Shakespeare chronology

A new chronology for
Shakespeare’s plays............................................................................................................................................................
Douglas Bruster and Genevie`ve Smith
University of Texas at Austin
.......................................................................................................................................
Abstract
It is widely recognized that Shakespeare’s verse lines grew progressively longer as
his career unfolded. Scholars have traditionally used this fact, among others, to
date the plays. Drawing on the existing and original data relating to their verbal
arrangements, this essay constructs a new chronology for 42 dramatic texts, and
parts of texts, by Shakespeare. This chronology is based on a constrained corres-
pondence analysis of the plays’ internal pauses, qualified in relation to a principal
component analysis of other verbal features and the recorded closings of the
London playhouses owing to plague. The result is a more specific ordering of
the Shakespeare canon than has previously been available.
.................................................................................................................................................................................
1 Introduction
It is a commonplace that Shakespeare’s lines became
longer throughout his career. Nearly as familiar to
scholars is how this aspect of his verse, particularly
his lines’ internal pauses as marked by punctuation,
sheds light on his works’ chronology. Together with
external evidence (such as publication, or records
attesting to performance or the availability of a
manuscript for printing), changes to Shakespeare’s
habits in versification have helped establish our
timeline of his works. Major chronologies of the
plays and poems, including those of E.K.
Chambers (1930), G. Blakemore Evans (Evans,
1974, rev. 1996), and Gary Taylor (1987), have
drawn on what we know about the patterns of
Shakespeare’s prosody to order his works. These
three chronologies agree on the general shape of
his literary output, placing Julius Caesar and
Henry V at the midpoint of 38 plays so evaluated.
They disagree, however, as to which year or years
various works were written, as well as which came
before or after others in the canon.
The present study offers a new chronology for
Shakespeare’s plays based on an analysis of the
most extensive data available concerning the
structure of Shakespeare’s verse lines: the pause
counts collected by Ants Oras (1960). We revise
some of Oras’s numbers in light of new findings
concerning attribution, narrowing Shakespeare’s
portion of particular plays (Titus Andronicus, 1
Henry VI, Timon of Athens) and adding to our
data set parts of four other texts (Arden of
Faversham, Edward III, Sir Thomas More, and the
Additional Passages to the 1602 Spanish Tragedy).
This enhanced data set is then subjected to a con-
strained correspondence analysis (CCA), with vari-
ous methodological modifications. The latter
includes setting a range for Shakespeare’s literary
output and fixing selected ‘anchor’ texts for the de-
termination of dates for the remaining plays. These
dates are then compared with the predictions from a
principal component analysis (PCA) of new data
concerning various linguistic features in
Shakespeare’s verse (Tarlinskaja, 2014). We
employ a bootstrapping procedure to establish a
likely range for the composition of each work.
Finally, in light of a theory advanced by J. Leeds
Barroll (1991), we construct our timeline of
Shakespeare’s plays by coordinating the CCA’s
date predictions with periods when the playhouses
of Shakespeare’s time were open for business.
Correspondence:
Douglas Bruster
Department of English
208 W. 21st St Stop B5000
Austin TX 78712-1040
USA.
E-mail:
bruster@austin.utexas.edu
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doi:10.1093/llc/fqu068
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Advance Access published December 8, 2014

2 Chronology: Background
Oras’s aim was to demonstrate historical and au-
thorial patterns in iambic pentameter by tabulating
where punctuated pauses fall within its first nine
syllables (punctuation after the 10th syllable is not
counted). Pauses can be counted in three different
ways in Oras’s tabulation; he labels these A, B, and C
pauses. A pauses are those signaled by punctuation
of any kind within a pentameter line (Oras counts
short lines, but not their terminal punctuation). B
pauses, a subgroup of the A pause, are so-called
‘strong’ pauses within the line: those signaled by
any punctuation mark other than a comma, includ-
ing periods, question marks, colons, semi-colons,
and dashes. C pauses are composed of punctuation
marks dividing ‘split-’ or ‘shared’ lines. Oras
counted A, B, and C pauses for 38 Shakespeare
plays, adding the A and B pauses as well for Venus
and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets.
Oras presented his counts both in tables and in
line graphs that display the percentages of pauses in
the first nine syllabic positions of Shakespeare’s pen-
tameter line. Because Shakespeare’s verse is iambic,
typically with an unstressed syllable followed by a
stressed one, pauses tend to come after the even
syllables, making these graphs a virtual study in
peaks and valleys. The changes across plays that
they reveal have a clear significance for the study
of chronology. For example, the changing pause
patterns—the averages for each of the nine pause
positions—in groups of plays traditionally identi-
fied with successive phases of Shakespeare’s career
are strikingly different (Fig. 1). In works identified
with the beginning of his activities as playwright in
the early and mid-1590s, pauses cluster heavily after
the fourth syllable (Fig. 1, left panel). As his career
progresses, however, the distribution balances
between the fourth and the sixth positions (Fig. 1,
center panel). Toward the end of his time as a
dramatist, the most significant proportion of
pauses shifts toward to the sixth position, with a
greater number in the second half of the line than
the first (Fig. 1, right panel).
The relevance of such data for chronologies of
Shakespeare’s work has long been recognized
(Bathurst, 1857). Because it is so comprehensive,
Oras’s research was used for what we will call the
Fig. 1 Pauses in Shakespeare’s plays from three periods: early, middle, and late. Average percentage of pauses at each
position is indicated by the black line; gray shading indicates 95% confidence intervals. Left panel: Titus, Shrew, 1 Henry
VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and Two Gentlemen; Center panel: Much Ado, As You Like It, Julius Caesar,
Hamlet, Henry V, and Twelfth Night; Right panel: Coriolanus, Tempest, Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Henry VIII, and Two
Noble Kinsmen
D. Bruster and G. Smith
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‘Oxford chronology’ (Taylor in Wells and Taylor
1987, pp. 69–144), which reproduces Oras’s A, B,
and C pauses in separate columns opposite an
ordered list of plays. In its discussion of various
plays, the Oxford chronology refers to Oras’s data
for confirmation of an estimated date or range. Yet,
there is some divergence between the order implied
by Oras’s counts and the order of the Oxford chron-
ology. That is, 9 of the 38 plays ordered in the
Oxford chronology share an exact position with
the sequence that Oras’s A pauses suggest: Shrew,
3 Henry VI, Richard III, King John, Julius Caesar,
Timon, Lear, Macbeth, and Kinsmen. Fifteen fall
within two slots of each other in the Oras A order
and Oxford chronology: 1 Henry VI, Errors, Love’s
Labor’s Lost, Richard II, Romeo, Dream, Merry
Wives, 2 Henry IV, Much Ado, As You Like It,
Measure, Othello, Pericles, Winter’s Tale, and
Cymbeline.
Yet, almost as many plays, 14, are separated by
three or more places in the two lists: Two Gentlemen
of Verona, 2 Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, Merchant, 1
Henry IV, Henry V, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Troilus,
All’s Well, Antony, Coriolanus, Tempest, and Henry
VIII. Of course, no test of any single linguistic fea-
ture—whether run on lines, feminine endings, or
colloquialism in verse—should be expected to
produce comprehensively satisfying results. This is
particularly the case because so many factors, extrin-
sic and intrinsic alike, can affect the makeup of a
literary text. At the same time, however, it seems
significant that the Oxford chronology and the
Oras data disagree to this extent. Some of the
plays are quite divergent in their places: Oras’s
counts for ‘first half’ pauses, for instance, would
have us put Troilus seven places earlier than
Oxford locates it, and Merchant seven places later;
Titus and Antony are, by this measure, six places
later in Oras, and both Two Gentlemen and
Coriolanus four places later than in the Oxford
chronology. Added to this puzzle is the extremely
unlikely positioning, in the Oras data, of 2 Henry IV
before 1 Henry IV, and of The Tempest before
Pericles—chronological placements with which few
if any scholars would be likely to agree.
The Oxford chronology’s use of the Oras data
formed the basis of the most sustained examination
to date of the relation between syntax and temporal
ordering in Shakespeare: MacDonald P. Jackson’s
‘Pause Patterns in Shakespeare’s Verse: Canon and
Chronology’ (Jackson, 2002). There Jackson de-
scribes Oras’s methodology and findings before sub-
mitting his A-pause counts to statistical analysis.
Jackson compared A pauses among all plays, produ-
cing 1640 Pearson product moment correlation co-
efficients to indicate how close each text is, in terms
of its pause patterning, to all the others. Listing each
play separately, Jackson provides its five closest cor-
relations in descending order, and notes that the
results tend to confirm the accuracy of the Oxford
chronology and support our traditional understand-
ing of Shakespeare’s development.
Because his methodology emphasizes relation
and proximity among plays, Jackson does not seek
to establish new dates for them. Yet he acknow-
ledges that his analysis produced correlations that
diverge significantly from what the Oxford chron-
ology would predict. Six plays come in for particular
mention: The Merchant of Venice (which his results
would place later than Oxford); Merry Wives (later
than Oxford); 2 Henry IV (varied, but on the whole
earlier than Oxford); Troilus (earlier than Oxford);
Othello (earlier than Oxford); and All’s Well (later
than Oxford). These differences seem important,
not least because such divergence also characterizes
Oras’s relation to the 1930 chronology of Chambers,
the most authoritative chronology of the time. That
is, Oras employed Chambers’s chronology but did
not revise it, even though his own graphs and num-
bers challenged its order in numerous instances. The
reluctance is understandable, for chronologies by
definition have many working parts. Like received
narratives generally, chronologies can be ‘sticky’
phenomena: something fixed through custom, and
hard to dislodge (Kuhn, 1962).
3 Correspondence Analysis and
PCA
To address the differing number of pauses in vari-
ous texts, Oras quite understandably made them
equal by converting pauses to percentages. But the
plays (and parts of plays) vary greatly in the amount
A new chronology for Shakespeare’s plays
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2014 3 of 20

