Fun Facts

Did You Know…?

Elizabethan theaters would raise a flag outside to indicate what the day's feature would be: black for tragedy, red for history, white for comedy. This is how managers evaded the law prohibiting theaters from advertising.

Scholars believe Shakespeare performed the following roles in his own plays: King Duncan in Macbeth, Adam in As You Like It, King Henry in Henry IV, and the Ghost in Hamlet.

The “Shakespeare Apocrypha” is a term referring to 12 additional plays that some scholars believe Shakespeare also wrote. Little evidence supports this claim, but the 12 plays of the Apocrypha include: Locrine; The London Prodigal; The Puritan; Thomas, Lord Cromwell; Sir John Oldcastle; Arden of Feversham; A Yorkshire Tragedy; The Birth of Merlin; Edward III; Fair Em; Mucedorus; and The Merry Devil of Edmonton.

The Plays by the Numbers

Shortest play: The Comedy of Errors (1,787 lines)
Longest play: Hamlet (4,042 lines)
Characters with most lines: Hamlet (1,569), Richard III (1,161) and Iago from Othello (1,117)
Plays with most rhyming lines: Love's Labour's Lost (62.2%) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (43.4%)*
Total words in Shakespeare's works: 884,647
Total lines in Shakespeare's works: 118,406
Total speeches in Shakespeare's works: 31,959
Shakespeare's estimated vocabulary: between 15,000 and 29,000 words (at least double or triple the vocabulary of other great English writers!)

*As estimated by Shakespearean scholar Tucker Brooke