Shakespearean Tragedy

Traditionally Shakespearean plays are categorised as Comedy, History, and Tragedy, with some additional debatable categories that were proposed by scholars over the years. It is considered that William Shakespeare wrote 10 tragedies. However, Shakespeare's overlapping in style often creates disputes about the classification of the plays. To illustrate, "Much Ado About Nothing" is normally classified as a comedy, it follows many of the tragic conventions though.

 Many of history plays by William Shakespeare share the qualifiers of a tragedy, but because their characters are real historical figures, they were classified as "histories" in the first collected edition First Folio. Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus – the Roman tragedies – are also about figures from English history but because of their foreign and ancient sources they are more often classified as tragedies rather than histories.

Shakespearean romances or tragicomic plays were published originally as either tragedy or comedy. Although they share some elements of tragedy, they end happily like Shakespearean comedies. So, the classifications of certain Shakespeare plays are still debated among scholars.

In Shakespeare’s epoque, the term “tragedy” mostly implied a set of dramatic conventions established many years ago by the ancient Greeks and theorized by Aristotle in his Poetics. The number of plays grouped as Shakespearean tragedies follows the Aristotelian model of a noble, aberrant flawed protagonist who makes a mistake and subsequently suffers a fall from his position, but in the end the normal order is somehow resumed.