The Complete Works of Shakespeare

by William Shakespeare

on already popular stories appear to have been seen as more likely to draw large crowds. There were also aesthetic reasons: Renaissance aesthetic theory took seriously the dictum that tragic plots should be grounded in history. This stricture did not apply to comedy, and those of Shakespeare's plays for which no clear source has been established, such as Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest, are comedies. Even these plays, however, rely heavily on generic commonplaces. For example, Hamlet (c.1601) may be a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), and King Lear is likely an adaptation of an older play of the same name. For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives and the English history plays are indebted to Raphael Holinshed's 1587 Chronicles. Categorization of the Plays While there is much dispute about the exact chronology of Shakespeare plays, as well as the Shakespeare Authorship Question, the plays tend to fall into three main stylistic groupings. The first major grouping of his plays contains the histories and comedies of the 1590s. Shakespeare's earliest plays tended to be adaptations of other playwright's works and employed blank verse and little variation in rhythm. However, after the plague forced Shakespeare and his company of actors to leave London for periods between 1592 and 1594, Shakespeare began to use rhymed couplets in his p...