The First Folio, collected by John Heminges and Henry Condell in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, preserved thirty-six plays, eighteen of which had not previously been published. Shakespeare wrote approximately thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets between roughly 1589 and 1613, working as a shareholder in the Globe Theatre and as a principal playwright for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men. The plays cover tragic, comic, and historical material; the histories alone constitute a two-tetralogy account of English royal history from Richard II through Henry V and from Henry VI through Richard III. The sonnets remain among the most closely studied poems in English.
The range of Shakespeare's work makes any single thematic characterization inadequate. The problem plays, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, resist comic and tragic classification alike. The romances of the final period, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, combine tragic material with resolutions that conventional tragedy would not allow, and have generated substantial critical debate about what they mean and whether the reconciliations they stage are earned. The sonnets, addressed partly to a young man and partly to a dark-complexioned woman, are simultaneously among the most formally accomplished and the most psychologically difficult poems in the language, capable of saying opposite things in consecutive lines and requiring multiple rereadings to stabilize meaning.
Shakespeare's language has become an obstacle for readers who encounter him without theatrical context; the plays were written to be spoken and performed, not read silently in editions with footnotes. Seeing a good production before or after reading the text often transforms the experience. The most practical argument for engaging with the complete works is the same argument for any large body of work by a single author: patterns and preoccupations become visible across texts that are invisible within any single one, and the development from the early comedies through the tragedies to the romances is a development in understanding what the forms can do that is worth following chronologically.
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were composed and transmitted entirely orally for centuries before being written down.
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