Shakespeare Genres
Shakespeare’s 37 plays split across 5 genre categories. The tragedys contain the most dialogue — 31,473 lines, roughly 29% of the corpus. Each genre below links to its full archive, ranked by line count.
The 5 Genres, Compared
| Genre | Plays | Total lines | Avg / play | Longest | Shortest | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tragedies | 10 | 31,473 | 3,147 | Hamlet (4,023) | Macbeth (2,385) | 29.1% |
| Histories | 10 | 30,719 | 3,072 | Richard III (3,702) | King John (2,648) | 28.4% |
| Comedies | 10 | 24,876 | 2,488 | Love's Labours Lost (2,862) | The Comedy of Errors (1,962) | 23% |
| Romances | 4 | 11,811 | 2,953 | Cymbeline (3,755) | The Tempest (2,278) | 10.9% |
| Problem Plays | 3 | 9,214 | 3,071 | Troilus and Cressida (3,456) | Measure for Measure (2,833) | 8.5% |
Genre at a Glance
The most dialogue-heavy genre
The tragedys account for 31,473 lines across 10 plays — the biggest single block of dialogue in the canon. The longest individual play in this group, Hamlet, runs 4,023 lines by itself.
The longest and shortest plays overall
Across all genres, Hamlet (4,023 lines) is the longest and The Comedy of Errors (1,962 lines) is the shortest. Genre and length are only loosely correlated — a Romance can be short, a History can run long.
Why two genres are modern additions
The Romance and Problem Play labels were not in the 1623 First Folio — both came from twentieth-century criticism. Romance groups the late pastoral plays (The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Cymbeline). Problem Play captures works whose tone resists the Comedy/Tragedy split (Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well). Where sources disagree on a play’s category, we follow Open Source Shakespeare.