We know of 39 plays by William Shakespeare, including a few collaborations with other playwrights. One play, Cardenio, was performed at court in the 1612–13 season, but the text has been lost. The other 38 are listed here.
Shakespeare’s plays are traditionally divided into the three categories of the First Folio: comedies, histories, and tragedies. The plays within each grouping vary widely. Among the comedies, for example, one can find sunny works filled with the banter of witty lovers; hilariously complicated farces; and darker, more sober plays such as The Tempest.
The following pages provide brief introductions to the plays, drawn from the Folger Shakespeare Library editions. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, the Folger editions of Shakespeare’s plays provide fresh, thoroughly re-edited texts of the plays, with notes and images from the Folger collection on the facing pages. Each edition includes essays on the plays and their publication and on Shakespeare’s life, theater, and language, an afterword by a contemporary scholar, and other notes and features.
COMEDIES
All's Well That Ends Well
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Cymbeline
Love's Labor’s Lost
Measure for Measure
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Pericles
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Troilus and Cressida
Twelfth Night
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Winter's Tale
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
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Hamlet
Julius Caesar
King Lear
Macbeth
Othello
Romeo and Juliet
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
