How many of shakespeare's plays were comedies?

Answer 1

There are 18 of Shakespeare's plays which are identified as comedies. Your mileage may vary on which ones are better than which others. Just because a play is popular and frequently performed does not mean that it is better.

The five most frequently performed Shakespearean comedies are probably The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night.

Answer 2

It's easier to ask how many weren't. The ten histories and the ten tragedies are not, which leaves 17 or 18 comedies. Cymbeline for some strange reason is sometimes placed with the tragedies, adding one to the tragedies and taking one away from the comedies. Also some modern scholars want to invent a new class, the romances and transfer four of the comedies (Cymbeline, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, and Pericles) into this category. I say 17 or 18 because the acceptance of The Two Noble Kinsmen is quite new and older authors may discount it.

Answer 3

Usually 10 history plays and 18 comedies, but Cymbeline was not counted originally among the comedies but rather among the tragedies, and the First Folio did not include Pericles or the Two Noble Kinsmen. Some authors have also sought to created new categories like romances, problem plays or tragicomedies and have shunted some of the plays into them, usually comedies.

Answer 4

There were 36 plays in the First Folio, called "Mr William Shakespeares Comedies Histories & Tragedies." It starts out with fourteen plays generally considered to be comedies, then ten histories, Troilus and Cressida, ten tragedies, and Cymbeline. This makes it look rather like Troilus & Cressida and Cymbeline were considered to be tragedies. People do die in those plays, although in Cymbeline it is the villains who die.

Conventionally, these two plays have been lumped in with the fourteen other Comedies, and Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which are at least partly by Shakespeare but were not in the First Folio, were added to them, making a total of eighteen. However, as you can see, the categorization of plays as either comedies, histories or tragedies is far from scientific.

Answer 5

The First Folio lists fourteen of the thirty-six plays as comedies.