Shakespeare's plays

William Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature.

Overview

About Shakespeare
William Shakespeare Shakespeare's life Religion • Sexuality Bibliography Collaborations • Attribution Criticism Reputation • Influence World Bibliography Folger Shakespeare Library Books on Shakespeare
Poems
Shakespeare's Sonnets Shakespearean sonnet Petrach vs. Shakespeare "A Lover's Complaint" "Venus and Adonis" "The Rape of Lucrece" "The Phoenix and the Turtle"
Plays
Chronology • Early texts First Folio • Second Folio False Folio • Style
Comedies
The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Merry Wives of Windsor Measure for Measure The Comedy of Errors Much Ado About Nothing Love's Labour's Lost A Midsummer Night's Dream The Merchant of Venice As You Like It The Taming of the Shrew All's Well That Ends Well Twelfth Night
Histories
King John • Richard II Henry IV, Part 1 • Part 2 Henry V • Henry VI, Part 1 Henry VI, Part 2 • Part 3 Richard III • Henry VIII
Tragedies
Troilus and Cressida Coriolanus • Titus Andronicus Romeo and Juliet'' Timon of Athens Julius Caesar Macbeth • Hamlet King Lear • Othello Anthony and Cleopatra
Romances
Pericles, Prince of Tyre Cymbeline • The Winter's Tale The Tempest The Two Noble Kinsmen
Editors
Rowe • Pope • Theobald Johnson • Steevens • Malone Chalmers
Contemporaries
Elizabeth I • James I Richard Barnfield Beaumont and Fletcher Geo. Chapman • Henry Chettle Robert Davenport Tho. Dekker • Michael Drayton Thomas Freeman • John Ford Tho. Heywood • Hugh Holland Ben Jonson • Thomas Kyd John Lyly • Richard Linche Gervase Markham Christopher Marlowe John Marston • Tho. Middleton Anthony Munday • Tho. Nashe George Peele • William Percy Walter Raleigh • William Rowley Cyril Tourneur • John Webster Geo. Whetstone • Mary Wroth Elizabethan miscellanies
In performance
Shakespeare's Globe Royal Shakespeare Theatre Stratford Shakespeare Festival Theatre companies Film and TV adaptations BBC Television Shakespeare
Miscellaneous
Shakespeare Apocrypha Authorship question • History Jubilee • Bardolatry Shakespeare's Birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare garden

Traditionally, the 37 plays are divided into the genres of tragedy, history, and comedy; they have been translated into every major living language, in addition to being continually performed all around the world.

Many of his plays appeared in print as a series of quartos, but approximately half of them remained unpublished until 1623, when the posthumous First Folio was published. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the categories used in the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labelled some of these plays "problem plays" which elude easy categorization, or perhaps purposefully break generic conventions, and has introduced the term romances for what scholars believe to be his later comedies.

Theatre in Shakespeare's time

When Shakespeare came to London in the late 1580s or early 1590s, dramatists writing for the city's new commercial playhouses (such as The Curtain) were combining 2 different strands of dramatic tradition into a new and distinctively Elizabethan synthesis. Previously, the most common forms of popular English theatre were the Tudor morality plays. These plays, which blend piety with farce and slapstick, were allegories in which the characters are personifications of moral attributes who validate the virtues of a Godly life by prompting the protagonist to choose such a life over Evil. The characters and plot situations are largely symbolic rather than realistic. As a child, Shakespeare would likely have seen this type of play (along with, perhaps, mystery plays and miracle plays).

The other strand of dramatic tradition was classical aesthetic theory. This theory was derived ultimately from Aristotle; in Renaissance England, however, the theory was better known through its Roman interpreters and practitioners. At the universities, plays were staged in a more academic form as Roman closet dramas. These plays, usually performed in Latin, adhered to classical ideas of unity and decorum, but they were also more static, valuing lengthy speeches over physical action. Shakespeare would have learned this theory at grammar school, where Plautus and especially Terence were key parts of the curriculum and were taught in editions with lengthy theoretical introductions.

Theatre and stage setup

Archaeological excavations on the foundations of the Rose and the Globe in the late 20th century showed that all London English Renaissance theatres were built around similar general plans. Despite individual differences, the public theatres were 3 stories high, and built around an open space at the centre. Usually polygonal in plan to give an overall rounded effect, three levels of inward-facing galleries overlooked the open centre into which jutted the stage—essentially a platform surrounded on three sides by the audience, only the rear being restricted for the entrances and exits of the actors and seating for the musicians. The upper level behind the stage could be used as a balcony, as in Romeo and Juliet, or as a position for an actor to harangue a crowd, as in Julius Caesar.

Usually built of timber, lath and plaster and with thatched roofs, the early theatres were vulnerable to fire, and gradually were replaced (when necessary) with stronger structures. When the Globe burned down in June 1613, it was rebuilt with a tile roof.

A different model was developed with the Blackfriars Theatre, which came into regular use on a long term basis in 1599. The Blackfriars was small in comparison to the earlier theatres, and roofed rather than open to the sky; it resembled a modern theatre in ways that its predecessors did not.

