Books inspired by Shakespeare
After
Shakespeare
100 books and literary works inspired by Shakespeare, traced back to the line that helped name them.
Writers have been quietly cutting titles from Shakespeare for two centuries: a few words lifted from a speech, detached from their first life, then made to carry an entirely different book.
A living, source-linked index rather than a claim of final exhaustiveness.
“How beauteous mankind is!— Miranda
O, brave new world
That has such people in ’t!”
Wonder becomes irony.
One speech, many books
The most productive ten lines in the collection
Macbeth’s final soliloquy is practically a publishing house. Its language of repetition, exhaustion and meaninglessness has been cut into titles again and again.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Macbeth, 5.5
The source shelf
Hamlet and Macbeth do most of the naming
Choose a source to open its descendants in the library.
The serial borrower
One fantasy series, eighteen Shakespearean titles
Every October Daye novel published through 2023 takes its title from Shakespeare. Read in sequence, the books form a second, hidden anthology: comedy, tragedy, history and narrative poem stitched into one urban-fantasy shelf.
The interesting part
A quotation changes when it becomes a title
The borrowing is rarely ornamental. A later writer can reverse the line, sharpen it, mistranslate it productively, or make its old metaphor literal.
The library
Follow a title back to the stage
Search 100 Shakespeare-inspired book titles by later work, author, Shakespeare source, or a word inside the original quotation.
All 100 entries are available below. Search and filters become available when the page finishes loading.
Novel · 1929The Sound and the Fury
“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”
Macbeth means noise without meaning; Faulkner turns that nihilism into a family whose voices cannot quite reach one another.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2022Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools”
Macbeth’s deadening repetition becomes, in Zevin, the renewable logic of play: another life, another attempt, another tomorrow.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 1973The Way to Dusty Death
“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!”
Poem · 1916“Out, Out—”
“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,”
Story collection · 1930Brief Candles
“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,”
Novel · 1994Walking Shadow
“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,”
Novel · 1923Told by an Idiot
“That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”
Novel · 1962Something Wicked This Way Comes
“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. Open, locks,”
Novel · 1968By the Pricking of My Thumbs
“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.”
Novel · 1957Fire, Burn!
“Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble.”
Novel · 2023Birnam Wood
“Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be, until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him.”
An impossible forest that fulfils a prophecy becomes Catton’s moving ecology of activism, capital and political ambition.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Story collection · 1956The Seeds of Time
“That he seems rapt withal. To me you speak not. If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow, and which will not, Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear”
Novel · 1942The Moon Is Down
“The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.”
Novel · 1992A Heart So White
“My hands are of your color, but I shame To wear a heart so white. I hear knocking At the south entry:—retire we to our chamber.”
Lady Macbeth’s taunt about cowardice becomes a title for secrecy, complicity and the things a marriage cannot say.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 1982Light Thickens
“Which keeps me pale!—Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to th’ rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,”
Novel · 1952Let It Come Down
“Let it come down.”
Novel · 1932Brave New World
“O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in ’t!”
Miranda’s astonishment at humanity becomes one of modern literature’s most famous ironies.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2016Hag-Seed
“Hag-seed, hence! Fetch us in fuel; and be quick, thou ’rt best,”
Story collection · 1994Something Rich and Strange
“Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.”
Play · 1982The Isle Is Full of Noises
“Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments”
Novel · 1964This Rough Magic
“The pine and cedar: graves at my command Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let ’em forth By my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure; and, when I have requir’d”
Novel · 2011Every Third Thought
“And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave.”
Novel · 1962Pale Fire
“Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun; The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief,”
Shakespeare’s moon steals its light; Nabokov builds a novel about borrowed authorship, reflected meaning and literary theft.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Non-fiction · 1966In Cold Blood
“If wisdom be in suffering. O my lords, As you are great, be pitifully good. Who cannot condemn rashness in cold blood? To kill, I grant, is sin’s extremest gust,”
A plea against dispassionate judgment becomes a title of forensic chill.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 1983Fools of Fortune
“Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears, You fools of fortune, trencher-friends, time’s flies, Cap-and-knee slaves, vapours, and minute-jacks!”
Novel · 1996Infinite Jest
“Let me see. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I”
Yorick’s vanished comic vitality becomes a huge novel about entertainment, addiction and the joke that will not release us.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Story collection · 1921Mortal Coils
“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life.”
Novel · 1978What Dreams May Come
“To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There’s the respect”
Novel · 1959Time Out of Joint
“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right.”
Short story · 1975There Are More Things
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come,”
Novel · 1973More Things in Heaven
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come,”
Novel · 2016Nutshell
“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
Novel · 2004Kings of Infinite Space
“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
Play · 1952The Mousetrap
“The Mousetrap. Marry, how? Tropically. This play is the image of a murder done in Vienna. Gonzago is the Duke’s name, his wife Baptista:”
Poetry collection · 1955The Less Deceived
“I was the more deceived.”
