Tropes

I could spend (and have spent) hours and hours on TV Tropes reading about all the different plot and character devices that my favorite television shows use. So I thought, Why not Shakespeare? I looked around, and there are several pages about Shakespeare that are worth looking at. Each play has its own tropes page, and several adaptations do as well. Old Shakey has his own place of honor in trope history: The Zeroth Law of Trope Examples. If you follow through to different trope links, you can find other works that use the same devices as Shakespeare, which would be a good way to start a critical comparison.