actor-playwright learned from Kyd how to construct a play, how to vary it, how to
build intensity.The order of the plays
Shakespeare wrote on average two plays a year between c.1588–90 and 1611, except
in 1592–4 when bubonic plague shut the theatres. Contemporaries saw or read
Shakespeare play by play, as we do in the theatre or at school. But the Folio gave
Shakespeare as a whole to readers, something not available in his lifetime. Scholars
have since established an approximate chronology of composition, enabling
consider ation of the pattern of his writing career. Before approaching representa-
tive plays the order of his writing is worth a look, both chronologically and in terms
ofgenre.
He beg an with comedies of love, and chronicle-plays. The first decade produced
ten love comedies, nine plays called after Kings of England, and two less English
tragedies. The second decade shows more critical comedies, with tragedies and
Roman plays, followed by four romances, ending with The Te mpest. Ten years after
Elizabeth’s death he worked with Fletcher on Henry VIII and on Two Noble
Kinsmen.116 4 · SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA
The title-page of the sixth
printing of Marlowe’s play,
showing Faustus conjuring
spirits: a devil rises from the
trapdoor.