of data they offer. Thus, treating the shortest
Shakespeare text in our sample (in this case, his
contributions to the lightly punctuated Sir Thomas
More, with a scant 32 pauses) as statistically equiva-
lent to his most pause-heavy text (Cymbeline, with
2,735 pauses) emphasizes the former at the expense
of the latter. Making their pause data equal 1, that
is, imposes a statistical constraint on them both, and
implies equal confidence in how representative their
information is. Thus, the element of the Oxford
chronology that looks to Oras for confirmation, as
well as other studies based on percentages (Gray,
1931; Wentersdorf, 1951; Jackson, 1995), rely on
artificially constrained evidence. How, then, to ac-
knowledge the differential weight of the Oras-type
data?
A valuable method for comparing compositional
data—among other types of multivariate data—is
correspondence analysis (or CA) (Hirschfeld, 1935;
Benze´cri, 1973; Hill, 1974; Greenacre, 2007). At its
most basic, CA is a statistical methodology that
takes categorical information and looks for associ-
ations, and strength of associations, in the relations
of rows to columns in a contingency table (also
known as a cross tabulation table, which contains
frequencies of occurrence). Correspondence analysis
first attempts to identify, and then rank, the most
statistically significant variation in that data. Thus,
the first CA axis will account for the largest amount
of variation in the original data, the second axis will
account for the next largest portion, and so on. By
identifying the most crucial of these variables, re-
searchers can visualize and interpret the bulk of the
variability in any original data.
Germane to our purposes here is the extensive,
and sophisticated, use of CA in seriation studies
(Greenacre, 2007; van de Velden et al., 2009;
Peeples and Schachner, 2012). Seriation, or simply
‘putting things in order’, is usually an exercise in
relative dating, employed when an absolute dating
method may be unavailable. In the field of arche-
ology, for example, researchers are often confronted
with artifacts that only occasionally have informa-
tion regarding production or use attached to them.
When carbon dating or information relating to, say,
tree rings or chemical composition is unavailable,
archaeologists have refined the statistical bases of
CA to help them order, and thus date (however
approximately), things of uncertain origin. By com-
paring the known composition of pottery remains,
for instance, archeologists may place certain assem-
blages closer together in time based on how similar
they are to one another.
Shakespeare’s plays may not strike one as arti-
facts, of course, but the procedures of CA as refined
for seriation nevertheless provide a statistically
rigorous methodology for examining their material
components. On the basis of such an examination,
in fact, we can offer a provisional chronology that
responds to the differential distribution of fea-
tures—in this case, pauses as recorded in the verse
of early texts—throughout the canon and various
plays with sections attributed to Shakespeare. This
chronology should be understood as a provisional
timeline of when the iambic pentameter in the play
texts under examination was mainly composed. By
emphasizing this last phrase, we mean to call imme-
diate attention to two things. First, Oras’s prose data
come from the pentameter verse in plays that are
sometimes made up heavily of prose. (This is par-
ticularly the case in the late 1590s). Pause pattern
analysis is therefore limited by the amount of verse
in each play. Second, there is a strong likelihood
that a number of Shakespeare’s plays were written
at one time (even over various times) and revised at
another, or others. A play title thus need not con-
note an event, but may sometimes have been mul-
tiple events, or even a process. The fixity of any
ordering, then, needs to be qualified in the context
of diachronic composition.
Like Taylor and Jackson, we focus on Oras’ A
pauses, though after deliberation have subtracted
values for shared lines (his C pauses). Our rationale
for this comes from the uneven distribution of
shared lines across the canon, and our sense that
this different kind of writing—with a line-ending
full stop built into its very structure—needs to be
measured separately (Reinhold, 1942). We have also
performed original tabulations of A (minus C)
pauses for various texts, and parts of texts, not
included or not disaggregated in Oras. These in-
clude parts of the collaborative plays Titus
Andronicus, 1 Henry VI, Edward III, Timon of
Athens, Arden of Faversham (scene 8), Sir Thomas

