King Lear

King Richard the Second

1595–97

The Life and Death of King John (possibly earlier)

1596–97

The Merchant of Venice

1596–97

The First Part of Henry the Fourth

1597–98

The Second Part of Henry the Fourth

1598

Much Ado About Nothing

1598–99

The Passionate Pilgrim (20 poems, some not by Shakespeare)

1599

The Life of Henry the Fifth

1599

“To the Queen” (epilogue for a court performance)

1599

As You Like It

1599

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

1600–01

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (perhaps revising an earlier version)

1600–01

The Merry Wives of Windsor (perhaps revising version of 1597–99)

1601

“Let the Bird of Loudest Lay” (poem, known since 1807 as “The Phoenix and Turtle” [turtledove])

1601

Twelfth Night, or What You Will

1601–02

The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida

1604

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice

1604

Measure for Measure

1605

All’s Well That Ends Well

1605

The Life of Timon of Athens, with Thomas Middleton

1605–06

The Tragedy of King Lear

1605–08

? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy, mostly by Thomas Middleton)

1606

The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton)

1606–07

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

1608

The Tragedy of Coriolanus

1608

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with George Wilkins

1610

The Tragedy of Cymbeline

1611

The Winter’s Tale

1611

The Tempest

1612–13

Cardenio, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald)

1613

Henry VIII (All Is True), with John Fletcher

1613–14

The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher

THE HISTORY BEHIND THE

TRAGEDIES: A CHRONOLOGY

FURTHER READING

AND VIEWING

CRITICAL APPROACHES

Booth, Stephen, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (1983). Not for beginners, but very penetrating.

Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). Still worth reading a century after publication.

Cavell, Stanley, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (1987). A skeptical philosopher’s reading; still less for beginners, but so full of deep insight that it has claims to be among the best pieces ever written on the play.

Colie, Rosalie L., and F. T. Flahiff, Some Facets of “King Lear”: Essays in Prismatic Criticism (1974). An unusually strong collection of critical essays.

Danby, J. F., Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (1949). Contexts for Edmund.

Dollimore, Jonathan, “King Lear and Essentialist Humanism,” in Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1984). Inflected by neo-Marxist cultural politics.

Elton, William R., King Lear and the Gods (1966). Useful contextualization in the intellectual history of Shakespeare’s time.

Empson, William, “Fool in Lear,” in The Structure of Complex Words (1951). Superb essay on a key word.

Goldberg, S. L., An Essay on King Lear (1974). Consistently thoughtful.

Greenblatt, Stephen, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespeare Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988). Inventive account of why Shakespeare used an anti-Popish treatise for the mad language of Poor Tom.

Heilman, R. B., This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (1963). Good account of image patterns.

Kermode, Frank, ed., King Lear: A Casebook (1969). Fine collection of studies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964). The chapter on King Lear as a bleak, absurd drama analogous to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame has been hugely influential; Peter Brook saw an early version, which did much to shape his 1962 production.