What type of plays are shakespeare famous for?

Answer 1

Shakespeare wrote a broad variety of plays, some of which are famous and some are not. Although they were all designed to be performed according to the customs of Shakespeare's day and so are basically similar to the plays being written by the large number of playwrights who were at work at that time, they are different from each other in terms of mood, theme, diction and structure. When they were published as a group, they were divided into three groups, rather arbitrarily. The ones which ended badly for the main character or characters were called tragedies, those which resulted in a happy ending, usually with lots of weddings, were called comedies, and those which had to do with English History (which were sometimes tragedies, sometimes comedies, and sometimes neither) were called Histories.Shakespeare's success came from pushing the boundaries of the genres of theatre that existed. Comedies were supposed to end in the couple getting together, but his early play Love's Labour's Lost ends with the couples not getting together after all due to circumstances outside their control. Shakespeare made a point of the fact that he was not using that particular comedy trope. Likewise his early tragedy Romeo and Juliet is about two middle-class kids, not members of royalty or the nobility, which everyone expected in a tragedy. Even today, people go around trying to say that Romeo and Juliet is not really a tragedy just because he pushed the limits of the genre. Sometimes he created a new genre--he invented the romantic comedy with his play Much Ado about Nothing. He pushed the limits of the Revenge Tragedy genre by having an unwilling revenger (all previous retellings of that story had Hamlet being willing but careful.)