More (the Hand D passages), and the Additional
Passages to the 1602 Spanish Tragedy. These
counts appear in Appendix 1, below, with informa-
tion regarding the source texts and passages ana-
lyzed in Appendix 2.
We first performed two statistical procedures on
our resulting data set. These are, respectively, a PCA
and a CA. We would note that these procedures
draw on distinct data: for the PCA, we used propor-
tional values of pause abundance (so, for each play,
the total proportion of the nine types sums to 1); for
reasons already mentioned (and discussed further
below), we used raw counts for the CA. We per-
formed these and all subsequent analyses in R
(R Core Team, 2014), using the ca package
(Nenadic and Greenacre, 2007). (Note that all of
the code used to produce the analyses and graphs
in this manuscript is available from https://github.
com/genevievekathleensmith/shakespeare-chronord
ination.)
The first Principal Component (PC 1) captured
62.3% of the total variation in pause composition
among plays, mostly capturing variation in the 4th,
6th, 7th, and 8th position pauses (Fig. 2a, looking at
how far each arrow travels left-right—that is, along
PC 1—those arrows reach the farthest). For its part,
PC 2 accounted for another 18.1% of the total vari-
ation, mainly reflecting variation in the 4th, 7th,
2nd, and 8th positions; again, one may notice far
up or down each arrow goes to gauge its contribu-
tion (Fig. 2a). The patterns are broadly similar in
the CA. The first CA axis comprised 77.4% of the
total variation in pause counts among plays, and CA
2 accounted for a further 8.9%. Yet, now most of the
arrows are more closely aligned with the horizontal
plane (Fig 2b). This means that changes in pauses
among plays are more well represented by a single
axis in the CA, rather than in the PCA. We can
additionally map the PCA and CA results onto the
same dimensions to compare how they are distrib-
uted relative to one another (Fig 2c and d). The
circles in Figures 2c and d have been scaled to reflect
the relative weights of the data in each analysis. In
PCA, each play contributes equally to determine the
major axes of variation, while in CA, plays with low
total pause counts (those that appear as slightly
smaller circles) contribute less to the analysis than
those with more pauses (which appear as larger cir-
cles). This is one advantage of CA: as opposed to
PCA, it allows one to recognize differences in the
amount of data contributed. One can interpret the
positions of the play points by looking back at the
axes of variation in Figures 2a and b. Texts are pos-
itioned in relation to where pauses occur in their
pentameter lines, and in what proportion. For ex-
ample, plays like Romeo and Juliet and Richard III
have relatively more pauses early on in lines (i.e. 1st
through 5th position), while plays like Macbeth and
Tempest have more late-position pauses (6th
through 9th).
4 Bootstrap Methodology
On their own, our pause counts cannot give us any
estimate of how certain (or uncertain) we are of the
relative ordering obtained by our CA. To under-
stand how small differences in our observed data
may influence the outcome of our analysis, we
employ a ‘bootstrap’ method. This is commonly
used across a variety of disciplines, including in
archeological studies (Ringrose, 1992). The boot-
strapping procedure is a method of resampling. In
our case, that means taking random samples of
pauses from each play and rerunning our CA
using the new values (Lockyear, 2012; Peeples and
Schachner, 2012). Because we sample with replace-
ment (meaning some pauses from the original data
will be sampled more than once, and others not at
all) the new counts of each pause type will vary
slightly from the original counts. We repeat this
resampling 1,000 times, repeating the CA with
each new set of counts. This affords us some meas-
ure of uncertainty for our CA scores, and allows us
to estimate 95% confidence intervals for the results
in two dimensions (Fig. 3). The resulting confidence
intervals produce a polygon for each play and trace
a gradual arc up and to the right. We have called out
five canonical texts–Richard III, Romeo and Juliet,
Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest—to show how
these data reveal the chronological progression of
Shakespeare’s works.
This ‘arc’ of Shakespeare’s verse pauses also pro-
vides a basic template for understanding the

syntactical development of his contemporaries’
iambic pentameter. Plotting the pause profiles of
six contemporary playwrights over and against
those of Shakespeare’s works (reproduced from
Fig. 3, shaded light gray) to compare their pause
content, we can see their plays tracing the general
movement plotted by his verse, from Kyd and
Marlowe through Fletcher. Jonson’s less iambic
practice (Fig. 4, bottom row, center) identifies him
as an exception. We should note that Marston’s
polygons fall almost entirely within Shakespeare’s,
a result that is not surprising given the fact that
Fig. 2 Results of PCA and CA as applied to pause variation in Shakespeare’s plays. (a) The contribution of each pause
type to PC Axis 1 and PC Axis 2. (b) The contribution of each pause type to CA Axis 1 and CA Axis 2. Arrow direction
indicates whether each pause type’s contribution is positive or negative, and arrow length indicates strength of each
pause type’s contribution to that axis. (c) The projection of each play on PC Axis 1 and 2. (d) The projection of each
play on CA Axis 1 and 2. The size of each point represents the weighting assigned to each text in the analysis. The same
five titles have been highlighted in each plot. See Table 1 for the full list of titles included in these analyses

