What Are Shakespeares Tragedies?
The most famous of all plays, some experts suggest, are William Shakespeare’s tragedies. These plays were written throughout his entire career, beginning with one two of his earliest plays, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet. Between 1600-1607, a period that coincided with the end of the glittering Elizabethan age and the rise of the Stuart Monarchy, Shakespeare wrote seven more tragic works: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, and Troilus and Cressida.
The most famous of all plays, some experts suggest, are William Shakespeare’s tragedies. These plays were written throughout his entire career, beginning with one two of his earliest plays, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet. Between 1600-1607, a period that coincided with the end of the glittering Elizabethan age and the rise of the Stuart Monarchy, Shakespeare wrote seven more tragic works: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, and Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare’s tragedies can be divided into two distinct groups. The love, or “heart,” tragedies of Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra and Othello, involve a pair of lovers torn apart by fate and society. In these three plays, the main characters are not masters of their own destiny, but pawns pulled along toward death or permanent separation by forces beyond control. Othello and Troilus and Cressida are considered by some experts to be borderline heart/head tragedies, as they combine eleme
