The Collected Works of William Shakespeare
Arranged by Category

You can also search the plays for occurrences of specific words. Or you can view lists of them in alphabetical order or in rough chronological order.

Shakespeare's plays are often arranged in three categories: tragedy, comedy, or history. The arrangement here is based on the arrangement of The Riverside edition, but it is important to realize that the categories are not Shakespeare's.

A number of Shakespeare's plays were published as quarto editions (so-named because the paper was folded twice, make four pages on one side of a sheet of paper) during his lifetime. These individual editions had no "category" listed, though they often contained words like history or tragedy in the title, e.g. The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, or The History of Henry the Fourth.

The arrangement of the plays into the three categories is a practice begun with the First Folio, which was printed in 1623 -- seven years after Shakespeare's death.

• Anthony and Cleopatra
• Coriolanus
• Hamlet
• Julius Caesar
• The Tragedy of King Lear
• Macbeth
• Othello
• Romeo and Juliet
• Timon of Athens
• Titus Andronicus

• All's Well That Ends Well
• As You Like It
• The Comedy of Errors
• Cymbeline
• Love's Labours Lost
• Measure for Measure
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• The Merchant of Venice
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre
• Taming of the Shrew
• The Tempest
• Troilus and Cressida
• Twelfth Night
• Two Gentlemen of Verona
• Winter's Tale

• Henry IV, part 1
• Henry IV, part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI, part 1
• Henry VI, part 2
• Henry VI, part 3
• Henry VIII
• King John
• Richard II
• Richard III