“Spare your arithmetic, never count the turns”: A Statistical Analysis of Writing about Shakespeare, 1960–2010

By taking a quantitative approach to Shakespeare studies, this paper reveals patterns in how and what we write about Shakespeare. Using statistics from the World Shakespeare Bibliography (WSB), we track publications about individual plays from 1960 to 2010. In addition to reporting descriptive statistics that offer a bird’s-eye view of Shakespeare studies over the last half century, we identify trends in relation to particular plays, such as The Tempest’s growing popularity and Julius Caesar’s relative decline. We demonstrate temporal trends in relation to genre and non-English Shakespeareana. This paper concludes by suggesting the value of further quantitative analyses of Shakespeare studies.