Much Ado About Nothing teeters on the brink of darkness but then comes out of it and proceeds towards a felicitous climax.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its forbidden love, threatens to fall into a dark chasm of unhappiness for the characters but survives that danger amidst hilarity and joy.

On the other hand, one of the ‘great’ tragic plays,

The Merchant of Venice, for example, traditionally a comedy, features Shylock, a tragic figure in every way, while the comic elements are only there to frame and heighten the tragic feeling.

That play alone confounds the efforts of all the scholars bent on classifying Shakespeare’s dramas. Antony and Cleopatra, shows the ultimate genius of a mind that doesn’t respect classification boxes in that it produces a real tragic feeling from a completely comic structure.When it comes to Shakespeare tragedies and Shakespeare comedies there are a broad range of dramatic types in each and, whatever those two terms may mean, none of the plays fits comfortably into either of them. These plays (and many others) are filled with tragic Shakespeare moments: The plays grouped as Shakespeare tragedies follow the Aristotelian model of a noble, flawed protagonist (the tragic hero) who makes a mistake and suffers a fall from his position, before the normal order is somehow resumed.

Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order.

Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.

The comedies of william shakespeare