There’s something quietly remarkable about a short rhyme that can unlock the door to an entire literary canon. Most people, when confronted with the question of how many Shakespeare plays exist and what they’re all called, simply shrug. It’s an intimidating list. Yet generations of students, actors, and literary enthusiasts have relied on a remarkably compact tool: a handful of rhyming lines that categorize the works into groups small enough for the brain to grip.
The trick isn’t magic. It’s memory science dressed in verse. The rhyme works by leaning on one of the oldest and most reliable features of human cognition, a tendency that long predates the printing press, the classroom, or the English language itself. Understanding why it works reveals something genuinely interesting about how the brain learns and holds onto information.
The Scale of the Problem: Thirty-Seven Plays Is a Lot to Remember
There are 37 plays in the Complete Works of Shakespeare. That’s a substantial body of work to carry in one’s head, especially when the titles range from the familiar (Hamlet, Macbeth) to the genuinely obscure (Timon of Athens, Pericles). For students preparing for literature exams, actors auditioning with Shakespearean material, or simply curious readers wanting a working map of the canon, knowing the full list is more than a parlor trick. It’s foundational.
Shakespeare’s plays can be grouped based on different criteria, such as order of publication or content, including comedy, tragedy, and history. That three-part structure is the real foundation of every memory aid built around the plays. Without some organizing framework, 37 titles is just noise. With it, the problem becomes manageable.
The First Folio Set the Categories That Made It Possible
Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare’s death. It’s worth pausing on that: the three-genre framework everyone uses today didn’t come from Shakespeare himself, but from his colleagues. Heminge and Condell grouped Shakespeare’s plays in the First Folio into three categories for the first time: the comedies, the histories, and the tragedies.
About half of Shakespeare’s plays had never previously appeared in print, including As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Tempest, and many more. Without the First Folio, 18 plays might have been lost forever. The very survival of the canon is tied to this act of organization. Those three categories have shaped how Shakespeare is taught, studied, and memorized ever since.
How the Histories Work as a Built-In Mnemonic
The 10 histories are the easiest to list: 7 Henrys, 2 Richards and a John. That’s genuinely elegant. Most people, once they hear it that way, can reconstruct the history plays from almost nothing. The naming convention does most of the work, since the history plays were named according to the kings who reigned during the events in the plays and put in the order of the kings’ reigns.
Once you know the arithmetic, the histories become a sequence rather than a list. Seven Henrys, distributed across parts and acts, with two Richards and a solitary King John rounding things out. The Henry plays are Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3, and Henry VIII. Counting becomes remembering.
The Comedies and Tragedies: Where a Rhyme Really Earns Its Keep
The 16 Shakespearean comedies are The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Sixteen titles. Reciting them cold is nearly impossible for anyone without a strong prior foundation.
That’s where rhyme-based mnemonic storytelling steps in. The approach involves creating mnemonic narratives to remember the titles of Shakespeare’s plays based on the order of publication. By weaving titles into a continuous, sometimes absurd story where one title triggers the next, a learner converts an unstructured list into a narrative chain that the brain can actually follow. Learning through storytelling and associations can be a powerful tool for memory retention.
Why the Brain Responds So Well to Rhyme
Rhymes aid in memory retention by utilizing acoustic encoding, which allows our brains to process and remember information through auditory patterns. Mnemonic devices like rhyming make information more memorable by creating patterns that are easier for the brain to recall. This is not a metaphor. It’s a measurable neurological phenomenon. By rhyming information, our brains can encode it more easily. This is known as “acoustic encoding” and refers to the ability to remember and understand something learned through hearing.
Rhyme and rhythm impose pattern. For that reason, rhyme and rhythm are particularly valuable when information is not inherently meaningful. A list of play titles has no internal logic that helps you predict the next item. A rhyme adds that predictive structure artificially. When we can anticipate the next part of a sequence or pattern, we encode that information better, probably because our attention has been focused on structurally important points.
The Science of Pattern, Prediction, and Long-Term Recall
In his 1995 book “Memory in Oral Traditions,” cognitive scientist David Rubin revealed that when a ballad used two words that rhymed, college students could remember them far better than they could non-rhyming words. This effect isn’t limited to poetry or music. It generalizes to any information that’s been restructured with sound-based cues. Research from 2019 shows that learning is more efficient when people use mnemonic devices.
Music’s repetitive patterns activate the hippocampus, key for storing new memories. The rhythmic memory boosting also engages the motor cortex, strengthening the connection between information and physical actions. The implication for learning Shakespeare is straightforward: a rhyme doesn’t just help you remember the titles in the short term. It builds the kind of deep encoding that sticks around for years.
A Long History: Oral Traditions and the Roots of Rhyme as Memory
Oral traditions must have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the casual transmission of verbal material. Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. They employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme.
Preliterate societies have relied on verbal memory and recall to transmit culture for thousands of years. While the memory abilities of members of these societies may not live up to the myth, the skill nonetheless finds continuous, obligatory exercise as there is no external storage. Rhyme-based memory isn’t a classroom invention. It’s a technology that human cultures developed long before writing existed, and it works for essentially the same reasons today as it did then.
What Makes This Specific Approach to Shakespeare’s Plays Endure
This categorisation of Shakespeare plays still underpins the practice of Shakespeare criticism, education, and performance today. The three-genre structure is stable, which means the mnemonic built on top of it stays useful across curricula, exam boards, and national traditions. Students in the UK sitting GCSEs, undergraduates writing essays in the US, and actors preparing audition pieces in Australia all work from the same essential map.
Teachers want to prepare pupils for literature exams where the questions are unseen before the assessment. Students need to know many quotations and titles off by heart in order to succeed. Mnemonics are a great way of remembering trigger words for quotations. The rhyme doesn’t replace deep reading. It creates a scaffold, a reliable starting point that makes everything else easier to build on.
Personalizing the Rhyme: Why Adaptation Makes It Stronger
Mnemonic devices can be personalized and tailored to individual learning needs. This is one of the underrated qualities of rhyme-based memory tools. Unlike a fixed acronym, a narrative rhyme can be stretched, edited, or illustrated in ways that make it more vivid for a particular learner. Anyone can create mnemonics: simply write down the fact you’re looking to memorize and think about which kind of mnemonic device it can fit into.
The effectiveness of rhymes and other mnemonic devices in memory retention can improve with practice, as the brain becomes more adept at creating and recalling these auditory patterns. The more a learner revisits their own version of the rhyme, the more deeply it gets encoded. Over time, what once required conscious effort becomes reflexive, the titles arriving almost unbidden, the way a childhood nursery rhyme surfaces decades later without warning.
The Broader Lesson About Memory and Literature Education
What the Shakespeare rhyme illustrates is something that applies well beyond the canon. A mnemonic is a tool that helps us remember certain facts or large amounts of information. They can come in the form of a song, rhyme, acronym, image, phrase, or sentence. Mnemonics help us remember facts and are particularly useful when the order of things is important. Literature education, which so often asks students to hold large bodies of knowledge in mind simultaneously, benefits enormously from these tools.
Memorizing this list can be an excellent starting point for learning more about Shakespeare and his plays. That’s the real point. The rhyme isn’t the destination. It’s the front door. Once you can reliably name all 37 plays, you have a framework onto which everything else attaches: themes, dates, characters, language, history. The simple rhyme doesn’t simplify Shakespeare. It makes him approachable.
