What category of Shakespearean plays included subjects like the King of England (from 1483-1485)?
Shakespearean history In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. The histories—along with those of contemporary Renaissance playwrights—help define the genre of history plays. The histories might be more accurately called the "English history plays" and include the outliers "King John" and "Henry VIII" as well as a continuous sequence of eight plays covering the Wars of the Roses. These last are considered to have been composed in two cycles. The so-called first tetralogy, apparently written in the early 1590s, deals with the later part of the struggle and includes "Henry VI, parts one", "two" & "three" and "Richard III". The second tetralogy, finished in 1599 and including "Richard II", "Henry IV, Part 1", "Henry IV, Part 2" and "Henry V", is frequently called the "Henriad" after its protagonist Prince Hal, the future Henry V.
Thomas J. King Jr. Professor Thomas J. King Jr. (July 25, 1925 – 1994) was an educator, and an early user of word processing and sequence analysis to compare available early versions of William Shakespeare's plays for identification of variant texts and their analysis. Dr. King's historical work also researched original prompt copies of Elizabethan Era and Jacobean Era plays contemporary to Shakespeare, along with their marginalia, in order to identify stage directions and infer physical staging of Shakespeare's plays at the Globe and other London venues, as well as at provincial halls and inns where Elizabethan troupes performed on tour. In his extensive studies, Prof. King created databases of every Shakespeare play and other extant Elizabethan contemporary playhouse documents, by scene and character, to determine number of lines, and therefore the roles that could be doubled with sufficient time between for costume change, thus enabling him to determine the size of a working Elizabethan theater company.