Shakespeare's plays


Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, comedy, or otherwise is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language.
Many of his plays appeared in print as a series of quartos, but approximately half of them remained unpublished until 1623, when the posthumous First Folio was published.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" that elude easy categorisation, or perhaps purposely break generic conventions, and has introduced the term romances for what scholars believe to be his later comedies.
When Shakespeare first arrived in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s, dramatists writing for London's new commercial playhouses were combining two 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, generally celebrating piety, use personified moral attributes to urge or instruct the protagonist to choose the virtuous 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.
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 |Rose] and the Globe in the late twentieth century suggested that all London English Renaissance theatres were built around similar general plans. Despite individual differences, the public theatres were three stories high and built around an open space at the center. Usually polygonal in plan to give an overall rounded effect, three levels of inward-facing galleries overlooked the open center 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 a character 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 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.
Shakespeare's Elizabethan tragedies 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 sceptical, 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 Plautus's Menaechmi, follows the model of new comedy closely. Shakespeare's other Elizabethan comedies are more romantic. Like Lyly, he often makes romantic intrigue 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 capitalise on the new fashion for tragicomedy, even collaborating with John Fletcher, the writer who had popularised 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 dramatise 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. One play, Troilus and Cressida, may even have been inspired by the War of the Theatres.
Shakespeare's final plays hark 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 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 dramatising 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. Later on, 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, he even added punctuation at the end of these iambic pentameter lines to make the rhythm even stronger. He and many dramatists of this period used the form of blank verse extensively in character dialogue, thus heightening poetic effects.
To end many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet to give a sense of conclusion, or completion. A typical example is provided in Macbeth: as Macbeth leaves the stage to murder Duncan, he says,
Hear it not Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
Shakespeare's writing also feature extensive wordplay in which double entendres and rhetorical flourishes are repeatedly used. Humour 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 humour was largely influenced by Plautus.

Soliloquies in plays

Shakespeare's plays are also notable for their use of soliloquies, in which a character, apparently alone within the context of the play, makes a speech so that the audience may understand the character's inner motivations and conflict.
In his book Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, James Hirsh defines the convention of a Shakespearean 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 Shakespearean 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 Shakespearean 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 recognising 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.'"

Canonical plays

Except where noted, the plays below are listed, for the thirty-six plays included in the First Folio of 1623, according to the order in which they appear there, with two plays that were not included being added at the end of the list of comedies and another at the end of the list of histories.

Comedies

  1. The Tempest LR
  2. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
  3. The Merry Wives of Windsor
  4. Measure for Measure PP
  5. The Comedy of Errors
  6. Much Ado About Nothing
  7. Love's Labour's Lost
  8. A Midsummer Night's Dream
  9. The Merchant of Venice PP
  10. As You Like It
  11. The Taming of the Shrew
  12. All's Well That Ends Well PP
  13. Twelfth Night
  14. The Winter's Tale LR PP
  15. Pericles, Prince of Tyre LR FF
  16. The Two Noble Kinsmen LR FF

    Histories

  17. King John
  18. Richard II
  19. Henry IV, Part 1
  20. Henry IV, Part 2
  21. Henry V
  22. Henry VI, Part 1
  23. Henry VI, Part 2
  24. Henry VI, Part 3
  25. Richard III
  26. Henry VIII
  27. Edward III FF

    Tragedies

  28. Troilus and Cressida PP
  29. Coriolanus
  30. Titus Andronicus
  31. Romeo and Juliet
  32. Timon of Athens PP
  33. Julius Caesar
  34. Macbeth
  35. Hamlet
  36. King Lear
  37. Othello
  38. Antony and Cleopatra
  39. Cymbeline LR
Note: Plays marked with LR are now commonly referred to as the "late romances". Plays marked with PP are known as the "problem plays". The three plays marked with FF were not included in the First Folio.

Dramatic 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.
Note: For a comprehensive account of plays possibly by Shakespeare or in part by Shakespeare, see the separate entry on the Shakespeare apocrypha.
  • Arden of Faversham – The middle portion of the play may have been written by Shakespeare.
  • Edmund Ironside – Contains numerous words first used by Shakespeare, and, if by him, is perhaps his first play.
  • The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy – Both plays were published in quarto as works of Shakespeare, in 1605 and 1608, and were included in the Third Folio. However, stylistic analysis considers these attributions unlikely.
  • Sir [Thomas More |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.
  • The Spanish Tragedy – Additional passages included in the fourth quarto, including the "painter scene", are likely to have been written by him.

    Performance history

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, Richard Cowley, William Kempe, and Henry Condell and John Heminges, who are most famous now for collecting and editing the plays of Shakespeare's First Folio.
Shakespeare's plays continued to be staged after his death until the Interregnum, 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 Shakespearean production styles seen today.

Censorship

In 1642 England's Parliament banned plays, including Shakespeare's, accusing the theatre of promoting "lascivious mirth and levity." In 1660, after the Commonwealth of England ended with the death of Oliver Cromwell, theatre resumed in a limited way.