The exact chronology of Shakespeare's plays is unknown, but that hasn't stopped plenty of scholars over the years from refining our knowledge of the publication dates. Sadly, even after centuries of effort by the most learned historians, our knowledge remains fuzzy. Each chronology is an approximation, and as such, editions of Shakespeare's works ordered by date vary. But although we'll never be sure about the exact dates, not least because many of the plays were rewritten and revised through the years, we could do much better in presenting the knowledge that we do have.
Chronologies of Shakespeare's plays tend to take one of two forms: explicit lists of when the plays were written, normally with date ranges; and implicit lists of plays, sometimes with dates in prefatory notes. When I wanted to illustrate my chronology of Shakespeare's life with a chronology of his plays, I commissioned Cody Woodard to make a graph of the plays for me, with the spans running from the terminus a quo (earliest possible date of composition) to the terminus ad quem (latest possible date). This turned out pretty well, but it's possible to go further.
Not only were the plays rewritten and revised throughout the years, but some of the plays were almost certainly collaborations, and even the plays entirely by Shakespeare took time to write. Some may have been unfinished projects from many years earlier that he then reached a breakthrough on. Nobody really knows, but there is usually a body of evidence that can pin down the dates of the plays, internal and external.
Internal evidence falls into two categories, that of internal style and internal references. Style refers to the kind of play that is being written, and its rhetoric; you can generally tell, for example, that A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet are of the same period because their language and their plots are so similar. Same with, say, the great tragedies later on, and the historical series. Internal references are notes to current events, ideas, people, and other things of the time. Some may be extremely brief and tenuous allusions, and of course it's difficult to tell whether some are later additions. But they can, nontheless, be very helpful.
External evidence is mainly what other people have written about the plays. This can range from when the play is registered for copyright to diarised performances of the plays to notes scrawled in the margins of books owned by the Elizabethan literati. Usually, the printing date of a play is used as the absolute terminus ad quem. But sometimes there is infallible earlier evidence, such as the fact that Henry VIII was said to have been played just a couple or few times previous to the performance that burned down the Globe Theatre in 1613—so it must have been finished by then, completed probably not long before. Incidentally, Henry VIII was known only as All Is True until the publication of the First Folio in 1623.
So there are shades of evidence, and the shades of evidence quite possibly reflect what is a very chronologically complicated process, that of the writing of Shakespeare's plays. Yet it's common to represent this merely by saying that, for example, play N was written between dates P and Q. My graphing idea was really no better than that, but I was thinking towards better pastures: for example, each type of evidence could be noted along the date range line. The believability and quality of the evidence could be noted by the weight of the line; and in books each piece of evidence could be footnoted, or, ideally, online each piece of evidence could be hyperlined, or set to expand when hovered over. SVG would be ideal for this sort of thing, though it'd be a fairly big task.