Fourth Period, Late Experiment. Coriolanus, Pericles, 1608; Cymbeline, 1609; Winter’s Tale, 1610-1611; The Tempest, 1611; Henry VIII (unfinished).

CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO SOURCE.  In history, legend, and story, Shakespeare found the material for nearly all his dramas; and so they are often divided into three classes, called historical plays, like Richard III and Henry V; legendary or partly historical plays, like Macbeth, King Lear, and Julius Caesar; and fictional plays, like Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice.  Shakespeare invented few, if any, of the plots or stories upon which his dramas are founded, but borrowed them freely, after the custom of his age, wherever he found them.  For his legendary and historical material he depended, largely on Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and on North’s translation of Plutarch’s famous Lives.

A full half of his plays are fictional, and in these he used the most popular romances of the day, seeming to depend most on the Italian story-tellers.  Only two or three of his plots, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Merry Wives of Windsor, are said to be original, and even these are doubtful.  Occasionally Shakespeare made over an older play, as in Henry VI, Comedy of Errors, and Hamlet; and in one instance at least he seized upon an incident of shipwreck in which London was greatly interested, and made out of it the original and fascinating play of The Tempest, in much the same spirit which leads our modern playwrights when they dramatize a popular novel or a war story to catch the public fancy.

CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO DRAMATIC TYPE.  Shakespeare’s dramas are usually divided into three classes, called tragedies, comedies, and historical plays.  Strictly speaking the drama has but two divisions, tragedy and comedy, in which are included the many subordinate forms of tragi-comedy, melodrama, lyric drama (opera), farce, etc.  A tragedy is a drama in which the principal characters are involved in desperate circumstances or led by overwhelming passions.  It is invariably serious and dignified.  The movement is always stately, but grows more and more rapid as it approaches the climax; and the end is always calamitous, resulting in death or dire misfortune to the principals.  As Chaucer’s monk says, before he begins to “biwayle in maner of tragedie”: 

    Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie
    Of him that stood in great prosperitee,
    And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
    Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.

A comedy, on the other hand, is a drama in which the characters are placed in more or less humorous situations.  The movement is light and often mirthful, and the play ends in general good will and happiness.  The historical drama aims to present some historical age or character, and may be either a comedy or a tragedy.  The following list includes the best of Shakespeare’s plays in each of the three classes; but the order indicates merely the author’s personal opinion of the relative merits of the plays in each class.  Thus Merchant of Venice would be the first of the comedies for the beginner to read, and Julius Caesar is an excellent introduction to the historical plays and the tragedies.