William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (baptised April 26, 1564 – April 23, 1616) was an English poet and playwright who has a reputation as one of the greatest of all writers in the English language and in Western literature, as well as one of the world's pre-eminent dramatists.

Works

Canonical works

The plays and their categories

Shakespeare's plays first appeared in print as a series of folios and quartos, and scholars, actors and directors continue to study and perform them extensively. They form an established part of the Western canon of literature.

Related Topics:
Folios and quartos - Western canon - Literature

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The plays are traditionally divided into tragedies, comedies and histories, following the logic of the original publications; however, modern criticism has labelled some of them "problem plays" as they elude easy categorization, or perhaps purposefully break generic conventions. In addition, Shakespeare's later comedies are commonly known as "romances".

Related Topics:
Problem plays - Romances

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The following list gives the plays in the order and categorization of the 1623 First Folio (the first collected edition of the plays). A single asterisk indicates a play commonly classified as a 'romance' today; two asterisks indicates those generally accepted as 'problem plays' - though other comedies still occasion critical dispute. To see the plays in the order in which they were written, see Chronology of Shakespeare plays.

Related Topics:
First Folio - Chronology of Shakespeare plays

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• Comedies
• The Tempest *
• 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
• Taming of the Shrew
• All's Well That Ends Well
• Twelfth Night or What You Will
• The Winter's Tale *
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre * (not included in the First Folio)
• The Two Noble Kinsmen * (not included in the First Folio)
• Histories
• King John
• Richard II
• Henry IV, part 1
• Henry IV, part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI, part 1
• Henry VI, part 2
• Henry VI, 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
• Antony and Cleopatra
• Cymbeline * (normally classed as a comedy today)

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 dependant on linguistic analysis by modern scholars.

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• Cardenio, a lost play; contemporary reports say that Shakespeare collaborated on it with John Fletcher.
• 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 incoherent plot and unusually cynical tone.
• Titus Andronicus may be a collaboration with, or revision of, 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 scrap of paper (apparently from a bookseller), 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 alternate title of one of the plays listed above, such as Much Ado About Nothing or All's Well That Ends Well.
• Cardenio, a late play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, referred to in several documents, has not survived. It 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 represents all we have of the lost play.

Poems

Shakespeare's other literary works include:

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• Shakespeare's Sonnets.
• Longer poems:
• Venus and Adonis
• The Rape of Lucrece
• The Passionate Pilgrim
• The Phoenix and the Turtle
• A Lover's Complaint

Apocrypha

Plays possibly by Shakespeare

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

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• Edward III Some scholars have recently chosen to attribute this play to Shakespeare, based on the style of its verse. Others refuse to accept it, citing, among other reasons, the mediocre quality of the characters. If Shakespeare had involvement, he probably worked as a collaborator.
• Sir Thomas More, a collaborative work by several playwrights, possibly including Shakespeare. That Shakespeare had any part in this play remains uncertain.

Other works possibly by Shakespeare

• A Funeral Elegy by W.S. (?). For a period many believed, on the basis of stylistic evidence researched by Donald Foster, that Shakespeare wrote a Funeral Elegy for William Peter. However most scholars, including Foster, now conclude that this evidence was flawed and that Shakespeare did not write the Elegy, which is more likely from the pen of John Ford.
• The King James Version of the Bible Some people claim that Shakespeare assisted in the translation of the King James Bible, rewording or rewriting certain sections to make them more poetic; they argue that the poetic sensibility of certain sections of the King James Bible is very similar to the style of Shakespeare, and cite Psalm 46, where the word "shake" appears 46 words from the beginning, and "spear" 46 words from the end. This is a controversial notion and is not accepted by mainstream scholarship, though Neil Gaiman managed to work it into his Sandman graphic novel .