Among Shakespeare's comedies, Much Ado About Nothing is relatively straightforward narratively, with the action focusing on two couples, the young lovers Claudio and Hero and the combative couple Beatrice and Benedick. The straightforward narrative, however, allows Shakespeare to play up the witty dialogue between Beatrice and Benedick. The play is famous for some of Shakespeare's cleverest writing and funniest scenes.

Christopher Marlowe was an early contemporary of William Shakespeare, and was arguably more popular in his time than Shakespeare. Marlowe's death in 1593 under mysterious circumstances was seen to have cut short a promising literary career. His work continues on, as in his telling of the Faust myth, Doctor Faustus, from 1589.

Titus Andronicus was William Shakespeare's first tragedy, performed originally in the early 1590s, when Shakespeare only had success as a comedy writer. Titus Andronicus is by far the goriest and most violent of Shakespeare's plays, in which he emulated contemporary "revenge plays." The play finishes with the titular Roman general feeding a pie to a Gothic queen that contains the meat of her two dead sons.