Novel · 1946With a Bare Bodkin
“When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life,”
Novel · 1930The Name of Action
“With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. Soft you now,”
Story collection · 1977All My Sins Remembered
“The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember’d.”
Novel · 1922The Glimpses of the Moon
“That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature”
Novel · 1977The Glimpses of the Moon
“That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature”
Novel · 1941This Above All
“This above all: to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Novel · 1944Leave Her to Heaven
“Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven, And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,”
Novel · 1948And Be a Villain
“My tables. Meet it is I set it down, That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”
Novel · 1978The Rest Is Silence
“So tell him, with the occurrents more and less, Which have solicited. The rest is silence.”
Play · 1966Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
“To tell him his commandment is fulfill’d, That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.”
Novel · 2012The Fault in Our Stars
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Cassius insists that human beings, not fate, are to blame. Green removes the “not” and writes about lives radically exposed to chance.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Play · 1917Dear Brutus
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Cassius insists that human beings, not fate, are to blame. Green removes the “not” and writes about lives radically exposed to chance.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 1948Taken at the Flood
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.”
A political metaphor for seizing the moment produces two very different titles: one about murder, another about life inside a system already in motion.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2014On Such a Full Sea
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.”
A political metaphor for seizing the moment produces two very different titles: one about murder, another about life inside a system already in motion.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 1974The Dogs of War
“Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,”
Story collection · 1837Twice-Told Tales
“There’s nothing in this world can make me joy. Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man;”
Poem · 1855“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
“Child Rowland to the dark tower came, His word was still—Fie, foh, and fum,”
Novel · 2017If We Were Villains
“make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance;”
Novel · 1944The Case of the Gilded Fly
“Adultery? Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No: The wren goes to’t, and the small gilded fly Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive;”
Novel · 1935Ripeness Is All
“Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all. Come on.”
Non-fiction · 2001Speak What We Feel
“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most; we that are young”
Novel · 1872Under the Greenwood Tree
“Under the greenwood tree, Who loves to lie with me And turn his merry note”
A woodland song becomes Hardy’s pastoral world, already shadowed by the modernity arriving at its edges.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2010A Local Habitation
“The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”
Memoir · 1950Ill Met by Moonlight
“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.”
Novel · 1964Nothing Like the Sun
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, Coral is far more red, than her lips red, If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:”
Novel · 1958The Darling Buds of May
“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,”
Novel · 1988Summer's Lease
“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,”
Novel cycle · 1922Remembrance of Things Past
“I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:”
Scott Moncrieff gave Proust an English Shakespearean title, making translation itself part of the literary afterlife.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Short story · 1971Inconstant Moon
“O swear not by the moon, th’inconstant moon, That monthly changes in her circled orb, Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.”
Novel · 2016Too Like the Lightning
“Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say “It lightens.” Sweet, good night. This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,”
Play · 1933Both Your Houses
“A plague o’ both your houses. I am sped. Is he gone, and hath nothing?”
Novel · 1934It Was the Nightingale
“It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear;”
Novel · 1961The Winter of Our Discontent
“Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York; And all the clouds that loured upon our house”
Richard’s season of grievance becomes Steinbeck’s diagnosis of a moral winter in postwar America.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 1967Where Eagles Dare
“I cannot tell. The world is grown so bad That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch. Since every Jack became a gentleman,”
Novel · 1994Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
“Tomorrow in the battle think on me, And fall thy edgeless sword. Despair, and die!”
Play · 1939This Happy Breed
“Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall”
Non-fiction · 1998This Blessed Plot
“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,”
Novel · 2001Mortal Engines
“Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats The immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit, Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone!”
Play · 1928Journey's End
“Be not afraid, though you do see me weapon’d. Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt, And very sea-mark of my utmost sail.”
Novel · 1960Pomp and Circumstance
“Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats The immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit,”
Novel · 1930Cakes and Ale
“Out o’ tune? sir, ye lie. Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
Play · 1939Present Laughter
“What is love? ’Tis not hereafter, Present mirth hath present laughter. What’s to come is still unsure.”
Novel · 1940Sad Cypress
“Come away, come away, death. And in sad cypress let me be laid. Fly away, fly away, breath;”
Novel · 2016Exit, Pursued by a Bear
“Exit, pursued by a bear.”
Novel · 2009Rosemary and Rue
“Give me those flowers there, Dorcas. Reverend sirs, For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep Seeming and savour all the winter long.”
Novel · 2014The Winter Long
“For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep Seeming and savour all the winter long. Grace and remembrance be to you both!”
Novel · 1935Gaudy Night
“And send to darkness all that stop me. Come, Let’s have one other gaudy night. Call to me All my sad captains. Fill our bowls once more Let’s mock the midnight bell.”
Novel · 1936Infants of the Spring
“Virtue itself ’scapes not calumnious strokes: The canker galls the infants of the spring Too oft before their buttons be disclos’d, And in the morn and liquid dew of youth”
Novel · 1948The Ides of March
“Beware the Ides of March.”