Elizabethan Shakespeare

For Shakespeare as he began to write, both traditions were alive; they were, moreover, filtered through the recent success of the University Wits on the London stage. By the late 16th century, the popularity of morality and academic plays waned as the English Renaissance took hold, and playwrights like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe revolutionised theatre. Their plays blended the old morality drama with classical theory to produce a new secular form.

The new drama combined the rhetorical complexity of the academic play with the bawdy energy of the moralities. However, it was more ambiguous and complex in its meanings, and less concerned with simple allegory. Inspired by this new style, Shakespeare continued these artistic strategies, creating plays that not only resonated on an emotional level with audiences but also explored and debated the basic elements of what it means to be human.

What Marlowe and Kyd did for tragedy, John Lyly and George Peele, among others, did for comedy: they offered models of witty dialogue, romantic action, and exotic, often pastoral location that formed the basis of Shakespeare's comedic mode throughout his career.(Citation needed)

Shakespeare's Elizabethan tragedies (including the history plays with tragic designs, such as Richard II) demonstrate his relative independence from classical models. He takes from Aristotle and Horace the notion of decorum; with few exceptions, he focuses on high-born characters and national affairs as the subject of tragedy. In most other respects, though, the early tragedies are far closer to the spirit and style of moralities. They are episodic, packed with character and incident; they are loosely unified by a theme or character. In this respect, they reflect clearly the influence of Marlowe, particularly of Tamburlaine. Even in his early work, however, Shakespeare generally shows more restraint than Marlowe; he resorts to grandiloquent rhetoric less frequently, and his attitude towards his heroes is more nuanced, and sometimes more skeptical, than Marlowe's. By the turn of the century, the bombast of Titus Andronicus had vanished, replaced by the subtlety of Hamlet.

In comedy, Shakespeare strayed even further from classical models. The Comedy of Errors, an adaptation of Menaechmi, follows the model of new comedy closely. Shakespeare's other Elizabethan comedies are more romantic. Like Lyly, he often makes romantic intrigue (a secondary feature in Latin new comedy) the main plot element; even this romantic plot is sometimes given less attention than witty dialogue, deceit, and jests. The "reform of manners," which Horace considered the main function of comedy, survives in such episodes as the gulling of Malvolio.

Jacobean Shakespeare

Shakespeare reached maturity as a dramatist at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and in the first years of the reign of James. In these years, he responded to a deep shift in popular tastes, both in subject matter and approach. At the turn of the decade, he responded to the vogue for dramatic satire initiated by the boy players at Blackfriars and St. Paul's. At the end of the decade, he seems to have attempted to capitalize on the new fashion for tragicomedy, even collaborating with John Fletcher, the writer who had popularized the genre in England.

The influence of younger dramatists such as John Marston and Ben Jonson is seen not only in the problem plays, which dramatize intractable human problems of greed and lust, but also in the darker tone of the Jacobean tragedies. The Marlovian, heroic mode of the Elizabethan tragedies is gone, replaced by a darker vision of heroic natures caught in environments of pervasive corruption. As a sharer in both the Globe and in the King's Men, Shakespeare never wrote for the boys' companies; however, his early Jacobean work is markedly influenced by the techniques of the new, satiric dramatists. His play Troilus and Cressida may even have been inspired by the War of the Theatres.

Shakespeare's final plays hearken back to his Elizabethan comedies in their use of romantic situation and incident. In these plays, however, the sombre elements that are largely glossed over in the earlier plays are brought to the fore and often rendered dramatically vivid. This change is related to the success of tragicomedies such as Philaster, although the uncertainty of dates makes the nature and direction of the influence unclear. From the evidence of the title-page to The Two Noble Kinsmen and from textual analysis it is believed by some editors that Shakespeare ended his career in collaboration with John Fletcher, who succeeded him as house playwright for the King's Men. These last plays resemble Fletcher's tragicomedies in their attempt to find a comedic mode capable of dramatizing more serious events than had his earlier comedies.

Style

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, "drama became the ideal means to capture and convey the diverse interests of the time." Stories of various genres were enacted for audiences consisting of both the wealthy and educated and the poor and illiterate. Shakespeare served his dramatic apprenticeship at the height of the Elizabethan period, in the years following the defeat of the Spanish Armada; he retired at the height of the Jacobean period, not long before the start of the Thirty Years' War. His verse style, his choice of subjects, and his stagecraft all bear the marks of both periods. His style changed not only in accordance with his own tastes and developing mastery, but also in accord with the tastes of the audiences for whom he wrote.

While many passages in Shakespeare's plays are written in prose, he almost always wrote a large proportion of his plays and poems in iambic pentameter. In some of his early works (like Romeo and Juliet), he even added punctuation at the end of these iambic pentameter lines to make the rhythm even stronger. He and other dramatists at the time used this form of blank verse for a lot of the dialogue between characters in order to elevate drama to new poetic heights.

