Here is a sample of some Really Old Classics that were written pre-Shakespeare (i.e., pre-1600s). This list is, of course, not exclusive. You can purchase books through my Amazon Store.
- Gilgamesh
- Egyptian Book of the Dead
- Holy Bible
- The Apocrypha
- Bhagavad-Gita
- Homer Iliad, Odyssey
- Aeschylus Oresteia, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound,
- Sophocles Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone
- Euripides Orestes
- Aristophanes
- Herodotus The Histories
- Thucydides  The Peloponnesian Wars
- Plato Dialogues
- Aristotle  Poetics, Ethics
- Plutarch Lives; Moralia
- “Aesop” Fables
- Cicero On the Gods
- Horace Odes
- Virgil Aeneid
- Ovid Metamorphoses
- Juvenal Satires
- Martial Epigrams
- Seneca Tragedies
- Apuleius The Golden Ass
- Saint Augustine City of God; Confessions
- The Koran (Al-Qur’an)
- The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
- The Nibelungen Lied
- Beowulf
- The Poem of the Cid
- Dante The Divine Comedy
- Petrarch Lyric Poems; Selections
- Giovanni Boccaccio The Decameron
- Michelangelo Buonarroti Sonnets and Madrigals
- Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince
- Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks
- Benvenuto Cellini Autobiography
- Giordano Bruno The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
- Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde
- Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte D’Arthur
- Sir Thomas More Utopia
- Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene
- Christopher Marlowe Poems and Plays
- The Song of Roland
- Michel de Montaigne Essays
- François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel
- Erasmus In Praise of Folly
- Christine de Pisan The Book of the City of Ladies
- Romances of the Three Kingdoms
- Sun Tzu’s Art of War
- Confucius’s The Analects