The Ides are Roman, not Shakespeare’s invention. The play made the warning culturally indelible.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2000The Quick and the Dead
“Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead, Till of this flat a mountain you have made, To o’ertop old Pelion or the skyish head”
The phrase is older than Shakespeare and appears in Christian scripture and creeds; Hamlet is an echo, not a secure sole source.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2010An Artificial Night
“But all so soon as the all-cheering sun Should in the farthest east begin to draw The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed, Away from light steals home my heavy son And private in his chamber pens himself, Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out, And makes himself an artificial night.”
Romeo’s withdrawn gloom becomes the title of a novel in which night is not merely emotional but a dangerous fairy realm.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2011Late Eclipses
“These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects.”
Gloucester sees political catastrophe written in the sky; Edmund immediately mocks the habit of blaming the stars.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2011One Salt Sea
“As many arrows loosèd several ways Come to one mark, as many ways meet in one town, As many fresh streams meet in one salt sea, As many lines close in the dial’s center, So may a thousand actions, once afoot, End in one purpose and be all well borne.”
A metaphor for coordinated state power becomes the name of a story about rival kingdoms divided by land and sea.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2012Ashes of Honor
“Her ashes new create another heir As great in admiration as herself, So shall she leave her blessedness to one, When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness, Who from the sacred ashes of her honor Shall starlike rise as great in fame as she was.”
Cranmer’s dynastic phoenix image is compressed into a title about survival, obligation and what remains after honor burns.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2013Chimes at Midnight
“We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.”
Falstaff’s boast is also nostalgia: two old men making a legend of the dissipated nights they survived.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2015A Red-Rose Chain
“Thus he that overruled I overswayed, Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain; Strong-tempered steel his stronger strength obeyed, Yet was he servile to my coy disdain.”
Venus turns desire into captivity. The later title keeps the beauty of the image and the coercion hidden inside it.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2016Once Broken Faith
“But to prevent the tyrant’s violence— For trust not him that hath once broken faith— I’ll hence forthwith unto the sanctuary To save at least the heir of Edward’s right.”
A warning about the irreversibility of betrayal becomes a title built around the political cost of promises.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2017The Brightest Fell
“A good and virtuous nature may recoil In an imperial charge. But I shall crave your pardon. That which you are, my thoughts cannot transpose. Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.”
Malcolm’s test turns on a terrifying possibility: brilliance and goodness are no guarantee against a fall.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2018Night and Silence
“Through the forest have I gone, But Athenian found I none On whose eyes I might approve This flower’s force in stirring love. Night and silence! Who is here?”
Puck’s discovery in the dark begins the play’s great romantic error; the phrase already contains secrecy and misrecognition.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2019The Unkindest Tide
“Lance: It is no matter if the tied were lost, for it is the unkindest tied that ever any man tied. Pantino: What’s the unkindest tide? Lance: Why, he that’s tied here, Crab my dog.”
Pantino hears “tide” where Lance says “tied”; Lance points back to Crab, his dog. The later title keeps the phrase without the exchange that makes the joke.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2020A Killing Frost
“This is the state of man: today he puts forth The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms And bears his blushing honors thick upon him; The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, And then he falls, as I do.”
Wolsey imagines ruin arriving precisely at the point of ripeness: not winter after decline, but frost at full bloom.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2021When Sorrows Come
“O, this is the poison of deep grief. It springs All from her father’s death, and now behold! O Gertrude, Gertrude, When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions.”
Claudius understands compounding crisis perfectly, even while failing to see how much of it he caused.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2022Be the Serpent
“Your face, my thane, is as a book where men May read strange matters. To beguile the time, Look like the time. Bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue. Look like th’ innocent flower, But be the serpent under ’t.”
Lady Macbeth’s compact theory of political performance becomes a title about the enemy hidden inside intimacy.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2023Sleep No More
“Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”
McGuire names two consecutive novels from the same terrified speech, then tells the same rupture from two viewpoints.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗Novel · 2023The Innocent Sleep
“Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath.”
The paired title shifts attention from the command—sleep no more—to the thing destroyed: restorative, blameless sleep itself.
Read the scene in context at Folger ↗No title has wandered this way yet.
Epistemic note
What counts as “inspired by Shakespeare”?
The site includes literary works whose titles reproduce or deliberately reshape words found in Shakespeare. It does not assume that Shakespeare invented every phrase: some were proverbial, biblical, classical, or otherwise already in circulation.
Quotation text is checked against the public-domain Complete Works distributed by Project Gutenberg. Each entry links to the corresponding scene, sonnet, or poem in the Folger Shakespeare Library so the line can be read in context.
The list began with published bibliographies and library lists, then each phrase was checked against the text. It remains open-ended: literary allusion does not come with a final census.
- Exact lift
- The phrase appears in the passage, allowing for articles or punctuation.
- Adapted phrase
- The later title changes grammar, number, wording or implication.
- Translation title
- A translator or translated work carries Shakespeare into another language and back.
- Shared or older phrase
- The wording appears in Shakespeare but has an earlier or independent lineage.