To end many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet for suspense. A typical example is provided in Macbeth: as Macbeth leaves the stage to murder Duncan (to the sound of a chiming clock), he says,

“

Hear it not Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

”

Shakespeare's writing (especially his plays) also feature extensive wordplay in which double entendres and clever rhetorical flourishes are repeatedly used. Humor is a key element in all of Shakespeare's plays. Although a large amount of his comical talent is evident in his comedies, some of the most entertaining scenes and characters are found in tragedies such as Hamlet and histories such as Henry IV, Part 1. Shakespeare's humor was largely influenced by Plautus.

Soliloquies in plays

Shakespeare's plays are also notable for their use of soliloquies, in which a character makes a speech to him- or herself so the audience can understand the character's inner motivations and conflict.

In his book Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, James Hirsh defines the convention of a Shakespearian soliloquy in early modern drama. He argues that when a person on the stage speaks to himself or herself, they are characters in a fiction speaking in character; this is an occasion of self-address. Furthermore, Hirsh points out that Shakespearian soliloquies and "asides" are audible in the fiction of the play, bound to be overheard by any other character in the scene unless certain elements confirm that the speech is protected. Therefore, a Renaissance playgoer who was familiar with this dramatic convention would have been alert to Hamlet's expectation that his soliloquy be overheard by the other characters in the scene. Moreover, Hirsh asserts that in soliloquies in other Shakespearian plays, the speaker is entirely in character within the play's fiction. Saying that addressing the audience was outmoded by the time Shakespeare was alive, he "acknowledges few occasions when a Shakespearean speech might involve the audience in recognizing the simultaneous reality of the stage and the world the stage is representing." Other than 29 speeches delivered by choruses or characters who revert to that condition as epilogues "Hirsh recognizes only three instances of audience address in Shakespeare's plays, 'all in very early comedies, in which audience address is introduced specifically to ridicule the practice as antiquated and amateurish.'"

Source material of the plays

As was common in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of other playwrights and recycled older stories and historical material. His dependence on earlier sources was a natural consequence of the speed at which playwrights of his era wrote; in addition, plays based on already popular stories appear to have been seen as more likely to draw large crowds. There were also aesthetic reasons: Renaissance aesthetic theory took seriously the dictum that tragic plots should be grounded in history. This stricture did not apply to comedy, and those of Shakespeare's plays for which no clear source has been established, such as Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest, are comedies. Even these plays, however, rely heavily on generic commonplaces. For example, Hamlet (c.1601) may be a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), and King Lear is likely an adaptation of an older play, King Leir. For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on 2 principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North, and the English history plays are indebted to Raphael Holinshed's 1587 Chronicles.

While there is much dispute about the exact chronology of Shakespeare's plays, as well as the Shakespeare authorship question, the plays tend to fall into three main stylistic groupings.

The 1st major grouping of his plays begins with his histories and comedies of the 1590s. Shakespeare's earliest plays tended to be adaptations of other playwright's works and employed blank verse and little variation in rhythm. However, after the plague forced Shakespeare and his company of actors to leave London for periods between 1592 and 1594, Shakespeare began to use rhymed couplets in his plays, along with more dramatic dialogue. These elements showed up in The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Almost all of the plays written after the plague hit London are comedies, perhaps reflecting the public's desire at the time for light-hearted fare. Other comedies from Shakespeare during this period include Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor and As You Like It.

The middle grouping of Shakespeare's plays begins in 1599 with Julius Caesar. For the next few years, Shakespeare would produce his most famous dramas, including Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear. The plays during this period are in many ways the darkest of Shakespeare's career and address issues such as betrayal, murder, lust, power and egoism.

The final grouping of plays, called Shakespeare's late romances, include Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. The romances are so called because they bear similarities to medieval romance literature. Among the features of these plays are a redemptive plotline with a happy ending, and magic and other fantastic elements.

