Which are the longest and shortest plays of Shakespeare?

Answer 1

The Comedy of Errors is the shortest. Hamlet is the longest only because there are two quite different shorter versions which are mashed together into one really long version. The longest play as it was published in Shakespeare's day (that is, before 1624) is in fact Richard III.

Inaccurate. The First Quarto of "Hamlet" was published in 1603 and is indeed significantly shorter than either the Second Quarto (1604) or the Folio (1623). Q1 differs in substance as well as length, and scholars disagree about how the publisher may have obtained the text. A popular hypothesis is that the actor playing Marcellus (whose part in Q1 is almost verbatim the same as Q2) recited the whole thing (as well as he could remember) from memory. Q2 was published only about a year after Q1 and is massively long, longer than the folio version in fact. Q2 Hamlet is the longest of Shakespeare's plays, whether is it conflated with F or not. If you are interested in the differences among the three versions, the New Arden Shakespeare has published all three in one volume.

Both "Coriolanus" and "Cymbeline" are, by some counts, longer than "Richard III" which is a big-ass long play. Neither of those appeared in print, as far as we know, before Shakespeare died in 1616.

"King Lear" may be the "MASH up" you were thinking of. The quarto and folio versions of this play differ by several hundred lines. Most published versions of "Lear" conflate the two. Oxford Shakespeare (and the Norton as well, which are based on Oxford) has published a parallel text version with quarto on the verso pages and folio on the recto. Even this version cheats a little. There are a couple of places where the editors chose the same reading for both texts where they actually differed in the originals.