The book publisher Penguin (which is a division of Random House now, I think) offers around 200
free teacher's guides to Penguin's classics, in the pdf format. These include such series as "Signet Classics" and the "Plume" editions.
You may be a teacher. If so, I think that you would find the material specifically created for you to be helpful. And, even if you're not a teacher, you might even find some of the dedicated teacher's material helpful if you're doing study for yourself.
But much of the material in these books is similar to the material in guides like
CliffsNotes and
SparksNotes. For example, in the guide for Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" there are sections for an Introduction to the play; an Overview, giving the historical context of the play; a List of the Play's Characters; Synopsis . . . well, you get the picture. Two other features in these, that I'm not sure that
CliffNotes or
SparkNotes includes, but I think could be enormously helpful, are a Bibliography and a list of Websites on the subject.
Even if you don't own the Penguin classics editions of the plays and books, there is little in these guides that couldn't be used with any other edition that you might be using.
You will need to interpret "classics" very, very broadly. I found, for example, guides to E.L. Doctorow's
City of God;
God's Hotel, by Victoria Sweet; and
Listening Is an Act of Love, edited by Dave Isay! Maybe Penguin is thinking that they will be "
future classics (or maybe I just don't really know the meaning of "classic" ha).
Penguin must be continually adding new guides, because in the list of titles they denote the ones that are "new teacher's guides."
This is one website that I've made sure to bookmark. And, I want to be sure to download some of the guides to put in my library, in case they should be taken away in the future (things like that do happen, you know).
You can find links to all of the guides
here.