How many categories of plays were written by Shakespeare?

Answer 1

The first volume of Shakespeare's Collected Plays, the First Folio of 1623, categorized all of his plays as either Histories, Tragedies or Comedies. Since then, scholars have reassessed both whether the plays were rightly categorized in the First Folio, or whether the categories need to be reassessed. Some have added the category "Romances" for the later comedies Pericles, Cymbeline, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, arguing that these four plays are different from the other comedies. Others create the category "Problem Plays" for comedies which are darker than the others, particularly Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well, but which arguably could also contain the darker comedies Troilus and Cressida and The Merchant of Venice. Then again the category "Tragicomedy" has been advanced to include these plays. A genre popular at the time was the "Revenge Play" into which category both Hamlet and Titus Andronicus both fall.

Polonius in Hamlet gives us an idea of the kinds of categories that plays were put into while Shakespeare was writing. In describing the kinds of plays the players put on, he says "either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral" From the silliness of this last category and the fact that he puts these words into the mouth of the tedious gasbag Polonius, we might guess that Shakespeare didn't put much stock in categorization of plays.