All 37 side by side¶

The All 37 page, at the top of every screen, puts the plays next to each other. It's the place for the questions that go across Shakespeare rather than into one play: which plays are long, which have a cast of dozens, and which are really one person's show.

All 37 plays compared Sorted by year, with a bar for each measure.

The four cards¶

Along the top are four quick facts: the longest play (Hamlet, at 4,003 lines in this edition), the shortest (The Comedy of Errors, 1,790), the play with the most speaking parts (Henry VI, Part 2, with 62) and the play where one part has the biggest share (Hamlet again, who speaks 37% of his play). Click a card to open that play.

The plays compared¶

Every play gets a row with three bars: its Length in lines, its number of Speaking parts, and the Biggest part's share, with that part's name. The bars for length and parts are in the colour of the play's genre (ochre for the comedies, blue for the histories, red for the tragedies and violet for the romances), and the share bar is always red.

Sort by puts them in order of Year (roughly when each was written, so it reads as Shakespeare's career), Length, Parts or Biggest part. Sorting by Parts puts the history plays and the Roman tragedies near the top, with their armies, messengers, senators and lords, and sorting by Biggest part shows the plays built around one person, like Hamlet, Timon of Athens, Henry V and Richard III. Click a row to open that play.

The years are the usual modern estimates and only approximate. The genres follow the four groups most editions use now, which means The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and Pericles are Romances rather than Comedies, and Troilus and Cressida stays with the Comedies, the way the MIT edition files it.

The 20 longest roles¶

Below the plays is the list of the 20 longest roles in Shakespeare, counted the same way, from Hamlet's 1,495 lines down to Falstaff's 616 in Henry IV, Part 1. Falstaff is there twice, once for each part of Henry IV. Click a role to open that play's cast.

The 20 longest roles in Shakespeare The 20 longest roles, with a bar in the colour of each play's genre.

These are lines as printed in this edition, so prose and short lines count the same as full verse lines. Counts in other books will differ a little, but because every play is counted the same way here, the order is fair.

Next step¶

Sort the plays by Biggest part, pick one you don't know from the top half and open its scene chart. That's the quickest way to find out what a play is built around.