Canonical plays

Tragedies

Main article: Shakespearean tragedy

Shakespeare's plays

Title	Year written	First publications	Performances	Authorship notes
Antony and Cleopatra	1601–1608	First published in the First Folio	Believed to have been between 1606 and 1608.
	Summary	In a setting soon after Julius Caesar, Marc Antony is in love with Cleopatra, an Egyptian queen. What used to be a friendship between Emperor Octavius and Antony develops into a hatred as Antony rejects the Emperor's sister, his wife, in favor of Cleopatra. Antony attempts to take the throne from Octavius and fails, while Cleopatra commits suicide.
Coriolanus		First published in the First Folio	No recorded performances prior to the Restoration; the first recorded performance involved Nahum Tate's bloody 1682 adaptation at Drury Lane.
	Summary	The Roman military leader Caius Martius, after leading Rome to several victories against the Volscans, returns home as a war hero with a new last name, Coriolanus, given for the city of Corioles which he conquered. However, after an attempt at political office turns sour, he is banished from Rome as a traitor. Hungry for revenge, Coriolanus becomes leader of the Volscan army and marches to the gates of Rome. His mother, his wife, and his son, however, beg him to stop his attack. He agrees and makes peace between Romans and Volscans, but is assassinated by enemy Volscans.
Hamlet	Likely early 17th century	First published in the so-called "bad" First Quarto, 1603	Earliest recorded performance of Hamlet was in June 1602, with Richard Burbage in the title role.	Some scholars, such as Peter Alexander and Eric Sams, believe that the oft-attributed source work known as the Ur-Hamlet was actually a first draft of the play, written by Shakespeare himself sometime prior to 1589.
	Summary	Prince Hamlet is visited by his father's ghost and ordered to avenge his father's murder by killing King Claudius, his uncle. After struggling with several questions, including whether what the ghost said is true and whether it is right for him to take revenge, Hamlet, along with almost all the other major characters, is killed.
Julius Caesar	1599	First published in the First Folio	Thomas Patter, a Swiss traveller, saw a tragedy about Julius Caesar at a Bankside theatre on September 21, 1599. This was most likely Shakespeare's play. There is no immediately obvious alternative candidate. (While the story of Julius Caesar was dramatized repeatedly in the Elizabethan/Jacobean period, none of the other plays known are as good a match with Patter's description as Shakespeare's play.)
	Summary	Cassius persuades his friend Brutus to join a conspiracy to kill Julius Caesar, whose power seems to be growing too great for Rome's good. After killing Caesar, however, Brutus fails to convince the people that his cause was just. He and Cassius eventually commit suicide as their hope for Rome becomes a lost cause.
King Lear	1603–1606		First recorded performance: December 26, 1606
	Summary	An aged king divides his kingdom among two of his daughters, Regan and Goneril, and casts the youngest, Cordelia, out of his Kingdom for disloyalty. Eventually he comes to understand that it is Regan and Goneril who are disloyal, but he has already given them the kingdom. He wanders the countryside as a poor man until Cordelia comes with her husband, the King of France, to reclaim her father's lands. Regan and Goneril are defeated, but only after Cordelia has been captured and murdered. King Lear then dies of grief.
Macbeth	1603–1606	First published in the First Folio	There are "fairly clear allusions to the play in 1607." The earliest account of a performance of the play is April 1611, when Simon Forman recorded seeing it at the Globe Theatre.	The text of Macbeth which survives has plainly been altered by later hands. Most notable is the inclusion of two songs from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (1615)
	Summary	Macbeth, a Scottish noble, is urged by his wife to kill King Duncan in order to take the throne for himself. He covers the king's guards in blood to frame them for the deed, and is appointed King of Scotland. However, people suspect his sudden power, and he finds it necessary to commit more and more murders to maintain power, believing himself invincible so long as he is bloody. Finally, the old king's son Malcolm besieges Macbeth's castle, and Macduff slays Macbeth in armed combat.
Othello
	Summary	Othello, a Moor and military general living in Venice, elopes with Desdemona, the daughter of a senator. Later, on Cyprus, he is persuaded by his servant Iago that his wife (Desdemona) is having an affair with Michael Cassio, his lieutenant. Iago's story, however, is a lie. Desdemona and Cassio try to convince Othello of their honesty but are rejected. Pursuing a plan suggested by Iago, Othello sends assassins to attack Cassio, who is wounded, while Othello himself smothers Desdomona in her bed. Iago's plot is revealed too late, and Othello commits suicide.
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet	1595–1596, with a possible early draft written in 1591	First published in 1597 in Q1	First performed sometime between 1591 and March 1597
	Summary	In Verona, Italy, two families, the Montagues and the Capulets, are in the midst of a bloody feud. Romeo, a Montague, and Juliet, a Capulet, fall in love and struggle to maintain their relationship in the face of familial hatred. After Romeo kills Juliet's cousin Tybalt in a fit of passion, things fall apart. Both lovers eventually commit suicide within minutes of each other, and the feuding families make peace over their recent grief.
Timon of Athens				Brian Vickers and others argue that Timon of Athens was co-written with Thomas Middleton, though some commentators disagree.
	Summary	Timon of Athens is an apparently wealthy man in his community who freely gives of his abundance to those around him. Eventually, it becomes apparent that he is living on credit, when all of his creditors ask for payment on the same day. Timon asks for his friends to help, but is refused. Angry at mankind's double nature, he leaves the city for the wilderness, and lives in a cave. Despite the efforts of several men to cheer his spirits, he dies full of hatred for humanity.
Titus Andronicus				Brian Vickers argues that Titus Andronicus was co-written with George Peele, though Jonathan Bate, the play's most recent editor for the Arden Shakespeare, believes it to be wholly the work of Shakespeare.
	Summary	Roman war hero Titus Andronicus returns victorious in his wars against the Goths. He kills one of the sons of the Queens of the Goths in a revenge ritual, despite her pleadings. When the queen becomes the Empress of Rome, she takes revenge on the house of Andronici for her son's blood. She has her sons rape and mutilate Titus' daughter, Lavinia, over her husband's murdered corpse, then frames Titus' own sons for the murder. Lavinia, however, manages to communicate to her father who the true murderers were, and Andronicus takes revenge, killing the queen and her two sons, but being killed in the act.
Troilus and Cressida
	Summary	The Trojans are under siege by the Grecian army of Agamemnon. Troilus, a Trojan, falls in love with Cressida, a Greek captive. When Cressida is given back to the Greeks as part of a prisoner exchange, Troilus fears that she will fall in love with one of them. His fears prove to be true when he crosses enemy lines during a truce and sees her and a Greek man together.