Marston began and ended his career as a playwright
while Shakespeare was still working, and appears to
have fashioned his plays (including the Antonio
plays, and The Malcontent) strongly in response to
the senior playwright’s (Cathcart, 1997).
5 CCA and Shakespeare’s
Chronology
Correspondence analysis, we should point out, pro-
vides relative ordering: object X most likely comes
before, or follows, object Y, at Z distance. Not being
content with a relative chronological order, we were
interested in using external evidence to suggest
more specific determinations for the plays. An ex-
tension of CA called ‘constrained correspondence
analysis’ (CCA), allows us to do just that
(Groenen and Poblome, 2003; van de Velden
et al., 2009). By incorporating such information as
interval constraints for Shakespeare’s career, as well
as hypothesized dates for some plays, and upper and
lower limits for others, we can constrain the
calculation of the CA scores (van de Velden et al.,
2009). As we saw earlier, CA produces only a single
score for each play. The same is true of CCA. We
opted, therefore, to employ a bootstrapping proced-
ure again, which allowed us not only to estimate
exact dates for each play, but also to generate con-
fidence intervals around those estimates (Peeples
and Schachner, 2012). In this manner, we were able
to produce a revised chronology of Shakespeare’s
plays, using only interval constraints, a few dates,
and the pause-position data itself. For this proced-
ure, we modified MATLAB code (MATLAB, 2011)
from van de Velden (2008) and wrote additional
procedures to implement the bootstrapping (again,
available from https://github.com/genevievekathlee
nsmith/shakespeare-chronordination).
To constrain our correspondence estimates, we
assigned numerical values to three plays for which
plausible dates could be advanced: 3 Henry VI, last
quarter of 1591 (¼ 1591.75); Henry V, middle of
1599 (¼ 1599.5); Pericles, first quarter of 1607
(¼ 1607.25); and fixed Tempest as after 1611
(>1611.0). Scholars could argue over these designa-
tions, of course, and other plays and dates could
have been employed; these seemed among the
more reasonable of our options. In addition, we
set upper and lower bounds on the extent of
Shakespeare’s writing career, demarcating it from
1589.5 to 1614.0. While these boundaries are also
open to debate, it seemed to us that they are defens-
ible so long as they are understood to be judgments
rather than facts.
In CCA, the relative positioning of an object (in
this case, a text) is made concrete through the add-
ition of specific information regarding other objects
in the timeline (Fig. 5). Thus, Macbeth is assigned a
date of 1606.2, or March of 1606, as a manifestation
of its statistical distance from all the other plays,
using 3 Henry VI, Henry V, and Pericles to orient
the chronology in time. As mentioned, we con-
strained the composition of The Tempest, placing
it no earlier than 1611. Obviously, the accuracy of
such a ‘forcing’ method depends in part on the
soundness of these anchors (van de Velden et al.,
2009), yet the procedure has the advantage of pro-
viding a specific date, rather than relative position,
for each play.
Fig. 3 Bootstrapped Correspondence Analysis of
Shakespeare’s plays. Each polygon indicates the 95% con-
fidence bounds calculated from 1,000 randomized boot-
straps. Note that we have reversed the sign of the CA Axis
1 scores, for the purpose of maintaining a left-to-right
chronological sequence. Since the sign of the values is
arbitrary, this does not affect our timeline predictions.
The same five titles have been highlighted as in Figure 2

Fig. 4 Bootstrapped Correspondence Analysis for Shakespeare and six contemporaries. Each polygon indicates the 95% confidence bounds calculated from
1,000 randomized bootstraps. In each panel, Shakespeare’s plays are indicated in light gray, while the corresponding author is illustrated in dark gray. See
Appendix 1 for titles and data
D.BrusterandG.Smith
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By bootstrapping this CCA, we were able to es-
timate confidence intervals for each play’s predicted
date of composition using the 0.025th and 0.975th
quantile of the bootstraps (Fig. 6). For some plays,
our prediction falls earlier than the Oxford date (e.g.
Troilus and Cressida, As You Like It); in other cases it
is later (e.g. Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale).
6 Adjusted CCA Chronology
To use our CCA results to produce a hypothesized
timeline, we further wanted to consider historical
data available on the disposition of the Elizabethan
playhouses (Chambers, 1930; Harrison, 1941, 1955;
Barroll, 1991). J. Leeds Barroll has posited that
Shakespeare would have reduced his dramatic writ-
ing or ceased writing new plays altogether when the
playhouses were closed, largely owing to the plague
(Barroll, 1991). Such occasioned the years 1592–94,
when, it is commonly thought, Shakespeare penned
Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece while the
public amphitheaters were closed for business.
Because a noticeable spread in the data appears
after 3 Henry VI (as well as prior to The Merry
Wives), we have elected to adjust our estimates for
the dates of composition on the assumption that
Shakespeare turned his energies to his two narrative
poems during the closure of the playhouses (Fig. 6).
During the drafting of this essay, we gained
access to new data: the metrical and linguistic
tables of Marina Tarlinskaja’s recent monograph
(Tarlinskaja, 2014). There Tarlinskaja provides a
massive tabulation of original prosodic data for nu-
merous playwrights, including Shakespeare. The
Shakespeare data, however, do not include various
prose-heavy plays (such as Merry Wives, Much Ado,
As You Like It, and Twelfth Night), or two collab-
orative works (Sir Thomas More, Timon). Further,
Tarlinskaja offers only partial data for Edward III, so
we chose to omit it, leaving a total of 34 texts, with
over 1,500 pieces of data regarding 45 stylistic and
structural categories. These categories include data
on strong and weak syllabic positions, respectively;
word boundaries (total and after positions); strong
syntactic breaks; run on lines; proclitic and enclitic
Fig. 5 Illustration of CCA approach, redrawn (with modifications) from van de Velden et al., 2009. Macbeth is dated
using three ‘anchor’ plays (indicated along the diagonal) as constraints. We also have illustrated the lower limit placed
on the possible dates for Tempest. The relationship between CCA score and time is used to predict dates for the
remaining plays

Fig. 6 Predicted dates of composition resulting from CCA of pause counts in Shakespeare’s plays. Filled circles rep-
resent the average predicted date over 1,000 bootstraps, horizontal black bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.
Vertical gray shading indicates periods when London’s playhouses are thought to have been closed. Shifts made to
our predictions in light of these closings are indicated with open circles

