Shakespeare: How Many Plays are Left? Seven Comedies, One Tragedy ​

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Since the end of 2020, Agora has held seminars on 31 of Shakespeare’s plays: all of the histories, all but one of the tragedies, just over half of the comedies.  What remain are these eight: seven comedies and a tragedy, among them some of his greatest plays.  Here are liberal learning put to the use of sonneteering for love (in Love’s Labor’s Lost), a play whose title asserts a proverbial truth (All’s Well that Ends Well), a profoundly disturbing comedy on lust, law, and justice (Measure for Measure), two resurrections by art (in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest), in Twelfth Night the confusions of love and identity caused by disaster and change of place (and the intoxication of music and speech), and finally, perhaps (with profuse apology to Falstaff) his two greatest characters, Rosalind and Hamlet (in the final two of the series, As You Like It and Hamlet). Each play in the series will take place roughly once a month apart.

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Books: Pelican, Arden – or any standard edition with line numbers -- is fine for each.

Schedule: roughly once a month in the order as follows

1. Love’s Labor’s Lost

2. All’s Well that Ends Well

3. Twelfth Night

4. Measure for Measure

5. The Winter’s Tale

6. The Tempest

7. As You Like It

8. Hamlet

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