Shakespeare's plays

• 1. Introduction

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  Shakespeare's plays number approximately 39 dramatic works, yet scholars still argue about the exact count. The question of whether a given text belongs in the canon at all has never been fully settled. Neither has the matter of how to sort them. Tragedy, comedy, history: these labels come from the posthumous First Folio of 1623, assembled not by Shakespeare but by colleagues he left behind. They carry the authority of proximity but not of the author himself.

  Some plays drift between categories so stubbornly that modern scholars coined a new term for them: problem plays. Others were quietly revised by different hands years after Shakespeare finished them, blurring the line between his work and someone else's. A handful are simply gone, survived only as titles in a bookseller's list or a single contemporary mention. And the plays that remain have been burned, banned, censored, and rewritten by rulers and reformers who found Shakespeare useful, dangerous, or both.

  The story of these plays is not just a story of genius. It is a story of fire, plague, collaboration, and the accidental survival of half a literary legacy.

• 2. Two Traditions, One Stage

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  When Shakespeare arrived in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s, he walked into a theatrical culture in the middle of an identity crisis. Two very different ideas of what a play should be were colliding in the new commercial playhouses such as The Curtain.

  The older tradition was the Tudor morality play. These plays used personified moral forces to steer a protagonist toward virtue; the characters were essentially symbols rather than people. As a child, Shakespeare would likely have seen them, alongside mystery plays and miracle plays that dramatised Biblical stories for popular audiences.

  The second tradition was classical aesthetic theory, traced ultimately to Aristotle but absorbed in Renaissance England mostly through Roman interpreters. At universities, this tradition produced Roman closet dramas performed in Latin, prizing long speeches and rigid formal unity over physical action. Shakespeare would have studied Plautus and especially Terence at grammar school, in editions that came with extensive theoretical introductions.

  Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe were the ones who fused these two strands into something new on the London stage. Their plays kept the bawdy energy of the moralities while borrowing the rhetorical complexity of the academic tradition, and they were far more interested in ambiguity than in simple allegory. For comedy, John Lyly and George Peele offered models of witty dialogue, romantic plots, and exotic pastoral settings. Shakespeare absorbed all of this, then built on it.

• 3. The Theatres Themselves

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  Archaeological excavations on the foundations of the Rose and the Globe in the late twentieth century revealed a consistent architectural logic across London's English Renaissance theatres. The public playhouses were three stories high, built around an open central space, and generally polygonal in shape to achieve a rounded overall form.

  The stage jutted into that open space as a platform, surrounded on three sides by the audience. Only the rear was reserved: for actor entrances and exits, and for the musicians. The upper level behind the stage could serve as a balcony, as in Romeo and Juliet, or as a raised position from which a character addresses a crowd, as in Julius Caesar. The theatres were typically built of timber, lath, and plaster with thatched roofs, which made them vulnerable to fire. When the Globe burned down in June 1613, it was rebuilt with a tile roof.

  A different kind of venue emerged with the Blackfriars Theatre, which came into regular long-term use in 1599. The Blackfriars was smaller and, crucially, roofed rather than open to the sky. In this respect it resembled a modern theatre far more than its predecessors did, and it shaped the plays Shakespeare wrote for it in his later career.

• 4. Plague, Maturity, and Dark Turns

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  Between 1592 and 1594, plague repeatedly forced Shakespeare and his company of actors out of London. The disruption had a concrete effect on his writing: after the plague years, he began working rhymed couplets into his plays alongside more dynamic dialogue, a shift visible in The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Almost all of the plays he wrote immediately after the plague period were comedies, which may reflect what audiences wanted from the theatre in the aftermath.

  By the turn of the century, a pronounced darkening was underway. The bombast of Titus Andronicus gave way to the subtlety of Hamlet. Shakespeare's Jacobean tragedies replaced the Marlovian heroic mode with something more unsettling: heroic figures trapped in environments of pervasive corruption.

  The influence of younger dramatists such as John Marston and Ben Jonson pulled Shakespeare toward dramatic satire, visible in the problem plays that resist easy categorisation. One play, Troilus and Cressida, may have been directly inspired by the so-called War of the Theatres, a running theatrical rivalry of that period. At the end of his career, Shakespeare seems to have responded to the new fashion for tragicomedy, and he collaborated with John Fletcher, the writer who had popularised the genre in England. From the title page of The Two Noble Kinsmen and from textual analysis, some editors believe Shakespeare ended his career with Fletcher as his co-writer, and that Fletcher subsequently became house playwright for the King's Men.