Comedies

Main article: Shakespearean comedy

Shakespeare's plays

Title	Year written	First publications	Performances	Authorship notes
All's Well That Ends Well	1601–1608	First published in the First Folio	Believed to have been between 1606 and 1608.	No recorded performances before The Restoration. The earliest recorded performance was in 1741 at Goodman's Fields, with another the following year at Drury Lane.
	Summary	Helena, a ward of the Countess of Rousillion, falls in love with the Countess's son, Bertram. Daughter of a famous doctor, and a skilled physician in her own right, Helena cures the King of France - who feared he was dying - and he grants her Bertram's hand as a reward. Bertram, however, offended by the inequality of the marriage, sets off for war, swearing he will not live with his wife until she can present him with a son, and with his own ring - two tasks which he believes impossible. However with the aid of a bed trick, Helena fulfils his tasks, Bertram realises the error of his ways, and they are reconciled.
As You Like It	1599–1600	First published in the First Folio	No recorded performances prior to the Restoration; the first recorded performance involved Nahum Tate's bloody 1682 adaptation at Drury Lane.	No recorded performances before The Restoration, though there was a possible performance at Wilton House in Wiltshire; the King's Men were paid £30 to come to Wilton House and perform for the King and Court (remaining there due to an outburst of the bubonic plague) on December 2, 1603. A Herbert family tradition states the play was As You Like It. The King's Company was assigned the play by royal warrant in 1669, and it was acted at Drury Lane in 1723 in an adapted form called Love in a Forest.
	Summary	It's a dramatic comedy, known for its confusing yet tantalising storyline that intrigues yet is one of the hardest by Shakespeare to understand. Like most others of its genre and age, it relies heavily on mistaken identity and desperate romance to induce humour between the artful weaving of the 16th century language.
The Comedy of Errors	1592–1594	First published in the First Folio	The first recorded performance was by "a company of base and common fellows," mentioned in the Gesta Grayorum ("The Deeds of Gray") as having occurred in Gray's Inn Hall on Dec. 28, 1594. The second also took place on "Innocents' Day" but ten years later - in 1604, at Court.
	Summary	Egeon, about to be executed for unlawfully entering Ephesus, tells the sad tale of his search for his twin sons and wife. The Duke agrees to spare him if his family is found. Meanwhile, his twin sons, both of whom are named Antipholus, are actually in Ephesus, each unaware that he even has a twin. After a series of hilarious events involving mistaken identity almost ending in catastrophe, the twins are reunited with their mother and father, and realize their relation to each other.
Cymbeline	This play is hard to date, though a relationship with a tragicomedy that Beaumont and Fletcher wrote ca. 1609-10 tends to support this dating around 1609; though it is not clear which play preceded the other.	First published in the First Folio	Only one early performance is recorded with certainty, which occurred on Wednesday night of Jan. 1, 1634, at Court.	Possible collaboration
	Summary	The princess Imogen loves the commoner Posthumus, and marries him, but her father, king Cymbeline, disapproves of the match and exiles Posthumus. In exile, he meets the rogue Jachimo - who, to win a wager, persuades Posthumus, wrongly, that he (Jachimo) has slept with Imogen. Enraged, Posthumus orders a servant, Pisanio, to murder Imogen, but he cannot go through with his orders, and instead she finds herself befriended by the wild-living Polydore and Cadwal - who turn out to be her own brothers: Cymbeline's princes who had been stolen from his palace in their infancy. The repentant Posthumus fights alongside Polydore and Cadwal in a battle against the Romans, and following the intervention of the god Jupiter, the various truths are revealed, and everyone is reconciled.
Love's Labour's Lost
	Summary
Measure for Measure
	Summary
The Merchant of Venice
	Summary	Antonio borrows money from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, in order to lend money to his friend Bassanio. Bassanio uses the money to successfully woo Portia, a wealthy and intelligent woman with a large inheritance. Unfortunately, a tragic accident makes Antonio unable to repay his debt to Shylock, and he must be punished as agreed by giving a pound of his flesh to the moneylender. Portia travels in disguise to the court and saves Antonio by pointing out that Shylock may only take flesh, and not any blood. Shylock is foiled, Portia reveals her identity, and Antonio's wealth is restored.
Merry Wives of Windsor
	Summary
A Midsummer Night's Dream	Approximately 1595	Registered in the 1600 quarto by Thomas Fisher on October 8, 1600	The title page assures it was "sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honorable the Lord Chamberlain and his Servants" prior to 1600 publication.
