Shakespeare's problem plays

In Shakespeare studies, the problem plays are three plays that William Shakespeare wrote between the late 1590s and the first years of the seventeenth century: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare's problem-plays are characterised by their complex and ambiguous tone, which shifts violently between dark, psychological drama and more straightforward comic material; compare tragicomedy.

The term was coined by critic F. S. Boas in Shakespeare and his Predecessors (1896), derived from a type of drama that was popular at the time of Boas' writing. It was most associated with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. In these problem plays, the situation faced by the protagonist is put forward by the author as a representative instance of a contemporary social problem. The term can refer to the subject matter of the play, or to a classification "problem" with the plays themselves.

Some critics include other plays, most commonly The Winter's Tale, Timon of Athens, and The Merchant of Venice. The term has been variously applied to other odd plays from different points in Shakespeare's career, as the notion of a problem-play has always been somewhat vaguely defined and is not accepted by all critics.

Boas himself lists the first three plays and adds that Hamlet links Shakespeare's problem-plays to his unambiguous tragedies. For Boas, this modern form of drama provided a useful model with which to study works by Shakespeare that had previously seemed uneasily situated between the comic and the tragic; nominally two of the three plays identified by Boas are comedies, while the third, Troilus and Cressida, is found amongst the tragedies in the First Folio, although it is not listed in the Catalogue (table of contents) of the First Folio. According to Boas, Shakespeare's problem-plays set out to explore specific moral dilemmas and social problems through their central characters.

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