1601) in Henry VI, Part I and with George Peele (1556–96) in Titus Andronicus. And towards the end he collaborated with George Wilkins (fl. 1604–8) in Pericles, and with his younger colleagues Thomas Middleton (1580–1627), in Timon of Athens, and John Fletcher (1579–1625), in Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost play Cardenio. Shakespeare’s output dwindled in his last years, and he died in 1616 in Stratford, where he owned a fine house, New Place, and much land. His only son had died at the age of eleven, in 1596, and his last descendant died in 1670. New Place was destroyed in the eighteenth century but the other Stratford houses associated with his life are maintained and displayed to the public by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

One of the most remarkable features of Shakespeare’s plays is their intellectual and emotional scope. They span a great range from the lightest of comedies, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors, to the profoundest of tragedies, such as King Lear and Macbeth. He maintained an output of around two plays a year, ringing the changes between comic and serious. All his comedies have serious elements: Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, almost reaches tragic dimensions, and Measure for Measure is profoundly serious in its examination of moral problems. Equally, none of his tragedies is without humour: Hamlet is as witty as any of his comic heroes, Macbeth has its Porter, and King Lear its Fool. His greatest comic character, Falstaff, inhabits the history plays and Henry V ends with a marriage, while Henry VI, Part III, Richard II and Richard III culminate in the tragic deaths of their protagonists.

Although in performance Shakespeare’s characters can give the impression of a superabundant reality, he is not a naturalistic dramatist. None of his plays is explicitly set in his own time. The action of few of them (except for the English histories) is set even partly in England (exceptions are The Merry Wives of Windsor and the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew). Italy is his favoured location. Most of his principal story-lines derive from printed writings; but the structuring and translation of these narratives into dramatic terms is Shakespeare’s own, and he invents much additional material. Most of the plays contain elements of myth and legend, and many derive from ancient or more recent history or from romantic tales of ancient times and faraway places. All reflect his reading, often in close detail. Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577, revised 1587), a great compendium of English, Scottish and Irish history, provided material for his English history plays. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans by the Greek writer Plutarch, finely translated into English from the French by Sir Thomas North in 1579, provided much of the narrative material, and also a mass of verbal detail, for his plays about Roman history. Some plays are closely based on shorter individual works: As You Like It, for instance, on the novel Rosalynde (1590) by his near-contemporary Thomas Lodge (1558–1625), The Winter’s Tale on Pandosto (1588) by his old rival Robert Greene (1558–92) and Othello on a story by the Italian Giraldi Cinthio (1504–73). And the language of his plays is permeated by the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the proverbial sayings of his day.

Shakespeare was popular with his contemporaries, but his commitment to the theatre and to the plays in performance is demonstrated by the fact that only about half of his plays appeared in print in his lifetime, in slim paperback volumes known as quartos, so called because they were made from printers’ sheets folded twice to form four leaves (eight pages). None of them shows any sign that he was involved in their publication. For him, performance was the primary means of publication. The most frequently reprinted of his works were the non-dramatic poems – the erotic Venus and Adonis and the more moralistic The Rape of Lucrece. The Sonnets, which appeared in 1609, under his name but possibly without his consent, were less successful, perhaps because the vogue for sonnet sequences, which peaked in the 1590s, had passed by then. They were not reprinted until 1640, and then only in garbled form along with poems by other writers. Happily, in 1623, seven years after he died, his colleagues John Heminges (1556–1630) and Henry Condell (d. 1627) published his collected plays, including eighteen that had not previously appeared in print, in the first Folio, whose name derives from the fact that the printers’ sheets were folded only once to produce two leaves (four pages). Some of the quarto editions are badly printed, and the fact that some plays exist in two, or even three, early versions creates problems for editors. These are discussed in the Account of the Text in each volume of this series.

Shakespeare’s plays continued in the repertoire until the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642. When performances resumed after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, many of the plays were not to the taste of the times, especially because their mingling of genres and failure to meet the requirements of poetic justice offended against the dictates of neoclassicism. Some, such as The Tempest (changed by John Dryden and William Davenant in 1667 to suit contemporary taste), King Lear (to which Nahum Tate gave a happy ending in 1681) and Richard III (heavily adapted by Colley Cibber in 1700 as a vehicle for his own talents), were extensively rewritten; others fell into neglect.