Shakespeare’s early writing style indicates “a time of apprenticeship”, showing “direct debt to London dramatists of the 1580s and to Classical examples than do his later works,” as well as evidence that he imitated the success of London theatre in learning the craft. In his earlier works, Shakespeare often wrote in the genre of the romantic comedy, drawing on the comic works of dramatists Robert Greene and John Lyly, while developing something new and distinctively Shakespearean. These works most often were “stories of amorous courtship in which a plucky and admirable young woman is paired off against her male wooer.” These works often found a woman disguised as a man as a frequent trope, including The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. In binary terms, Shakespeare’s comedies are often seen as of the women, while his tragedies focus on men; the women of Shakespeare’s comedies are often witty, intelligent, assured agents who can talk, plot, and reason circles around the characters who are men. Shakespeare’s comedies also tend to feature multiple plotting, in which dominant and sub-plot emerge, an expert weaving of narrative around thematic centers. 

In his career, Shakespeare also developed the genre of the history play; whereas classical traditions showed precedents for the genres of comedy and tragedy, Shakespeare’s work with the English history play, “an existential invention [in] the dramatic treatment of recent English history,” developed this genre anew, with the editors of the First Folio distinguishing these plays a separate title of “history”. (Evidence shows that Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, including Henry VI’s three parts and Richard II, was hugely popular among audiences.) Critics understand Shakespeare’s history plays as attempting to define the country’s history “at a time when the English nation was struggling with its own sense of national identity.” Thus, Shakespeare’s plays—using the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587) as a source—adapt history to identify villains and heroes, freely changing dates and events in their dramatization of emergent nationhood. Shakespeare’s early histories notably, “end on a major key; the accession to power of the Tudor dynasty that will give England its great years under Elizabeth.”

Towards the end of this early period of Shakespeare’s career, there are three plays identified by critics as “problem plays” or “problem comedies”: All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. These plays evade categorization in their complex treatment of an ethical and social problem, involving the topics of “revenge, sexual jealousy, aging, midlife crisis, and death.” 

Toward the middle years of his career, Shakespeare moved to writing tragic plays, such as Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, which explore revenge, sexual jealousy, aging, ambition, and midlife crisis respectively. Notable for the range of human emotion and psychology that they explore, Shakespeare’s tragedies are also deeply concerned with domestic and family relationships, a departure from classical tragedies which show tragic protagonists from upper-class or ruling origins in their hubris as powerful figures. (There are a number of plays which also specifically deal with daughters and fathers: Othello, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest.) 

The romances or late romances of Shakespeare’s career—referring to Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Cymbeline; The Winter’s Tale; and The Tempest—tell of “wandering and separation leading eventually to tearful and joyous reunion.” These plays often feature the supernatural, pastoral or exotic settings, resurrection, forgiveness and a sense of loss. The Tempest, specifically, is sometimes interpreted as Shakespeare’s farewell to theatre, in the figure of Prospero, a magical manipulator and organizer of action that is compared to the role of playwright. In Shakespeare’s later years, he collaborated with playwrights on several plays: with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen, with Fletcher on Henry VIII, and possibly on the anonymously published play, Edward III.