stresses; syllabic -ed and -eth; disyllabic -ion; gram-
matical inversion; meter-sense; syntactical run ons;
feminine endings (total); feminine endings built by
simple and compound constructions, respectively;
and alliterative lines. Because Tarlinskaja’s data are
rendered largely in percentages, we could not apply
a CA or CCA. Thus, with Tarlinskaja’s permission,
we ran a PCA on these new data and used PC 1
to estimate approximate dates of composition
(Table 1).
We wish to emphasize that the results are purely
our own, rather than Tarlinskaja’s, who should not
be assumed to endorse any of the datings we adduce
from analyzing her data. Further, our analysis of her
data assumes the same intervals for Shakespeare’s
career (1589.5 to 1614.0) as in the CCA. These esti-
mated dates are provided in Table 1 below, in add-
ition to dates from the Oxford chronology, the
Riverside chronology, Brainerd’s multivariate
chronology (Brainerd, 1980), the dates predicted
by our CCA (averaged across 1,000 bootstraps),
and our final predictions, which adjust the CCA
dates in relation to playhouse closures and exigen-
cies of composition. By the latter, we refer to ad-
justments that assume a working distance among
Shakespeare’s texts—even though it is quite possible
he may have composed various works simultan-
eously. The asterisks in the final two columns flag
the anchor dates we provided (for 3 Henry VI, Julius
Caesar, and Pericles, respectively), to distinguish
these from predictions generated from analysis.
7 Dates and Discussion
The following discussion of our results begins with
title, hypothesized date, and bootstrap range. In
addition to the chronologies and tests outlined in
Table 1, our discussion alludes to Langworthy’s
tabulations of verse-sentence data (Langworthy,
1931), Reinhold’s research on shared lines
(Reinhold, 1942), Waller’s doth/does and hath/has
ratios (Waller, 1966), Slater’s tables regarding link
words between Shakespeare’s plays (Slater, 1988),
and Ilsemann’s data regarding speech word-length
(Ilsemann, 2008). We have also consulted
McManaway, 1950; Uhlig, 1968; and Schabert, 2000.
Titus Andronicus–1590.7 (1589.7–1591.7). As with
other works, our adjusted CCA treats only the
portion currently ascribed to Shakespeare (see
Appendix 2 for breakdowns). Early dating concurs
with the PCA of Tarlinskaja’s data, as well as with
Slater’s order, and initiates a group that concludes
with Edward III.
Arden of Faversham (Sc. 8)—1590.9
(1589.5–1593.9). Paucity of data makes dating dif-
ficult. PCA of Tarlinskaja places this before Titus,
as Shakespeare’s first surviving writing.
The Taming of the Shrew–1591 (1590–1592.2). Our
adjusted CCA concurs with Oxford and Brainerd.
We believe this play was written before the closing
of the theaters, and preceded A Shrew. Waller’s
doth/does and hath/has ratios place Shrew, alone
among the early plays, in the second half of the
canon.
1 Henry VI–1591.2 (1589.5–1593.3). Issues of col-
laboration complicate dating. Our CCA treats 2.4,
4.2–4.5; CCA of the complete text places it only
marginally later, at 1591.9.
3 Henry VI–1591.75* (1591.75*). Our adjusted
CCA’s first anchor, fixed at a position supported
by Oxford, Riverside, Brainerd, the Tarlinskaja
PCA, and Ilsemann.
Edward III–1592 (1590.5–1593.2). Our adjusted
CCA treats 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 4.5–4.9 (Elliott and
Valenza, 2010). Probably written before the clos-
ing of the theaters, but Slater’s rare-word linkage
with Lucrece could suggest the hiatus or immedi-
ately after the reopening. CCA places 1.2, 2.1, 2.2,
and 4.4 at 1591.8.
2 Henry VI–1593.8 (1591.8–1593.8). Stylistically, 2
Henry VI postdates 3 Henry VI, most likely owing
to revision at a much later date. (We see such
signs most obviously in 2.1.1-4.1.147 and 5.1.1-
end, though there are indications of revision
throughout). Its position here likely averages writ-
ing from earlier and later in Shakespeare’s career.
Placement after 3 Henry VI is replicated in
Brainerd, the Tarlinskaja PCA, Langworthy,
Reinhold, and Ilsemann. First in a group running
through Richard II.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona–1594.2 (1591.7–
1594.3). Our adjusted CCA (adjusted to recognize
the availability of the theaters) is close to

Table 1 Dates from received (Taylor, 1987; Evans, 1996; Brainerd, 1980) and original chronologies (PCA of Tarlinskaja
data; Bruster–Smith bootstrap mean, and Bruster–Smith final), compared. Key to abbreviations following
Play Oxford
date
Riverside
date
Brainerd
date
Date predicted
by PCA of
Tarlinskaja data
Bruster–Smith
bootstrap mean
date prediction
Bruster–Smith
final prediction
SHR 1590–1 1593–4 1591.4 1595.83 1591.08 1591
TGV 1590–1 1594 1592.9 1596.61 1593.08 1594.2
3H6 1591 1590–1 1591.0 1593.43 1591.8* 1591.8*
2H6 1591 1590–1 1591.2 1594.22 1592.83 1593.8
ARD n/a n/a n/a 1589.5 1591.05 1590.9
TA 1592 1593–4 1592.6 1592.36 1590.73 1590.7
1H6 1592 1589–90 1592.7 1594.09 1591.26 1591.2
R3 1592–3 1592–3 1596.1 1596.92 1594.16 1595
E3 n/a 1592–5 n/a n/a 1591.88 1592
ERR 1594 1592–4 1594.8 1595.27 1593.45 1594.4
LLL 1594–5 1594–5 1601.7 1595.05 1593.83 1594.8
ROM 1595 1595–6 1596.3 1594.44 1593.73 1594.6
MND 1595 1595–6 1595.9 1594.52 1594.3 1595.3
R2 1595 1595 1595.9 1596.22 1594.77 1595.5
JN 1596 1594–6 1599.2 1594.69 1595.44 1596.1
MV 1596–7 1596–7 1598.3 1599.67 1596.59 1597.2
1H4 1596–7 1596–7 1596.7 1595.73 1596.73 1597.5
2H4 1597–8 1598 1599.5 1599.19 1597.21 1597.8
WIV 1597–8 1597 1596.1 n/a 1598.78 1599
SPT n/a n/a n/a 1600.07 1593.57 1594.5
ADO 1598 1598–9 1596.9 n/a 1596.69 1597.35
H5 1598–9 1599 1598.0 1599.89 1599.5* 1599.5*
JC 1599 1599 1598.8 1600.77 1597.29 1598.2
AYL 1599–00 1599 1600.3 n/a 1596.11 1597
HAM 1600–1 1600–1 1604.7 1603.49 1598.93 1599.25
TN 1601 1601–2 1601.4 n/a 1600.53 1600.8
TRO 1602 1601–2 1600.8 1602.43 1597.39 1598.4
MM 1603 1604 1604.7 1605.44 1601.49 1602.2
OTH 1603–4 1604 1603.3 1604.49 1600.77 1601
STM 1603–4 1594–5 n/a n/a 1602.56 1602.8
AWW 1604–5 1602–3 1607.2 1607.37 1603.88 1604.3
TIM 1605 1607–8 1604.7 n/a 1605.67 1606.1
LR 1605–6 1605 1606.2 1607.91 1604.67 1605
MAC 1606 1606 1606.1 1608.28 1605.88 1606.3
ANT 1606 1606–7 1607.9 1609.02 1610.53 1610.5
PER 1607 1607–8 1604.2 1606.92 1607.2* 1607.2*
COR 1608 1607–8 1604.8 1610.60 1611.57 1611.6
WT 1609 1610–11 1609.4 1612.97 1613.29 1613.3
CYM 1610 1609–10 1608.9 1611.43 1613.52 1613.5
TMP 1611 1611 1610.0 1614 1611 1611
H8 1613 1612–3 1607.4 1613.22 1613.09 1613.1
TNK 1613–4 1613 1605.5 1613.26 1611.88 1611.9
Notes: 1H4 1 Henry IV; 1H6 1 Henry VI; 2H4 2 Henry IV; 2H6 2 Henry VI; 3H6 3 Henry VI; ADO Much Ado About Nothing; ANT
Antony and Cleopatra; ARD Arden of Faversham; AWW All’s Well That Ends Well; AYL As You Like It; COR Coriolanus; CYM
Cymbeline; E3 Edward III; HAM Hamlet; H5 Henry V; H8 Henry VIII; JC Julius Caesar; JN King John; LLL Love’s Labor’s Lost; LR
King Lear; MAC Macbeth; MM Measure for Measure; MND Midsummer Night’s Dream; MV Merchant of Venice; OTH Othello; PER
Pericles; R2 Richard II; R3 Richard III; ROM Romeo and Juliet; SHR Taming of the Shrew; SPT Spanish Tragedy (Additional Passages);
STM Sir Thomas More (Hand D); TA Titus Andronicus; TGV Two Gentlemen of Verona; TIM Timon of Athens; TMP Tempest; TN
Twelfth Night; TNK Two Noble Kinsmen; TRO Troilus and Cressida; WIV Merry Wives of Windsor; WT Winter’s Tale.

