The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors" class="md-crosslink">The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The Taming of the Shrew" class="md-crosslink">The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor" class="md-crosslink">The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night" class="md-crosslink">Twelfth Night (1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona" class="md-crosslink">The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s Lost" class="md-crosslink">Love’s Labour’s Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream" class="md-crosslink">A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It" class="md-crosslink">As You Like It (1598–1600)—have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the fragmented individual may recover wholeness. All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice" class="md-crosslink">The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About Nothing" class="md-crosslink">Much Ado About Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well" class="md-crosslink">All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure" class="md-crosslink">Measure for Measure (1603–04)—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law, human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida" class="md-crosslink">Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02) presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality. The tragedies
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies Titus Andronicus" class="md-crosslink">Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet" class="md-crosslink">Romeo and Juliet (1594–96), with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar" class="md-crosslink">Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments. In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge tragedy in Hamlet" class="md-crosslink">Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello" class="md-crosslink">Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King Lear" class="md-crosslink">King Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth" class="md-crosslink">Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and Cleopatra" class="md-crosslink">Antony and Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence. The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest single product.