Introduction

Abstract

In the years 1602–4, Shakespeare wrote three comedies which are often grouped together under the title ‘problem plays’: All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. Shakespeare’s comedies had already begun to grow darker, with plays like Much Ado About Nothing (c.1598) and Twelth Night (c.1600) having sombre elements which are less in evidence in the earlier comedies. The problem plays coincide with the middle of the period in which the great tragedies were written: Hamlet (1600), Othello (? 1603), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606). The theory often advanced is that Shakespeare moved out of the gaiety of his earlier work in the 1590s into a more sombre drama, in which even the comedies have lost their lightness of touch. The three plays are sometimes labelled as tragicomedies. Oneof Shakespeare’s contemporaries, John Fletcher, gave a rather superficial definition of this genre, but it certainly fits the ‘problem’ comedies: ‘it wants [i.e. lacks] death which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet it brings some near to it which is enough to make it no comedy’.