First Folio in the context of "Macbeth"

The Tragedy of Richard the Third, often shortened to Richard III, is a play by William Shakespeare, which depicts the Machiavellian rise to power and subsequent short reign of King Richard III of England. It was probably written c. 1592–1594. It is labelled a history in the First Folio, and is usually considered one, but it is sometimes called a tragedy, as in the quarto edition. Richard III concludes Shakespeare's first tetralogy which also contains Henry VI, Part 1, Henry VI, Part 2, and Henry VI, Part 3.

It is the second longest play in the Shakespearean canon by word count and the fourth longest by number of lines, as well as the longest of the First Folio, whose version of Hamlet, otherwise the longest, is shorter than its quarto counterpart. The play is often abridged for brevity, and peripheral characters removed. In such cases, extra lines are often invented or added from elsewhere to establish the nature of the characters' relationships. A further reason for abridgment is that Shakespeare assumed his audiences' familiarity with his Henry VI plays, frequently referring to them.

"All the world's a stage" is the phrase that begins a monologue from William Shakespeare's pastoral comedy As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques in Act II Scene VII Line 139. The speech compares the world to a stage and life to a play and catalogues the seven stages of a man's life, sometimes referred to as the seven ages of man.

As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 and first published in the First Folio in 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 (the house having been a focus for literary activity under Mary Sidney for much of the later 16th century) has been suggested as a possibility.

As You Like It follows its heroine Rosalind as she flees persecution in her uncle's court, accompanied by her cousin Celia to find safety and, eventually, love, in the Forest of Arden. In the forest, they encounter a variety of memorable characters, notably the melancholy traveller Jaques, who speaks one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches ("All the world's a stage") and provides a sharp contrast to the other characters in the play, always observing and disputing the hardships of life in the country.

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, often shortened to Othello, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare around 1603. Set in Venice and Cyprus, the play depicts the Moorish military commander Othello as he is manipulated by his ensign, Iago, into suspecting his wife Desdemona of infidelity. Othello is widely considered one of Shakespeare's greatest works and is usually classified among his major tragedies alongside Macbeth, King Lear, and Hamlet. Unpublished in the author's life, the play survives in one quarto edition from 1622 and in the First Folio.

Othello has been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, both among playgoers and literary critics, since its first performance, spawning numerous stage, screen, and operatic adaptations. Among actors, the roles of Othello, Iago, Desdemona, and Emilia (Iago's wife) are regarded as highly demanding and desirable. Critical attention has focused on the nature of the play's tragedy, its unusual mechanics, its treatment of race, and on the motivations of Iago and his relationship to Othello. Originally performed by white actors in dark makeup, the role of Othello began to be played by black actors in the 19th century.

Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, comedy, or otherwise is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language.

Many of his plays appeared in print as a series of quartos, but approximately half of them remained unpublished until 1623, when the posthumous First Folio was published. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the categories used in the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labelled some of these plays "problem plays" that elude easy categorisation, or perhaps purposely break generic conventions, and has introduced the term romances for what scholars believe to be his later comedies.

No contemporary physical description of William Shakespeare is known to exist. The two portraits of him that are the most famous (both of which may be posthumous) are the engraving that appears on the title-page of the First Folio, published in 1623, and the sculpture that adorns his memorial in Stratford upon Avon, which dates from before 1623. Experts and critics have argued that several other paintings from the period may represent him, and more than 60 portraits purporting to be of Shakespeare were offered for sale to the National Portrait Gallery within four decades of its foundation in 1856, but in none of them has Shakespeare's identity been proven.

There is no concrete evidence that Shakespeare ever commissioned a portrait. However, it is thought that portraits of him did circulate during his lifetime because of a reference to one in the anonymous play Return from Parnassus (c. 1601), in which a character says "O sweet Mr Shakespeare! I'll have his picture in my study at the court."

In the First Folio (1623), the plays of William Shakespeare were in three categories: (i) comedies, (ii) histories, and (iii) tragedies. Alongside the history plays of his Renaissance playwright contemporaries, the histories of Shakespeare define the theatrical genre of history plays. The historical plays also are biographies of the English kings of the previous four centuries, and include the plays King John, Edward III, and Henry VIII, and a continual sequence of eight plays known as the Henriad, for the protagonist Prince Hal, the future King Henry V of England.

The chronology of Shakespeare's plays indicates that the first tetralogy was written in the early 1590s, and discusses the politics of the Wars of the Roses; the four plays are Henry VI, parts I, II, and III, and The Tragedy of Richard the Third. The second tetralogy was completed in 1599, and comprises the history plays Richard II, Henry IV, parts I and II, and Henry V.

Shakespearean tragedy is the designation given to most tragedies written by William Shakespeare. Many of his history plays share the qualifiers of a Shakespearean tragedy, but because they are based on real figures throughout the history of England, they were classified as "histories" in the First Folio. The Roman tragedies—Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus—are also based on historical figures, but because their sources were foreign and ancient, they are almost always classified as tragedies rather than histories. Shakespeare's romances (tragicomic plays) were written late in his career and published originally as either tragedy or comedy. They share some elements of tragedy, insofar as they feature a high-status central character, but they end happily like Shakespearean comedies. Almost three centuries after Shakespeare's death, English scholar Frederick S. Boas also coined a fifth category, the "problem play," for plays that do not fit neatly into a single classification because of their subject matter, setting, or ending. Scholars continue to disagree on how to categorize some Shakespearean plays.