	Summary	In Athens, Hermia is in love with Lysander, defying her father's command to marry Demetrius; the couple flee to the woods to avoid the law sentencing her to death or a nunnery. Demetrius pursues them, and is in turn pursued by Helena, who is in unrequited love with him. Meanwhile a group of low-class workers decides to stage a play for the wedding of the King and Queen of Athens; they rehearse in the woods. Fairy king Oberon is quarreling with his queen Titania; he magically causes her to fall in love with one of the actors, Bottom, whom he has transformed to have the head of an ass. He also attempts to resolve the Athenian youths' love triangle, but his servant Puck accidentally causes both Lysander and Demetrius to fall in love with Helena instead of Hermia. In the end, Oberon has Puck restore Lysander to loving Hermia, allows Demetrius to stay in love with Helena, and returns Titania to her senses and Bottom to his shape. They return to Athens, where Lysander and Hermia are pardoned and they all watch the workers (badly) perform their play.
Much Ado About Nothing
	Summary
Pericles, Prince of Tyre	Either 1607–1608, or written at an earlier date and revised at that time	1609 quarto	The Venetian ambassador to England, Zorzi Giustinian, saw a play titled Pericles during his time in London, which ran from Jan. 5, 1606 to Nov. 23, 1608. As far as is known, there was no other play with the same title that was acted in this era; the logical assumption is that this must have been Shakespeare's play.	Shakespeare is thought to be responsible for the main portion of the play after scene 9. The first two acts were likely written by a relatively untalented reviser or collaborator, possibly George Wilkins.
	Summary	This episodic story, covering many years, charts the history of Pericles, who believes he has lost both his daughter and his wife, but is ultimately reunited with both. His daughter Marina, sold into prostitution, proves to be a paragon of virtue; and his wife Thaisa, recovered by a skilled doctor having been buried at sea, becomes a priestess of the goddess Diana.
The Taming of the Shrew
	Summary	The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the Induction, in which a drunken tinker named Sly is tricked into thinking he is a nobleman by a mischievous Lord. The Lord has a play performed for Sly's amusement, set in Padua with a primary and sub-plot. The main plot depicts the courtship of Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, and Katherina, the headstrong, obdurate shrew. Initially, Katherina is an unwilling participant in the relationship, but Petruchio tempers her with various psychological torments — the "taming" — until she is an obedient bride. The sub-plot features a competition between the suitors of Katherina's more tractable sister, Bianca.
The Tempest
	Summary	Prospero, overthrown and exiled Duke of Milan, lives on a small island with his daughter Miranda. By chance, his usurping brother Antonio, along with Alonso, King of Naples (who helped him) and his retinue, have passed near the island on a ship; Prospero, aided by his fairy servant Ariel, has magically called up a tempest to shipwreck them. Prospero toys with them but ultimately forgives Alonso (who has been betrayed in turn by Antonio) and permits Alonso's son Ferdinand to marry Miranda. Before returning to reclaim his throne, Prospero renounces magic.
Twelfth Night	1600–1601	First Folio	Earliest known performance 2 February 1602
	Summary	Viola finds herself shipwrecked in Illyria and, assuming that her brother Sebastian has died in the wreck, disguises herself as a man in order to gain a position in Duke Orsino's court. Orsino sends Viola (whom he knows as Cesario) to deliver a message to his love, Olivia. Olivia, however, dislikes the Duke. She falls in love with Viola, who she thinks is a man. Eventually, Viola's brother Sebastian, who in fact was unharmed in the wreck, reappears. At a critical moment, Viola's true identity is revealed when members of the court notice the similarities between her and Sebastian. Olivia quickly falls in love with Sebastian, and Viola confesses her love for the Duke.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
	Summary	Two close friends, Proteus and Valentine, are divided when Valentine is sent to the Duke's court in Milan. Proteus later follows, leaving behind his loyal beloved, Julia, and he and Valentine both fall in love with the Duke's daughter, Silvia. Valentine proves himself brave and honourable, while Proteus is underhand and deceitful - and eventually attempts to rape Silvia. Julia follows her betrothed to Milan, disguised as a boy, Sebastian, who becomes Proteus' page. Eventually Proteus sees the error of his ways and returns to Julia, while Valentine marries Silvia.
The Two Noble Kinsmen	1613–1614	Published as a quarto in 1635		Thought to be a collaboration with John Fletcher. Shakespeare is thought to have written the following parts of this play: Act I, scenes 1-3; Act II, scene 1; Act III, scene 1; Act V, scene 1, lines 34-173, and scenes 3 and 4.
	Summary	Two close friends, Palamon and Arcite, are divided by their love of the same woman: Duke Theseus' sister-in-law Emelia. They are eventually forced to compete publicly for her hand, but once the bout is over, the victor dies tragically and the other marries their love.
The Winter's Tale	Estimates vary widely, from 1594–1611	First published in the First Folio.
	Summary	In Sicilia, King Leontes becomes convinced that his wife, Hermione, is having an affair with his friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia. He has her imprisoned and sends delegates to ask an oracle if his suspicions are true. While in prison, Hermione gives birth to a girl and Leontes has it sent to Bohemia to be placed alone in the wild. When the delegates return and state that the oracle has exonerated Hermione, Leontes remains stubborn and his wife and son die. Sixteen years later, a repentant Leontes is reunited with his daughter, who is in love with the Prince of Bohemia. His wife is also later reunited with him by extraordinary means.

