This is a ranked list, with one thing the usual lists leave out: for each play, the single scene to open first. Every one of them is on this site in full, free, with a modern translation beside every speech, so you can test the recommendation in five minutes rather than take it on trust.

One more thing before the list. Shakespeare wrote these to be spoken, and the fastest way to understand a scene is still to read a part in it out loud. You do not need a stage or a cast. You need a kitchen, ten minutes, and the willingness to sound a little silly. More on that at the end.

1. A Midsummer Night's Dream

Start here. It is the funniest thing he wrote, it is short, and almost nothing in it depends on knowing history, politics or who is related to whom. Four young people run into a wood at night, the fairies who live there interfere, and a group of amateur actors rehearse the worst play ever written. Everybody gets a happy ending, including the donkey.

The language is some of his clearest, and the jokes still land four hundred years on. When Puck looks at the tangle the lovers have got into and says Lord, what fools these mortals be!, you do not need a footnote.

Open first: Act 1, Scene 1. Hermia is told to marry a man she does not love or die, and she and Lysander plan to run away. The scene has the line everyone knows without knowing where it is from, The course of true love never did run smooth, and it sets every plot in the play running in about fifteen minutes.

If you want to try a part: Helena, in that same scene. She is in love with a man who is in love with her best friend, and she says so with a self-awareness that is very funny and a little painful. It is a part you can read cold.

2. Macbeth

The shortest of the tragedies and by a distance the fastest. A general is told by three witches that he will be king, his wife decides to make it happen, and the play follows the two of them through the murder and out the other side. It moves like a thriller because it is one.

It is also the best play for hearing what Shakespeare's verse can do, because so much of it is one person alone on stage thinking out loud. Macbeth sees a dagger in the air before the murder and asks Is this a dagger which I see before me, and the speech that follows is a man watching his own mind. If you have ever been told soliloquies are boring, this one will change your view in under two minutes.

Open first: Act 1, Scene 3. The witches meet Macbeth and Banquo on the heath. Macbeth's first line in the play, So foul and fair a day I have not seen, echoes what the witches chanted two scenes earlier, Fair is foul, and foul is fair, and you are already inside the play's logic. Then read Act 2, Scene 1 for the dagger.

If you want to try a part: Lady Macbeth in Act 1, Scene 7, talking her husband back into the murder he has just decided against. Nobody who reads that scene aloud comes out of it thinking of her as simply a villain.

3. Romeo and Juliet

The one you probably already know the shape of, which is exactly why it is a good early choice. You are never lost. What surprises first-time readers is how funny the first half is, and how fast the whole thing happens: the lovers meet, marry, and are both dead inside four days.

It is also the most formally beautiful of the early plays. The whole story is told in advance by a fourteen-line sonnet, Two households, both alike in dignity, and when Romeo and Juliet first speak to each other, they share another one between them without either knowing it.

Open first: The prologue, which takes a minute, and then Act 1, Scene 5, the party where they meet. The shared sonnet begins at If I profane with my unworthiest hand. Count the lines. It ends with a kiss.

If you want to try a part: Juliet in the balcony scene. She does most of the thinking in it, and most of the deciding.

4. Julius Caesar

Nobody puts this on a beginners' list, and that is a mistake. It has the plainest, most direct language of any of the major plays, because it is about politicians, and politicians speak to be understood. There is no wordplay to decode and no fairies. There is a conspiracy, an assassination in the middle of the play rather than the end, and then the most famous piece of public speaking in English.

Open first: Act 3, Scene 2. Brutus has just explained to the crowd why Caesar had to die, and they are with him. Then Antony stands up with the body and begins Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, and over the next few minutes turns the same crowd into a mob. You can watch him do it, line by line. It is the best single scene to read if you want to know what rhetoric actually is.

If you want to try a part: Antony, in that scene. It is long, but it is built in steps, and every step is a decision about the crowd.

5. Othello

A step up in difficulty, and the first play on this list that is genuinely hard to read, because its subject is cruelty and it does not look away. Othello is a general, newly married, and his ensign Iago decides to destroy him. The play is the slow, precise record of how.

Why it is here rather than lower: it is a two-hander at heart, the plot is simple to follow, and Iago is the most interesting villain Shakespeare wrote because he explains himself to the audience constantly and his explanations never add up.

Open first: Act 3, Scene 3. This is the scene where Iago plants the idea. He opens with concern, O, beware, my lord, of jealousy, and by the end of the scene Othello has decided to kill his wife. It is the longest scene in the play and worth every line.

If you want to try a part: Iago. Read his lines and notice how often he is telling the truth.

6. Hamlet

Last, and on purpose. Hamlet is the best play in the language and a terrible place to begin, because it is also the longest, the most inward, and the one where the most is going on under the surface. Read it third or fourth and you will see what the fuss is about. Read it first and you may decide Shakespeare is not for you, which would be a pity, because it is the previous five plays that would have told you otherwise.

Open first, when you get to it: Act 3, Scene 1, for To be, or not to be, and then keep reading, because the scene with Ophelia that follows it is the part people forget and the part that hurts.

Which one, then?

If you want to laugh: A Midsummer Night's Dream. If you want to be gripped: Macbeth. If you want the story you half know: Romeo and Juliet. If you want to understand how the plays work: Julius Caesar.

And if you are reading because someone has assigned you a different play entirely, the same rule applies. Find the one scene in it that everyone talks about, open it with the translation beside it, and read a part aloud. The play will make more sense in ten minutes of speaking it than in an hour of reading silently, which is not a trick. It is just what the plays are.