• 5. The Craft of the Language

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  While many passages in Shakespeare's plays are written in prose, he built the great proportion of his dramatic verse in iambic pentameter. In some early works such as Romeo and Juliet, he added punctuation at the ends of these lines to make the rhythmic beat even more pronounced. He used blank verse extensively in character dialogue across the plays, and to close many scenes he reached for the rhyming couplet as a signal of completion. In Macbeth, as the title character leaves the stage to murder Duncan to the sound of a chiming clock, he delivers the couplet: "Hear it not Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell."

  Wordplay ran through everything. Double entendres and rhetorical flourishes appear repeatedly, and humour is present even in the tragedies. Some of the most entertaining scenes and characters in Hamlet and Henry IV, Part 1 live in those plays' darkest contexts. Shakespeare's comic sensibility was shaped substantially by Plautus, whose work he had studied at school and returned to as a source throughout his career.

  The soliloquy was a distinct technical tool. In his book Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, James Hirsh argues that Shakespearean soliloquies are speeches of self-address by characters fully in character within the play's fiction, not direct communications to the audience. Hirsh identifies only three instances of genuine audience address across all of Shakespeare's plays, all of them in very early comedies, where audience address is introduced specifically to mock the practice as outdated and amateurish.

• 6. Sources, Collaborators, and Lost Work

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  Shakespeare rarely invented his plots from nothing. Most of the Roman and Greek plays draw on Plutarch's Parallel Lives, specifically the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North. The English history plays are heavily indebted to Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of 1587. King Lear is probably an adaptation of an older play called King Leir; Hamlet, dated to around 1601, may be a reworking of a lost earlier play scholars call the Ur-Hamlet, though the abundance of lost plays from the period makes any definitive claim impossible. Renaissance aesthetic theory actually encouraged this kind of borrowing: tragic plots were supposed to be grounded in history, and plays based on familiar stories drew larger crowds.

  Collaboration was equally standard. Edward III has been assessed by Brian Vickers as forty percent Shakespeare and sixty percent Thomas Kyd. Henry VI, Part 1 may contain less than twenty percent of Shakespeare's own writing. Thomas Middleton may have revised Macbeth in 1615 to add musical sequences. George Wilkins may have had a hand in Pericles, Prince of Tyre. In Sir Thomas More, a collaborative manuscript, there is now a growing scholarly consensus that the section known as "Hand D" belongs to Shakespeare.

  Two plays are simply gone. Love's Labour's Won is mentioned by the late sixteenth-century writer Francis Meres and appears in a bookseller's list, but no copy has survived. Cardenio, attributed in a Stationers' Register entry of 1653 to Shakespeare and Fletcher, may survive only as Lewis Theobald's 1727 adaptation Double Falshood, which Theobald claimed to have drawn from three manuscripts of a lost Shakespeare play. Modern scholarship has not confirmed whether any original Shakespeare text lies beneath it.

• 7. Banned, Burned, and Restored

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  Richard Burbage was the actor who created the title roles in the first performances of Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, and King Lear. He performed alongside William Kempe, who played Peter in Romeo and Juliet and possibly Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Richard Cowley, who played Verges in Much Ado About Nothing. It was Henry Condell and John Heminges who gathered the surviving texts and published the First Folio in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death.

  In 1642, England's Parliament banned all plays outright, accusing the theatre of promoting "lascivious mirth and levity." The ban held through the Interregnum until 1660, when theatre resumed in a limited way after the death of Oliver Cromwell. The plays that returned to the stage were substantially altered: texts were "reformed" and "improved" with elaborate scenery, music, dancing, thunder, lightning, wave machines, and fireworks. What later generations regarded as shockingly disrespectful treatment of the plays was, at the time, an attempt to make them newly spectacular.

  Victorian productions swung toward archaeological authenticity, dressing actors in historically researched costumes and staging elaborate visual effects. The sea fights and barge scene in Antony and Cleopatra became a showcase for spectacle, though critics noted the pace suffered. William Poel pushed back toward the end of the nineteenth century, staging Elizabethan-style productions on a thrust stage that returned attention to dramatic structure. In the early twentieth century, Harley Granville-Barker directed quarto and folio texts with minimal cuts, while Edward Gordon Craig and others argued for abstract staging. Both of these impulses remain visible in how the plays are produced today.