Shakespeare was very casual about the publication of his works, apparently having little interest in saving his writings. The 1623 Folio contains most of Shakespeare's plays, but they were not published in chronological order and do not include the dates of their original composition. Instead, the best scholars can do is examine the quarto editions, published during Shakespeare's life, or references from contemporary letters or diaries and try to determine from those dates the possible timeframe for a play's first performance.
After careful research, scholars have assigned probable dates of composition to Shakespeare's work, and those dates, used by the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare and adopted by other editors, including the editors of the Norton Shakespeare, will be used in the following discussion of the texts' probable dates of composition. In general, the plays before 1600 were histories and romantic comedies. After 1600, tragedies became the focus of Shakespeare's work, while the problem comedies, such as The Tempest, were darker in content, exploring serious social and moral problems.
