The witty comedy Much Ado About Nothing is marred, in the opinion of some critics, by an insensitive treatment of its female characters. However, Shakespeare's most mature comedies, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, are characterised by lyricism, ambiguity, and the attraction of beautiful, charming, and strong-minded heroines like Beatrice. Shakespeare constructed a complex pattern between different characters and between appearance and reality. Another comedy of the second period is The Merry Wives of Windsor ; this play is a farce about middle-class life in which Falstaff reappears as the comic victim. Romeo and Juliet, famous for its poetic treatment of the ecstasy of youthful love, dramatises the fate of two lovers victimised by the feuds and misunderstandings of their elders and by their own hasty temperaments. On the other hand, Julius Caesar is a serious tragedy of political rivalries, less intense in style than the tragic dramas that followed.
Shakespeare's third period includes his greatest tragedies and his so-called dark or bitter comedies. Hamlet, his most famous play, goes far beyond other tragedies of revenge in picturing the mingled sordidness and glory of the human condition. Hamlet feels that he is living in a world of horror; confirmed in this feeling by the murder of his father and the sensuality of his mother, he presents a pattern of crippling indecision and precipitous action. Othello portrays the growth of unjustified jealousy in the protagonist, Othello, a Moor serving as a general in the Venetian army. The innocent object of his jealousy is his wife, Desdemona. In this tragedy, Othello's evil lieutenant Iago draws him into mistaken jealousy in order to ruin him. King Lear - Lear's daughter Cordelia displays a redeeming love that makes the tragic conclusion a vindication of goodness, though a bleak resolution because Cordelia dies. Antony and Cleopatra is concerned with a different type of love, namely the middle-aged passion of the Roman general Mark Antony for the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. In Macbeth, Shakespeare depicts the tragedy of a great and basically good man who, led on by others and because of a defect in his own nature, succumbs to ambition. In getting and retaining the Scottish throne, Macbeth dulls his humanity to the point where he becomes capable of any amoral act. Three other plays of this period suggest bitterness lacking in these tragedies because the protagonists do not seem to possess greatness or tragic stature. In Troilus and Cressida, the most intellectually contrived of Shakespeare's plays, the gulf between the ideal and the real.