| has gloss | eng: In Shakespeare studies, the term problem plays normally refers to three plays that William Shakespeare wrote between the late 1590s and the first years of the seventeenth century: Alls Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, although some critics would extend the term to other plays, most commonly The Winters Tale, Timon of Athens, and The Merchant of Venice. The term was coined by critic F. S. Boas in Shakespeare and his Predecessors (1896), who lists the first three plays and adds that "Hamlet, with its tragic close, is the connecting-link between the problem-plays and the tragedies in the stricter sense." The term can refer to the subject matter of the play, or to a classification "problem" with the plays themselves. |