Shakespearean problem play

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1896, F. S. Boas published Shakespeare and His Predecessors and coined a phrase that scholars have never fully agreed on: problem plays. He applied the label to three of Shakespeare's plays. Their tone could swing violently from comic lightness into dark psychological drama within a single work.

  Two of the three were officially classified as comedies. The third, Troilus and Cressida, was filed among Shakespeare's tragedies in the First Folio. It was not even listed in the Folio's own table of contents.

  The label Boas invented has survived for more than a century. But it has never stopped being contested. Where did the concept come from? What exactly is the problem these plays share? And why do later scholars, working from such different premises, arrive at such different answers?

• 2. An Ibsen-Shaped Lens

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  The phrase Boas reached for was not Shakespeare's own. It came from a type of theater popular in his day, most closely associated with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. In those plays, the protagonist faced a situation that stood in for a recognized social problem facing the audience. Boas found this a useful model for Shakespeare plays that had long seemed awkwardly placed between comedy and tragedy.

  The plays he grouped under the label were All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. Boas argued that each set out to explore specific moral dilemmas through its central characters. That shared purpose was what, in his view, united otherwise very different works.

  Boas also drew Hamlet into the discussion. He did not include it fully in the problem play category. Instead, he saw it as a bridge connecting the problem plays to Shakespeare's more clearly defined tragedies. Boas named the category, but its edges remained open. Subsequent scholars would question not only which plays belonged, but what kind of problem the label was actually describing.

• 3. Bewilderment by Design

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  Rather than arousing simple joy or pain, Boas argued, the problem plays produced something more unsettling: engrossment and bewilderment. The audience was pulled in but left without clear emotional direction.

  All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure do arrive at resolutions. Troilus and Cressida offers none, and on that point it resembles Hamlet. The plays that refused resolution required the most of their audiences. Boas believed Shakespeare was asking readers to actively decipher these works rather than passively receive them.

  Boas also argued that the problem plays let readers examine complex and neglected topics. Those works were sometimes cited as early predecessors to tragicomedy, a hybrid genre that would later gain wider recognition. Ernest Schanzer, arriving at the question from a different direction, would eventually argue that only one of Boas's original three plays genuinely met the standard he proposed.

• 4. A Category Under Pressure

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  The Winter's Tale, Timon of Athens, and The Merchant of Venice were eventually pulled into the category by critics who came after Boas. The definition had expanded beyond its original edges, and the concept began to strain under its own vagueness.

  Boas never provided a precise definition of what made a play a problem play, and no consensus has emerged since. Its use as a formal classification is still not accepted by all Shakespeare critics. Each new scholarly framework produced a different list of plays, and sometimes a shorter one.

  Three scholars would eventually propose frameworks that reshaped the category. Neil Rhodes, A.G. Harmon, and Ernest Schanzer each arrived at a different answer about what the problem in a problem play actually was.

• 5. Three Competing Answers

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  Neil Rhodes defined the essential feature of a Shakespearean problem play as its controversial plot. What separated Measure for Measure from Shakespeare's other works was its refusal to steer the audience toward a verdict. It presented both sides of a social dispute equally. This withholding of judgment, Rhodes noted, was not a technique Shakespeare invented. The practice of putting forward a thesis alongside an equally persuasive counter-argument stretched back to Ancient Greece.

  Rhodes argued that a Shakespeare play qualifies as a problem play only if it addresses a genuinely debatable social issue. His examples included gender roles and institutional power frameworks. The category, in his view, had become less distinct over time. As scholars discovered controversy everywhere in Shakespeare, the problem plays lost their special claim to that description.

  A.G. Harmon approached the question differently. He argued that what the problem plays share is their engagement with the relationship between law and nature. In each play, Harmon saw a disorder in nature that the characters attempted to resolve by amending faulty contracts. The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida all follow a recognizable sequence. Established laws are challenged, chaos takes hold, and order is finally restored through new arrangements.

  Harmon departed from the conventional view in one important respect. He argued that the problem plays do offer resolution. Shakespeare, like his characters, fulfilled his contract as a playwright by providing an ending. The common tension these plays explored, in Harmon's reading, was between social laws and natural human tendencies.

  Ernest Schanzer took a different path still. Rather than asking which plays seemed tonally difficult or socially contentious, he returned to the phrase itself. He asked what the word problem strictly required. He chose to consider only ethical dilemmas, setting aside psychological, political, social, and metaphysical problems that might arise. By that standard, a problem play had to present a pivotal ethical dilemma. The dilemma had to generate genuinely opposing and equally plausible responses from the audience.

  Applying this test, Schanzer found that only Measure for Measure met the standard. All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida, he argued, lacked the kind of central ethical split that divided an audience. In their place, Schanzer put forward two plays that Boas had never considered: Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The plays that Boas had originally named all dated from the late 1590s to the early years of the seventeenth century.