Riverside. Slater’s rare-word list ranks it 7th of the
plays, Reinhold’s data 9th–just prior to Love’s
Labor’s Lost—and Ilsemann’s just after Love’s
Labor’s Lost. Langworthy supports Oxford in
seeing it as a very early play.
The Comedy of Errors–1594.4 (1592.1–1594.7). Our
adjusted CCA matches well with Oxford,
Riverside, and Brainerd, and anticipates the re-
corded performance at Gray’s Inn 28 December
1594. Cross-genre rare-word links (Slater) suggest
proximity to Richard III, as does Ilsemann’s data.
The Additional Passages to The Spanish Tragedy
(1602)–1594.5 (1589.5–1598). Paucity of data
here, reflected in the bootstrap range, lessens our
confidence in this dating. PCA of the Tarlinskaja
data puts them much later, as would Ilsemann’s
data (after Henry V).
Romeo and Juliet–1594.6 (1592.7–1594.8). This first
of the lyric plays perhaps finishes earlier owing to
its formal, amatory verse (our unadjusted CCA
places it in mid-1593). Our adjusted CCA squares
with the PCA of Tarlinskaja’s data.
Love’s Labor’s Lost–1594.8 (1592.6–1595) Our ad-
justed CCA squares with Oxford, Riverside, and
the PCA of Tarlinskaja’s data.
Richard III–1595 (1593.2–1595.1). Our adjusted
CCA agrees with the PCA of Tarlinskaja’s data
and with Brainerd in positing a later date for
this text than Oxford or Riverside.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream–1595.3 (1593–
1595.6). Our adjusted CCA agrees with Oxford,
Riverside, Brainerd, and the PCA of Tarlinskaja’s
data.
Richard II–1595.5 (1593.7–1595.8). Dated 1595 in
four of the chronologies, with the PCA of
Tarlinskaja’s data only a year later.
King John–1596.1 (1594.3–1596.6). Crucial since
Honigmann’s argument for an extremely early
composition (Honigmann, 2000). Our position-
ing agrees with Oxford and Riverside. Brainerd
has a later date; PCA of the Tarlinskaja data an
earlier one, though after Romeo and Dream;
Langworthy locates immediately after Richard II.
As You Like It–1597 (1594.8–1597.5). This first of
the prose-heavy plays (with fewer pauses for ana-
lysis) suggests a much earlier date than is conven-
tionally accepted. Brainerd (1600.3) better accords
with Oxford and Riverside; Tarlinskaja has no
data for it. Shares unexpected extra-generic rare-
word links with Richard III and Romeo, in add-
ition to Henry V. For arguments concerning a date
before 1599, see Knowles, 1977, pp. 340-49, 365-
67. Stylistically first in a group running through
Troilus.
The Merchant of Venice–1597.2 (1595.5–1597.7).
Both Brainerd and PCA of the Tarlinskaja data
locate it in 1598. Barely distinguishable, statistic-
ally, from Much Ado, it finishes slightly earlier
than that text on the bootstrap procedure.
Much Ado About Nothing–1597.35 (1595–1598.5).
Our positioning is slightly earlier than Oxford and
Riverside.
1 Henry IV–1597.50 (1595.5–1598). Our dating ac-
cords closely with Oxford, Riverside, and
Brainerd.
2 Henry IV–1597.8 (1595.8–1598.5). We believe this
play immediately followed 1 Henry IV. Our dating
accords closely with Oxford and Riverside.
Julius Caesar–1598.2 (1596.2–1598.3). Seen by
Platter in September of 1599. Brainerd has it at
the end of 1598, PCA of the Tarlinskaja data in
late 1600. Shares rare-word links with 2 Henry IV,
Troilus, and Hamlet.
Troilus and Cressida–1598.4 (1596.2–1598.5).
Typically dated some 2- to 4 years later.
Composition in 1598 would locate it near the
completion and publication of Chapman’s
Homer, but prior to the War of the Theaters,
Gilbert’s De Magnete, and Nashe’s Summer’s Last
Will and Testament, which are sometimes seen as
implicated in its language. Brainerd and the
Tarlinskaja PCA would place it near Oxford and
Riverside; Langworthy with Henry V and before
Hamlet; the Reinhold data after Twelfth Night but
before Othello and Hamlet.
The Merry Wives of Windsor–1599 (1595.4–
1602.7). Our dating comes later than Riverside,
Brainerd, and Langworthy. As is evident in the
wide bootstrap range, scant pause data makes
placement less certain. Groups stylistically with
Hamlet and Henry V.
Hamlet–1599.25 (1597.9–1600). Statistically close to
Henry V, this play’s references to Julius Caesar
suggest that it followed the Roman tragedy.

