Shakespeare lovers, please help!?

Question

How many plays/ sonnetts did Shakespeare write and were they all connected somehow to love? THANK YOU

Answer 1

Oh, what a question.

The first folio of Shakespeare's plays contained 36 plays.  Most scholars think we have 38 of them, adding "Two Noble Kinsmen" and "Pericles" to the ones in the first folio.  We are fairly sure that Shakespeare did not write every word of every play attributed to him--most notably, the final act of MacBeth doesn't seem like his style.

There are 154 published sonnets.

Are they connected somehow to love?  I think MacBeth is about madness, greed, vengeance and gullibility.  Hamlet is a classic Elizabethan revenger's tragedy, not much love there.  There's some love in Tempest, but it's secondary to the main theme of resiliency and transcendance.  Romeo and Juliet, which may parrot as 'the greatest love story ever told', has nothing of true love in it for me--Romeo starts out the play impassioned with his only possible love, Rosalind!  Who he forgets when he sees the pretty face of Juliet, all of 13 or so and not yet really mature enough to give true love.  No, I say R&J is about power and the insane drive to prestige and power that defeats itself.

So no, not all of Shakespeare's stuff is focused on love.