In the following year "Hamlet" appeared.

Until the arrival of the Volkhoff troop, all his plays were acted in St.Petersburg only, by the cadets and officers of the "Nobles' Cadet Corps," where he himself had been educated.

Towards the end of Elizaveta Petrovna's reign, Sumarokoff acquired great renown, almost equaling that of Lomonosoff in his literary services, and the admirers of Russian literature of that day were divided into hostile camps, which consisted of the friends and advocates of these two writers, the Empress Elizabeth being at the head of the first, the Empress Katherine II.

(then Grand Duchess) at the head of the second.
For about ten years (1759-1768), Sumarokoff published a satirical journal, "The Industrious Bee," after which he returned to his real field and wrote a tragedy, "Vysheslaff," and the comedies, "A Dowry by Deceit," "The Usurer," "The Three Rival Brothers," "The Malignant Man," and "Narcissus." In all he wrote twenty-six plays, including the tragedies "Sinav and Truvor," "Aristona," and "Semira," before the establishment of the theater in St.Petersburg, in addition to "Khoreff" and "Hamlet," "Dmitry the Pretender," and "Mstislaff." "Semira" was regarded as his masterpiece, and among his comedies "Tressotinius" attracted the most attention.

All these, however, were merely weak imitations of the narrow form in which all French and pseudo-classical dramas were molded, the unities of time, place, and action exerting an embarrassing restriction on the action; and the heroes, although they professed to be Russians, with obscure historical names (like Sinav and Truvor), or semi-mythical (like Khoreff), or genuinely historical (like Dmitry the Pretender), were the stereotyped declaimers of the bombastic, pseudo-classical drama.
Sumarokoff's dramatic work formed but a small part of his writings, which included a great mass of odes, eclogues, elegies, ballads, and so forth; and although he ranks as a dramatist, he is most important in his series of fables, epigrams, and epitaphs, which are permeated with biting satire on his own period, though the subjects are rather monotonous--the bad arrangement of the courts of justice, which permitted bribery and other abuses among lawyers, the injurious and oppressive state monopolies, attempts at senseless imitations of foreigners in language and customs, and ignorance concealed by external polish and culture.