A number of Shakespeare’s plays are widely regarded as among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature. He wrote tragedies, histories, comedies and romances, which have been tragedies into every major living language, in addition to being continually performed around the world
As was normal in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of other playwrights and reworked earlier stories and historical material. For example, Hamlet ( c. 1601 ) is probably a reworking of an older, lost play ( the so-called Ur-Hamlet), and King Lear is an adaptation of an earlier play, also called King Lear.
For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch Parallel Lives ( Form the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North ), and the English history plays are indebted to Raphael Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles).
Shakespeare’s plays tend to be placed into three main stylistic groups:
* early comedies and histories ( such as A Midsummer Nights Dream and Henry IV, part I )
* middle period ( which includes his most famous tragedies, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, as well as ’’problem plays ’’ such as Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure )
* Iater romances ( such The Winters Tale and the Tempest ).
The earlier plays range from broad comedy to historical nostalgia, while the middle-period plays tend to be grander in terms of theme, addressing such issues as betrayal, murder, lust, power and ambition. By contrast, his late romances feature redemptive plotlines with ambiguous ending and the use of magic and other fantastical elements. However, the borders between these genres are never clear .
Some of Shakespeare’s plays first appeared in print as a series of quartos, but most remained unpublished until 1623 when the posthumous First Folio was published by two actors who had been in Shakespeare’s company: John Heminges and Henry Condell. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories directions, punctuation and act divisions enter his plays, setting the trend for further future editorial decisions. Modern criticism has also labelled some of his plays problem plays or tragic-comedies, as they elude easy categorization, or perhaps purposefully break generic conventions. The term romances has also been preferred for the later comedies .
There are many controversies about the exact chronology of Shakespeare’s plays. In addition, the Shakespeare did not produce an authoritative print version of his plays during his life accounts for part of the textual problem often noted with his plays, which means that for several of the plays there are different textual versions. As a result, the problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote became a major concern for most modern editions. Textual corruptions also stem from printers errors, compositors misreading, or wrongly scanned lines from the source material. Additionally, in an age before standardized spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, contributing further to the transcribers confusions. Modern scholars also believe Shakespeare revised his plays throughout the years, sometimes leading to perhaps two or more existing versions of one play.
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