Histories

Main article: Shakespearean history

Shakespeare's plays

Title	Year written	First publications	Performances	Authorship notes
Henry IV, Part 1	Likely early - mid 1590s	First published in a 1598 quarto by Andrew Wise	Though 1 Henry IV was almost certainly in performance by 1597, the earliest recorded performance was on March 6, 1600, when it was acted at Court before the Flemish Ambassador. Other Court performances followed in 1612 and 1625.
	Summary
Henry IV, Part 2	1597–1599	First published in a quarto in 1600 by Valentine Simms	Philip Henslowe's diary records a performance of a Henry VI on March 3, 1592, by the Lord Strange's Men. Thomas Nashe refers in 1592 to a popular play about Lord Talbot, seen by "ten thousand spectators at least" at separate times.	There is stylistic evidence that Part 1 is not by Shakespeare alone, but co-written by a team with three or more unknown playwrights (though Thomas Nashe is a possibility).
	Summary
Henry V	1599	Published in a "bad quarto" in 1600 by Thomas Millington and John Busby; reprinted in "bad" form in 1603 and 1619, it was published fully for the first time in the First Folio.	A tradition, impossible to verify, holds that Henry V was the first play performed at the new Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599; the Globe would have been the "wooden O" mentioned in the Prologue. In 1600 the first printed text states that the play had been performed "sundry times", though the first recorded performance was on January 7, 1605, at Court.
	Summary
Henry VI, Part 1	1588–1592	First published in the First Folio	Philip Henslowe's diary records a performance of a Henry VI on March 3, 1592, by the Lord Strange's Men. Thomas Nashe refers in 1592 to a popular play about Lord Talbot, seen by "ten thousand spectators at least" at separate times.	There is stylistic evidence that Part 1 is not by Shakespeare alone, but co-written by a team with three or more unknown playwrights (though Thomas Nashe is a possibility).
	Summary
Henry VI, Part 2	1590–1591	A version was published in 1594, and again in 1600 (Q2) and 1619 (Q3); the last as part of William Jaggrd's False Folio.	See notes for Henry VI, Part I above. Parts I and III of Henry VI are known to have been playing in 1592, and it is assumed (but not reliably known) part 2 was presented at the same times.
	Summary
Henry VI, Part 3	1590–1591	A version was published in 1594, and again in 1600 (Q2) and 1619 (Q3); the last as part of William Jaggrd's False Folio.	Performed before 1592, when Robert Greene parodied one of the play's lines in his pamphlet A Groatsworth of Wit. See notes for Part II and I above.
	Summary
Henry VIII			A fire destroyed the Globe Theatre during a performance of this play on June 29, 1613, as recorded in several contemporary documents. While some modern scholars believe the play was relatively new (one contemporary report states that it "had been acted not passing 2 or 3 times before"), the value of this has been questioned, since London diarist Samuel Pepys also referred to Henry VIII as "new" in 1663, when the play was at least 50 years old.	Thought to be a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher, due to the style of the verse. Shakespeare is thought to have written Act I, scenes i and ii; II,ii and iv; III,ii, lines 1-203 (to exit of King); V,i.
	Summary
King John
	Summary
Richard II
	Summary
Richard III
	Summary

Apocrypha

Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha

Dramatic collaborations

Main article: Shakespeare collaborations

Like most playwrights of his period, Shakespeare did not always write alone, and a number of his plays were collaborative, although the exact number is open to debate. Some of the following attributions, such as for The Two Noble Kinsmen, have well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as for Titus Andronicus, remain more controversial and are dependent on linguistic analysis by modern scholars.

• Cardenio, either a lost play or one that survives only in later adaptation Double Falsehood; contemporary reports say that Shakespeare collaborated on it with John Fletcher.
• Cymbeline, in which the Yale edition suggests a collaborator had a hand in the authorship, and some scenes (Act III scene 7 and Act V scene 2) may strike the reader as un-Shakespearian compared with others.
• Edward III (play), of which Brian Vickers' recent analysis concluded that the play was 40% Shakespeare and 60% Thomas Kyd.
• Henry VI, Part 1, possibly the work of a team of playwrights, whose identities we can only guess at. Some scholars argue that Shakespeare wrote less than 20% of the text.
• Henry VIII, generally considered a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher.
• Macbeth, Thomas Middleton may have revised this tragedy in 1615 to incorporate extra musical sequences.
• Measure for Measure may have undergone a light revision by Thomas Middleton at some point after its original composition.
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre may include the work of George Wilkins, either as collaborator, reviser, or revisee.
• Timon of Athens may result from collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton; this might explain its unusual plot and unusually cynical tone.
• Titus Andronicus may be a collaboration with, or revision by George Peele.
• The Two Noble Kinsmen, published in quarto in 1654 and attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare; each playwright appears to have written about half of the text.

Lost plays

• Love's Labour's Won - a late sixteenth-century writer, Francis Meres, and a bookseller's list both list this title among Shakespeare's recent works, but no play of this title has survived. It may have become lost, or it may represent an alternative title of one of the plays listed above, such as Much Ado About Nothing or All's Well That Ends Well.
• Cardenio - the original of a late play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, referred to in several documents, has not survived. It is believed to have re-worked a tale in Cervantes' Don Quixote. In 1727, Lewis Theobald produced a play he called Double Falshood, which he claimed to have adapted from three manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare that he did not name. Double Falshood does re-work the Cardenio story, and modern scholarship generally agrees that Double Falshood includes fragments of Shakespeare's lost play.

