Shakespeare: The Comedies
The comedies, best known first, with the three problem plays at the end.
- Twelfth Night EnglishYou get Viola’s clever, tender balancing act, Malvolio’s wonderfully sour self-importance, and a comedy that keeps slipping between farce and real loneliness. The mistaken identities can feel deliberately tangled, but the language is playful enough to reward reading aloud, especially when the characters are trying hardest to hide what they want.
- Much Ado About Nothing EnglishBeatrice and Benedick spend the whole play insulting each other so cleverly you'll want to read their scenes twice, and watching their friends trick them into admitting the obvious is pure pleasure. There's a nasty turn with Hero midway, but the comedy earns its way back.
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream EnglishYou get a play that keeps changing its mind about love, from the quarrelling lovers in the forest to Bottom blundering through his amateur performance. The language is playful and slippery, and Puck gives the whole thing a mischievous sense that human beings are never quite in control.
- As You Like It EnglishOnce everyone escapes to the Forest of Arden, the play just relaxes, and you get Rosalind in disguise coaching her own lovestruck suitor in how to woo her. She runs the whole show, wittier than anyone around her, and the melancholy Jaques grumbling nearby only sweetens it.
- The Merchant of Venice EnglishThe comedy bits are light (Portia testing suitors with riddle caskets), but Shylock's "hath not a Jew eyes" speech will sit with you for days. It's uncomfortable, deliberately or not, and that tension is exactly why it's worth arguing about afterward.
- The Taming of the Shrew EnglishThe fun is watching Kate and Petruchio trade insults at full speed, two clever people who've finally met their match. Fair warning, the "taming" itself sits uneasily now, and Kate's last speech will either charm you or make you argue with the page.
- The Comedy of Errors EnglishYou get a wonderfully fast, physical farce from the twin Antipholuses and twin Dromios, with everyone confidently mistaking the wrong man for someone they know. It’s deliberately slight and noisy, but the escalating confusion, especially around Adriana’s furious domestic arguments, makes Shakespeare feel surprisingly loose and playful.
- The Merry Wives of Windsor EnglishYou get Falstaff at his most shameless, trying to seduce two respectable wives and being cheerfully outwitted by both. The plotting is broad, quick, and pleasantly ridiculous, with disguises, pranks, and a final woodland humiliation, so you’ll enjoy it most when you want Shakespeare being openly comic rather than profound.
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona EnglishEarly, slight, and a bit lumpy (the ending will make you yelp), but Launce's monologues to his stone-faced dog Crab are some of the funniest pages Shakespeare wrote, and Julia in disguise carries real ache. Read it if you like watching genius warm up.
- Love’s Labour’s Lost EnglishYou get Shakespeare at his most verbally playful here, with four men making grand vows to avoid women and immediately tripping over their own love letters. The wit is dense and sometimes showy, but the women’s clear-eyed teasing gives the comedy real bite, and the late change in mood leaves it pleasantly unsettled.
- Measure for Measure English
A problem play: a comedy plot built on a deputy ruler's sexual blackmail.
- All’s Well That Ends Well English
A problem play: the heroine wins back, by a trick, the husband who fled her.
- Troilus and Cressida English
A problem play, filed by the First Folio between the histories and the tragedies: the Trojan War played as satire.