The Shakespeare Plays, Famous and Obscure -- Part I

A version of this post was published on my now-defunct blog "Renaissance Man" on September 1, 2009.


I've always been kind of fascinated with the relative prominence and obscurity of the plays in the Shakespeare canon. At one end, you've got your Hamlet and your Romeo and Juliet.  At the other is your Pericles and your Two Gentlemen of Verona. All Shakespeare, obviously, is not created equal.

Now, we could sit around here all day and argue about which plays are more or less "significant."  It would probably be kind of fun.  But we don't have to, because in 2009 I conducted a highly rigorous bit of original research that unambiguously resolves the issue.  I will share my findings with you here over the course of this week, instead of dealing with all the hassle of peer review. Institutions wishing to confer honorary doctorates may leave contact information in the comments.

The Indicies

In looking at the relative prominence of the plays, I looked at seven different cultural indicators. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but then that's why I came up with seven instead of just doing one.  As a whole I think they give us a pretty good feel for the weight of the plays in the popular consciousness. They are as follows:

• The number of hits yielded by a Google search of (Shakespeare "[title]")
• The number of books titles on amazon.com yielded by a (Shakespeare "[title]") search.
• The number of titles in the Multnomah County Library collection yielded by a (author:Shakespeare + title:[title]) search
• The results of a "Sporcle" Quiz on the Plays of Shakespeare
• The number of copies of each play available on the shelves of Powells on Hawthorne on a given Sunday when I was doing the research 
• The number of times each play has been produced by the Oregon Shakespearian Festival
• The number of quotations each play has yielded in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3rd Edition

The biggest practical problem was with the Henry IVs and Henry VIs in the first four indices, where they didn't separate out very well. The other practical problem was that the number-crunching was sometimes a little boring. But I persevered!

In the rest of this post, we'll cover the first three indices. We'll do the other four on Wednesday, and the summary on Friday.

The Google Search 
The number of hits yielded by a Google search of (Shakespeare "[title]") 

This search has quite a bit of fuzziness built into it, but is not bad as a brute-force method of gauging a play's relative presence in that bottomless repository of human knowledge and what-not, the internet. I was afraid that the numbers would be contaminated by lots of lists of all the plays, but a few searches along the lines of (Shakespeare Tempest Coriolanus Twelfth Night Pericles) made me pretty confident this would not be a major factor.

What DOES end up screwing up this index is that a lot of Shakespeare plays are named after real or legendary people who have quite a bit of information of their own on the internet. And all those pages on Henry VIII and Henry V and, hell, even Cymbeline tend to mention that, hey, Shakespeare wrote a play about this person! So when using this index, it is reasonable to keep an open mind about whether Henry VIII is really Shakespeare's second most beloved play.

So, according to the Google Index, the most prominent Shakespeare plays are:

1. Hamlet (9470 thousand hits)
2. Henry VIII (5960) **
3. Julius Caesar (5030) **
4. Romeo and Juliet (4850)
5. Macbeth (4380)
6. The Tempest (4050)
7. 1 Henry IV (3220) **
8. Henry V (2690) **
9. A Midsummer Night's Dream (2510)
10. Cymbeline (2440) **

Or, if we got rid of the (**) "real people" factor, the top ten would be rounded out by King Lear, Othello,Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and Taming of the Shrew.

The most obscure plays, in this index, are:

1. The Two Noble Kinsmen (136 thousand hits)
2. Timon of Athens (337)
3. The Two Gentlemen of Verona (378)
4. Troilus and Cressida (468)
5. All's Well That Ends Well (565)
6. The Merry Wives of Windsor (578)
7. Titus Andronicus (646)
8. Antony and Cleopatra (729)
9. Measure for Measure (759)
10. Pericles (929)

Note that Pericles couldn't drag himself out of the bottom ten even with the "real person" factor going for him. That's gotta hurt!

The Amazon Search 
The number of book titles on amazon.com yielded by a (Shakespeare "[title]") search.

To see what books a broad cross-section of the English-speaking world buys, you can do worse than to peruse the merchandise of the online retailer amazon.com. The important thing here was to limit the selection to books, as that filters out the various musical pieces, operas, film adaptations, etc., that would clutter things up. Or maybe I shouldn't have filtered them out; maybe they really represent true cultural impact of a play. Nobody said this kind of work was easy. Anyway, what's left over might include the various grades of critical and student editions, children's and young adult adaptations, graphic novels versions, novelizations, etc.

The Most Prominent Shakespeare Plays, according to the Amazon Index:

1. Hamlet (1294 titles)
2. Macbeth (1106)
3. Romeo and Juliet (900)
4. A Midsummer Night's Dream (832)
5. Julius Caesar (776)
6. King Lear (748)
7. The Merchant of Venice (718)
8. The Tempest (677)
9. Twelfth Night (639)
10. As You Like It (638)

...and we're already starting to see some good correlation with the real-person adjusted Google Index, above.

The Most Obscure Shakespeare Plays, according to the Amazon Index:

1. The Two Noble Kinsmen (59 Titles)
2. Henry VIII (157)
3. All's Well That Ends Well (207)
4. Love Labour's Lost (209)
5. Cymbeline (211)
6. Pericles (216)
7. Titus Andronicus (224)
8. Timon of Athens (234)
9. The Two Gentlemen of Verona (235)
10. Troilus and Cressida (252)

Ouch! Quite a tumble for Henry VIII and Cymbeline.


The Multnomah County Library Collection 
The number of titles in the Multnomah County Library collection yielded by a (author:Shakespeare + title:[title]) search

I set out to count the number of actual books in the collection that met the criteria, but that turned out to be a HUGE pain. So, I went with the number of titles. As in the Amazon index, we're looking at how many different editions and adaptations are owned by the finest public library system in the United States, leaving aside that there will be only a single copy of many editions in the collection, but perhaps as many as 15 or 20 of some others.

Whereas the two previous indexes simply didn't work for the Henry IVs and Henry VIs, the Library Index seemed to. But I'm not 100% sure. It returned numbers for them which are mighty low, and this seems right, but I don't know if they should be THIS low. Well, courage:

The Most Prominent Shakespeare Plays, according to the Library Index:

1. Macbeth (51)
2. Romeo and Juliet (45)
3. Hamlet (44)
4. A Midsummer Night's Dream (41)
5. The Tempest (32)
5. The Comedy of Errors (32)
7. Othello (27)
8. King Lear (24)
8. The Merchant of Venice (24)
8. Twelfth Night (24)

The Most Obscure Shakespeare Plays, according to the Library Index:

1. The Two Noble Kinsmen (3)
1. 2 Henry IV (3)
3. 2 Henry VI (4)
3. 3 Henry VI (4)
3. 1 Henry VI (4)
3. Richard II (4)
7. 1 Henry IV (5)
8. Henry VIII (6)
9. Cymbeline (8)
9. Two Gentlemen of Verona (8)
9. Timon of Athens (8)
9. Coriolanus (8)

The Halftime Analysis

We're definitely starting to see some patterns taking shape. Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet are dominating -- they must be really famous plays! -- and Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest aren't far behind. Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and King Lear are other heavy hitters.

At the other end of the spectrum, it's been positively brutal for The Two Noble Kinsmen, barely still in the race after anchoring the tail end of all three indicies. The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Timon of Athens were also in the bottom ten of every index, with grim signs in the air as well for Titus, Cymbeline, Pericles, All's Well That Ends Well, and most of the Henry plays. Will they make a miraculous recovery in the other four indices? Will Pericles turn out to be more prominent than Hamlet after all? Stay tuned.