Plays possibly by Shakespeare

Note: For a comprehensive account of plays possibly by Shakespeare, see the separate entry on the Shakespeare Apocrypha.

• Edmund Ironside (play) - possibly by Shakespeare
• Sir Thomas More - a collaborative work by several playwrights, including Shakespeare. There is a "growing scholarly consensus" that Shakespeare was called in to re-write a contentious scene in the play and that "Hand D" in the surviving manuscript is that of Shakespeare himself.

Shakespeare and the textual problem

Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, Shakespeare did not have direct involvement in publishing his plays and produced no overall authoritative version of his plays before he died. As a result, the problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote is a major concern for most modern editions.

One of the reasons there are textual problems is that there was no copyright of writings at the time. As a result, Shakespeare and the playing companies he worked with did not distribute scripts of his plays, for fear that the plays would be stolen. This led to bootleg copies of his plays, which were often based on people trying to remember what Shakespeare had actually written.

Textual corruptions also stemming from printers' errors, misreadings by compositors or simply wrongly scanned lines from the source material litter the Quartos and the First Folio. Additionally, in an age before standardised spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, and this may have contributed to some of the transcribers' confusion. Modern editors have the task of reconstructing Shakespeare's original words and expurgating errors as far as possible.

In some cases the textual solution presents few difficulties. In the case of Macbeth for example, scholars believe that someone (probably Thomas Middleton) adapted and shortened the original to produce the extant text published in the First Folio, but that remains our only authorised text. In others the text may have become manifestly corrupt or unreliable (Pericles or Timon of Athens) but no competing version exists. The modern editor can only regularise and correct erroneous readings that have survived into the printed versions.

The textual problem can, however, become rather complicated. Modern scholarship now believes Shakespeare to have modified his plays through the years, sometimes leading to two existing versions of one play. To provide a modern text in such cases, editors must face the choice between the original first version and the later, revised, usually more theatrical version. In the past editors have resolved this problem by conflating the texts to provide what they believe to be a superior Ur-text, but critics now argue that to provide a conflated text would run contrary to Shakespeare's intentions. In King Lear for example, two independent versions, each with their own textual integrity, exist in the Quarto and the Folio versions. Shakespeare's changes here extend from the merely local to the structural. Hence the Oxford Shakespeare, published in 1986 (second edition 2005), provides two different versions of the play, each with respectable authority. The problem exists with at least four other Shakespearian plays (Henry IV, part 1, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello).

Alternative authorship proposals

For over 150 years there have been readers of Shakespeare's works who could not believe that they were written by a man with "small Latin and less Greek", and who prefer to think that the real author must be a highly educated person or persons. Their ideas are discussed as the Shakespeare authorship question. The scholarly consensus has always been to accept the substantial direct evidence for Shakespeare's authorship dating from 1623 and earlier.

Performance history

Main article: Shakespeare in performance

File:Globe Galleries.JPG

The modern reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, in London.

During Shakespeare's lifetime, many of his greatest plays were staged at the Globe Theatre and the Blackfriars Theatre. Shakespeare's fellow members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men acted in his plays. Among these actors were Richard Burbage (who played the title role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and King Lear), Richard Cowley (who played Verges in Much Ado About Nothing), William Kempe, (who played Peter in Romeo and Juliet and, possibly, Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream) and Henry Condell and John Heminges, are most famous now for collecting and editing the plays of Shakespeare's First Folio (1623).

Shakespeare's plays continued to be staged after his death until the Interregnum (1642–1660), when all public stage performances were banned by the Puritan rulers. After the English Restoration, Shakespeare's plays were performed in playhouses with elaborate scenery and staged with music, dancing, thunder, lightning, wave machines, and fireworks. During this time the texts were "reformed" and "improved" for the stage, an undertaking which has seemed shockingly disrespectful to posterity.

Victorian productions of Shakespeare often sought pictorial effects in "authentic" historical costumes and sets. The staging of the reported sea fights and barge scene in Antony and Cleopatra was one spectacular example. Too often, the result was a loss of pace. Towards the end of the 19th century, William Poel led a reaction against this heavy style. In a series of "Elizabethan" productions on a thrust stage, he paid fresh attention to the structure of the drama. In the early twentieth century, Harley Granville-Barker directed quarto and folio texts with few cuts, while Edward Gordon Craig and others called for abstract staging. Both approaches have influenced the variety of Shakespearian production styles seen today.

See also

• William Shakespeare
• Shakespeare's late romances
• Chronology of Shakespeare's plays
• Elizabethan era
• Globe Theatre
• List of Shakespearean characters
• Shakespeare on screen
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)

External links

Plays

• William Shakespeare - Digital Collection
• Complete text of Shakespeare's plays, listed by genre

Books

• William Shakespeare at Amazon.com

About

• Narrative and Dramatic Sources of all Shakespeare's works Also publication years and chronology of Shakespeare plays
• The Shakespeare Resource Center A directory of Web resources for online Shakespearean study. Includes play synopses, a works timeline, and language resources.