Our dating is slightly earlier than Oxford and
Riverside; both Brainerd and the Tarlinskaja
PCA have it later than those authorities. Several
passages in the Folio text hint at revision during
the early 1600s.
Henry V–1599.5* (1599.5*). Second of our anchor
texts. Choruses almost certainly composed prior
to Essex’s disastrous return from Ireland on
September 28. A date in late summer would just
enable it to inspire certain passages in 1 Sir John
Oldcastle, completed by 16 October. Shifting this
anchor a year later would retain the order of the
middle plays but bring them closer to conven-
tional dating.
Twelfth Night–1600.8 (1598.9–1602.3). Close match
with Oxford, Riverside, and Brainerd. Attaches to
Othello stylistically.
Othello–1601 (1599.5–1602). Our CCA locates
Othello earlier than Oxford, Riverside, Brainerd,
and the Tarlinskaja PCA. Echoes in Q1 Hamlet
indicate that it was already extent, even familiar,
by 1602 (Honigmann, 1993). Langworthy has it
before Henry V.
Measure for Measure–1602.2 (1600.2–1602.9).
Like As You Like It and Troilus, Measure fin-
ished earlier in the CCA than in all other chron-
ologies. Commonly thought of as a Jacobean
play owing to various of its themes, Measure
features very little that dates it certainly.
Pushing it into 1603–04 might imply correspond-
ingly later dates for texts immediately prior and
following. Revisions by Middleton may skew the
results here.
Sir Thomas More Additions–1602.8 (1596–1610.3).
This dating squares with Oxford; a seventeenth-
century date has been argued as well by Jackson
(Jackson, 1978, 2006, 2007).
All’s Well That Ends Well–1604.3 (1602.5–1605.4)
Our CCA squares with Oxford but is later than
Riverside. Brainerd and the Tarlinskaja PCA sug-
gest a later date (1607.2 and 1607.37, respectively),
as does Reinhold and Langworthy’s data, both of
which put this play after Lear and before Macbeth.
Jackson argues for 1606.5 or later (Jackson, 2001).
King Lear–1605 (1603.4–1606). Oxford suggests
1605–06, Riverside 1605, Brainerd 1606.2, and
the Tarlinskaja PCA 1607.91. Our location has it
preceding the second edition of King Lear (May of
1605).
Timon of Athens–1606.1 (1604.3–1607). This col-
laboration with Thomas Middleton is obviously
connected to King Lear, with which it has the
highest number of rare-word links (Slater). Our
CCA of the parts attributed to Shakespeare puts it
in the year after Lear, attaching stylistically to
Macbeth.
Macbeth–1606.3 (1604.5–1607.4). Our CCA agrees
closely with Oxford, Riverside, and Brainerd. The
Tarlinskaja PCA places it two years later.
Pericles–1607.25* (1607.25*). The third of our three
anchor texts. The date provided here comes prior
to its entry in the Stationers’ Register (20 May
1608). The PCA of the Tarlinskaja data puts it
just before 1607, in a cluster with All’s Well,
Lear, and Macbeth.
Antony and Cleopatra–1610.5 (1609.2–1611.9).
Entered in the Stationers’ Register 20 May 1608.
This later CCA date may indicate revision.
Brainerd and the Tarlinskaja PCA place it in
1608 and 1609, respectively. Slater’s rare-word
catalog links it not only with Macbeth and
Coriolanus, but also Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale,
and Tempest. Groups stylistically with Tempest,
Coriolanus, and Kinsmen.
The Tempest–1611 (>1611). Last in Brainerd’s
ordering; later, and also last in the Tarlinskaja
PCA (1614) and Slater’s rare-word ranking
(Slater, p. 99). Our dating coincides with Oxford
and Riverside.
Coriolanus–1611.6 (1610–1612.9). As with the
other late plays, our CCA produces a later-than-
conventional date. The Tarlinskaja PCA suggests
1610.6. Slater’s rare-word index links it most
tightly with Cymbeline and Winter’s Tale.
Langworthy places it after Antony.
The Two Noble Kinsmen–1611.9 (1609.9–1613.9).
This dating is at least a year earlier than Oxford
(1613–14) and Riverside (1613). Brainerd (who
does not separate according to collaboration)
has it much earlier (1605.5).
Henry VIII–1613.1 (1611.2–1614). According to our
CCA, this play follows Kinsmen but precedes two
of the romances. Certainly composed prior to late
June 1613, when it was performed at the Globe.

Fig. 7 Comparison of proposed Bruster–Smith chronology with standard dates (e.g. Oxford et al.). Open circles indicate
standard, previously-held date, arrows the shifts proposed to the timeline. Arrows pointing right indicate plays for which
later dates are proposed; arrows to the left indicate ones for which an earlier date of composition is suggested. As in
Figure 6, vertical gray shading indicates periods when London’s playhouses are thought to have been closed

The PCA of the Tarlinskaja data puts it at 1613.22.
Of the late plays, it has statistically significant
rare-word links with only Winter’s Tale. Attaches
stylistically to Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline.
Winter’s Tale–1613.3 (1611.7–1614). Seen by
Forman, May 1611. Brainerd’s 1609.4 accords
with Oxford, and just precedes Riverside. The
PCA of the Tarlinskaja data places this play at
the end of 1612. Langworthy has Winter’s Tale
and Cymbeline as two of his last three texts
(with Henry VIII).
Cymbeline–1613.5 (1612.1–1614). Seen by Forman
in 1611. The Tarlinskaja PCA has this text around
the middle of 1611. Slater’s rare-word links group
it with Winter’s Tale, Tempest, and Coriolanus.
Our CCA suggests it is Shakespeare’s final surviv-
ing writing.
8 Conclusion
The preceding chronology suggests a timeline for
the composition of the pentameter verse in
Shakespeare’s plays as represented in the First
Folio of 1623 and various early printed editions
(Fig. 7). In doing so, it makes at least four assump-
tions: first, that Oras’s counts accurately record the
pauses in the Folio texts it takes up (this was spot-
checked, and confirmed in multiple instances);
second, that Shakespeare’s verse line developed in
one direction, and regularly, without significant de-
viation; third, that, on the basis of pause data, a
CCA may accurately order the plays; and fourth,
that the dates for the three textual ‘anchors’ have
validity (van de Velden et al., 2009). The soundness
as well as particulars of our chronology could be
called into question by refuting or qualifying any
of these assumptions, and we welcome research
that does so in the service of expanding information
about Shakespeare’s compositional practice. Prior
to such interventions, however, we would point
out the general agreement between our ordering
and the established timeline of the plays, as well as
its confirmation of various independent challenges
to the conventional chronology. Further, although
we advance much earlier dates for several texts
(including As You Like It and Troilus and
Cressida), and later dates for many of the plays fol-
lowing Pericles, in no instance does our adjusted
CCA locate a title chronologically after its appear-
ance in print.
Our ordering is closer to the Oxford/Riverside
chronologies than are Brainerd or the PCA of the
Tarlinskaja data, yet we differ from Oxford/
Riverside on a number of plays in addition to
those mentioned above. For example, our adjusted
CCA places Two Gentlemen significantly later than
Oxford, Richard III later than both chronologies, the
Sir Thomas More passages much later than
Riverside, and Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Othello
earlier than their conventional dating—Othello sig-
nificantly so. We have seen, with 2 Henry VI, that a
text may date differently from a performance owing
to revision. It is important to keep in mind that the
chronology offered here concerns the time when the
pentameter in these texts was largely composed. If
we are correct in situating various of the plays that
follow Pericles later than the conventional dating, it
would suggest that Shakespeare was actively elabor-
ating their scripts immediately prior to or during his
retirement from writing for the theater.
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Mutschmann. Marburg: N.G.: Elwert.

