A Guide to Shakespeare's Plays

How Many Plays — and What Survives

Shakespeare never published his plays. Unlike his narrative poems, they were working scripts for a theatre company — kept private to prevent rivals copying them. The texts we have are, in many cases, reconstructed from early quartos of varying quality and the First Folio of 1623, which was assembled by his fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell seven years after his death and contains 36 plays.

Two more — Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen (a collaboration with John Fletcher) — are now generally accepted as substantially Shakespeare's. A further handful of early works, including parts of the Henry VI trilogy, may contain significant Shakespeare alongside other writers. The approximate total of 39 is now the working consensus among scholars.

The Three Genres — and Why They Break Down

The First Folio divides the plays into comedies, tragedies and histories, and this is still the most useful starting framework. But it quickly reveals its limits.

The Merchant of Venice is technically a comedy — it ends with marriages — but it contains Shylock, one of literature's most troubling and complex figures. Troilus and Cressida appears as a tragedy in some editions and a comedy in others and functions as neither. Measure for Measure ends with multiple weddings but feels nothing like a celebration. The safest approach is to treat the genres as tendencies rather than fixed categories: comedies lean toward confusion, disguise, love and reunion; tragedies toward pride, fatal error and destruction; histories toward the dynamics of political power.

The Comedies

Shakespeare's comedies make up roughly half his output and range from knockabout farce to something barely distinguishable from tragedy. Their shared DNA involves mistaken identity and romantic confusion — resolved, usually, through love and marriage — but beyond that they go in very different directions.

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (c.1595) — Four young lovers, a fairy court and a troupe of bumbling amateur actors collide in an enchanted forest. Magical, funny and stranger than it first appears.
• Much Ado About Nothing (c.1598–99) — The battle of wits between Beatrice and Benedick is among the sharpest double-acts in drama. The play's near-tragedy makes the comedy feel hard-won.
• Twelfth Night (c.1601) — The most melancholy of the comedies: the jokes have a wistful undertow, and Malvolio's humiliation sits uncomfortably in the memory.
• As You Like It (c.1599) — Set in the Forest of Arden, with Rosalind — Shakespeare's longest and most modern female role — directing events with wit and intelligence.
• The Merchant of Venice (c.1596–97) — The most ethically complex of the comedies, demanding careful attention to what it asks of its audience.

The Tragedies

The great tragedies were written mostly between 1600 and 1608 — the most concentrated burst of tragic writing in literary history. They deal in the largest questions: identity, power, consciousness, what we owe each other. They do not comfort.

Hamlet (c.1600–01) is the most-performed play in the world and the one that rewards the most return visits. It is about delay, memory, the impossibility of certainty and the horror of being asked to act when you cannot be sure you are right. Macbeth (c.1606) is the shortest tragedy and the most propulsive: ambition ignites in a single scene and burns until everything is ash. Othello (c.1603) is a study in manipulation and the destruction of trust — painfully intimate where Macbeth is epic. King Lear (c.1605–06) is the hardest and, many argue, the greatest: an old man stripped of everything, a kingdom torn apart, no moral verdict delivered.

Romeo and Juliet (c.1594–96) belongs here in spirit: a tragedy driven not by character flaws but by bad timing and institutional hatred — which makes it, in some respects, the most modern of them all.

The Histories

Shakespeare's ten history plays dramatise the reigns of English kings from King John (1199–1216) to Henry VIII (1509–47), with the dramatic centre of gravity in the Wars of the Roses. They are not history lessons — dates are altered, characters invented, motivations simplified for theatrical effect — but they are extraordinarily intelligent about power: how it is won and lost, what it demands, what it does to the people who hold it.

The crown of the sequence is the four-play arc running from Richard II through Henry IV, Part I and Part II to Henry V. Together they trace a young man's education in kingship, from Hal's tavern life with Falstaff — probably the greatest comic character in all of literature — to the cold calculations of the warrior-king who wins Agincourt. Richard III is the most theatrical of the histories, driven by its monstrous, magnetic villain-narrator who addresses the audience from the very first line.

The Late Romances and Problem Plays

The final phase of Shakespeare's career, roughly 1607–13, produced a group of plays critics call the late romances or tragicomedies: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. These are stranger, more dreamlike works. They begin with catastrophe — shipwrecks, unjust accusations, exile — and end in reconciliation and forgiveness rather than death. The Tempest (1611), generally considered Shakespeare's last sole-authored work, is often read as a meditation on artistic creation and the act of letting go.

The so-called problem plays — Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida — resist all categorisation. Measure for Measure in particular is one of the most unsettling things Shakespeare wrote: a study in power, desire and the hypocrisies of justice that reads as uncomfortably contemporary.

How the Plays Were Originally Performed

The Globe Theatre held between 2,000 and 3,000 people — a substantial fraction of London's population — and performances took place on weekday afternoons by natural daylight, without painted sets, without stage lighting and without an interval. Location was created entirely by the language: "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?" tells the audience it is night and there is a window, without any scenery required. The plays moved fast, probably at under two hours.

All female roles were played by boy actors — apprentices whose voices had not yet broken. This is not a historical footnote; it is built into the structure of the plays. When Rosalind says "Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak," the joke works on three levels simultaneously: a boy playing a woman who is disguised as a man, in front of an audience who knows it throughout.

Soliloquy — speaking directly to the audience — was the primary means of giving characters interiority. There was no fourth wall. When Hamlet asks "To be, or not to be," he is not thinking aloud in private; he is addressing several thousand people standing in an outdoor theatre on a Tuesday afternoon in 1601.

Read about the Globe Theatre's flag system →

Where to Start

The commonest mistake is beginning with the play you studied at school — which is usually a play you were forced to annotate rather than experience. A better approach: start with something you want to watch, and watch it first. A production on stage or screen will make the language feel immediate in a way that reading cold rarely manages.

• For thrillers: Start with Macbeth. Short, fast and relentlessly tense — under two hours in most productions.
• For romance: Start with Romeo and Juliet. The most accessible of the tragedies, with characters you already know.
• For comedy and wit: Start with Much Ado About Nothing. The Beatrice–Benedick exchanges feel as sharp as any contemporary sitcom.
• For the full experience: Start with Hamlet. It takes longer but gives more back — philosophy, tragedy, comedy, poetry and politics in a single play.

For reading rather than watching, the Arden Shakespeare editions are the most thoroughly annotated; Oxford World's Classics are reliable and affordable. Don't be deterred by unfamiliar words — the notes in any good edition handle them, and the language rewards patience.

Browse all 37 plays →