Comedies

Shakespeare wrote thirteen comedies, spanning his entire career from the early 1590s to the early 1600s. All end in marriage (or the prospect of it) and feature characteristic devices: disguise, mistaken identity, romantic confusion, and festive resolution.

Defining Features

• Happy endings — typically multiple marriages
• Disguise and mistaken identity — particularly cross-dressing heroines
• Wit and wordplay — clever characters outwitting slower ones
• Social integration — the comic world restored to harmony by the final scene
• Low comedy — clowns and mechanicals providing parallel comic action

The Plays (in approximate chronological order)

Play	Approx. Date	Setting	Notes
The Two Gentlemen of Verona	1589–1591	Verona & Milan	Shakespeare's earliest comedy
The Taming of the Shrew	1590–1592	Padua	Induction frame; debates of gender and authority
The Comedy of Errors	1592–1594	Ephesus	Farce; two pairs of twins; shortest play
Love's Labour's Lost	1594–1595	Navarre	Unusually ends without marriage
A Midsummer Night's Dream	1595–1596	Athens & Fairy Kingdom	Fairies, mechanicals, lovers intertwined
The Merchant of Venice	1596–1597	Venice & Belmont	Dark undertones; Shylock; problem of mercy
The Merry Wives of Windsor	1597–1601	Windsor	Falstaff humiliated; bourgeois comedy
Much Ado About Nothing	1598–1599	Messina	Witty battle of the sexes; Beatrice & Benedick
As You Like It	1599–1600	Forest of Arden	Pastoral; disguise; melancholy Jaques
Twelfth Night	1601–1602	Illyria	Cross-dressing; Malvolio; bittersweet tone
All's Well That Ends Well	1602–1603	France & Italy	Problem play; bed-trick; unheroic hero
Measure for Measure	1603–1604	Vienna	Problem play; dark themes of justice, sex, power
The Merry Wives of Windsor	—	—	(listed above)

**Note:** [[All's Well That Ends Well]], [[Measure for Measure]], and [[Troilus and Cressida]] are often classified as **Problem Plays** — comedies whose dark tone and unresolved tensions resist easy categorization. See also [[Romances]] for the late tragi-comedies.

Recurring Character Types

• The witty heroine (Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola)
• The blocking figure (fathers, rivals, authority figures)
• The clown or fool (Touchstone, Feste, Bottom)
• The melancholy outsider (Jaques, Malvolio, Shylock)

Cross-references

• Tragedies — the dark counterpart
• Romances — late tragi-comedies that share comic structure with darker underpinnings
• The Merchant of Venice — the most contested classification