Appendix 1 Pause Data
Pause data employed in this study, A-C pauses from Oras (1960) and hand counts. We have emended what
appears to be a typographical error in All’s Well C-count, position 8, from 23 to 3 (p. 80).
Play Author 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th
1 Tamburlaine Marlowe 26 59 40 194 119 80 26 19 4
2 Tamburlaine Marlowe 28 74 61 269 142 105 43 19 1
Jew of Malta Marlowe 132 118 93 339 212 157 97 37 14
Dr. Faustus Marlowe 16 26 29 64 57 37 13 7 0
Edward II Marlowe 63 211 84 486 182 259 62 19 2
Spanish Tragedy Kyd 65 144 61 361 145 99 50 21 5
Soliman and Persida Kyd 27 61 36 276 128 95 19 13 1
Edward III Kyd 9 22 20 152 79 38 32 6 1
Cornelia Kyd 76 95 53 294 189 125 60 32 7
Edward I Peele 7 44 25 162 61 51 14 4 4
Titus Andronicus Peele 17 51 23 134 73 72 22 10 1
Antonio & Mellida 1–2 Marston 156 235 102 582 414 464 162 136 53
Histriomastix Marston 43 57 32 146 114 108 63 19 5
Jack Drum’s Entertainment Marston 29 58 35 230 155 144 51 13 5
Dutch Courtesan Marston 9 28 8 92 49 76 41 24 3
Malcontent Marston 27 55 22 169 59 125 38 34 10
Parasitaster Marston 6 21 15 158 77 97 32 21 3
Sophonisba Marston 32 91 43 419 206 282 124 88 31
What You Will Marston 20 65 38 183 138 136 56 38 19
Insatiate Countess Marston 27 68 39 253 215 238 95 31 12
Tale of Tub Jonson 146 208 139 602 469 543 387 261 94
Case Is Altered Jonson 41 86 29 237 214 244 141 53 13
Every Man In Jonson 36 55 17 111 80 79 64 17 6
Every Man Out Jonson 43 59 22 100 80 110 92 38 13
Cynthia’s Revels Jonson 65 69 37 154 139 129 84 47 11
Poetaster Jonson 153 189 71 304 280 280 204 113 29
Sejanus Jonson 221 388 199 719 651 767 635 439 189
Volpone Jonson 300 415 231 754 752 832 694 593 301
Alchemist Jonson 336 437 266 837 823 838 726 672 322
Catiline Jonson 290 456 258 882 750 850 695 537 212
Henry 8 Fletcher 23 92 57 233 213 275 347 178 35
Two Noble Kinsmen Fletcher 29 52 60 241 216 306 303 159 43
Titus Andronicusa
Shakespeare 45 88 52 281 148 165 45 11 3
Comedy of Errors Shakespeare 35 97 34 229 140 156 63 25 2
1 Henry 6a
Shakespeare 16 20 7 61 41 30 18 3 1
1 Henry 6b
Shakespeare 80 183 71 474 304 203 127 49 3
3 Henry 6 Shakespeare 138 205 143 706 309 347 148 71 3
Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare 63 117 51 400 221 196 55 31 7
Richard 3 Shakespeare 138 305 120 680 430 445 186 108 20
Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare 97 138 76 308 172 222 76 39 12
Love’s Labor’s Lost Shakespeare 42 69 30 273 154 166 54 30 8
Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare 35 88 43 300 229 172 83 33 12
Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare 44 157 65 567 323 319 96 59 19
Richard 2 Shakespeare 61 182 90 568 323 375 130 79 14
King John Shakespeare 79 146 57 441 315 287 133 65 24
Merchant of Venice Shakespeare 39 66 42 272 206 212 132 24 9
(continued)

Appendix 2 Source Texts and Play
Breakdowns
Because Oras’s counts are based on a facsimile of the
1623 First Folio, our hand counts of Titus and
Timon used the Oxford Text Archive’s versions of
those plays in Folio form. We used EEBO texts for
Faversham (1592; STC 793) and Edward III (1596;
STC 7501); LION for the Additional Passages to the
Spanish Tragedy (1602; STC 15089); and the
Riverside Shakespeare for the Hand D material in
Sir Thomas More.
Breakdowns for Shakespearean portions of the
hand-counted collaborative plays, determined in
part by consulting Vickers, 2002, 2007, are as follows:
Titus Andronicus: 2.3–3.2, 4.2–5.3; Arden of
Faversham: scene 8; Edward III, conventional
Shakespeare attribution: 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 4.4; Edward
III, per Elliott and Valenza, 2010: 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 4.5–
4.9; 1 Henry VI: 2.4, 4.2–4.5; The Spanish Tragedy
(1602): Additional Passages 1–5;Timon of Athens:
1.1., 2.1–2.2, 4.1, 4.2.1–29, 4.3.1–457, 5.1–5.4.
Continued
Play Author 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th
Merry Wives Shakespeare 14 20 19 61 34 51 18 15 8
Much Ado Shakespeare 17 32 25 90 69 78 36 12 7
Henry 5 Shakespeare 28 83 50 284 198 242 146 51 14
Julius Caesar Shakespeare 77 114 102 376 311 366 165 61 21
As You Like It Shakespeare 18 37 35 165 111 149 48 21 3
Twelfth Night Shakespeare 8 37 26 136 100 138 60 39 5
Hamlet Shakespeare 43 116 63 397 225 405 171 66 16
Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare 61 122 66 439 213 336 134 78 19
Measure for Measure Shakespeare 41 88 34 243 156 317 120 76 14
Othello Shakespeare 79 178 82 542 238 483 208 153 42
All’s Well Shakespeare 9 36 23 205 135 279 123 54 15
Timona
Shakespeare 16 44 40 188 142 232 147 79 22
King Lear Shakespeare 40 103 55 354 143 448 183 125 40
Macbeth Shakespeare 36 82 46 270 159 403 142 135 34
Periclesa
Shakespeare 5 25 16 80 51 132 66 41 21
Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare 39 105 68 360 293 554 299 255 107
Coriolanus Shakespeare 37 111 68 381 224 535 314 264 117
Cymbeline Shakespeare 61 158 102 432 332 641 401 421 187
Winter’s Tale Shakespeare 44 138 78 380 261 492 307 378 133
Tempest Shakespeare 38 83 49 266 187 333 196 167 85
Henry 8a
Shakespeare 24 34 25 156 135 261 200 122 61
Two Noble Kinsmena
Shakespeare 10 34 12 111 109 186 129 92 32
Edward 3a
Shakespeare 8 24 13 133 63 58 25 4 3
Arden of Favershama
Shakespeare 1 1 1 30 5 13 0 2 0
Spanish Tragedy Add. Passagesa
Shakespeare 20 28 12 33 32 30 14 8 2
Sir Thomas More Passagesa
Shakespeare 0 0 0 9 6 8 9 0 0
a
Collaborative works for which we provide counts for only Shakespeare’s portion(s), as listed in Appendix 2.
b
In the case of 1 Henry VI, we have also included the total pause counts for the entire play.

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