Shakespeare plays: character count

Along with varying word counts and numerous locations, William Shakespeare's plays also have wide ranging numbers of characters in each play. The range in the number of characters with spoken parts in Shakespeare's plays is as little as 17, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, to as much as sixty, in Henry VI: Part Two. There is an average of almost 34 characters per play.
There is some correlation between the word count, number of speeches and number of characters, as the majority of plays that have above-average word counts are also above average in the other graphs, although this correlation is not very strong as there is no play that is in the top five of these three lists, and only one play (The Comedy of Errors) is in the bottom five of all three lists.

Total number of characters* in each William Shakespeare play

Characteristic	Number of words
Henry VI - Part 2	60
Henry VI - Part 1	54
Richard III	53
Antony and Cleopatra	53
Henry IV - Part 2	52
Coriolanus	49
Timon of Athens	48
Julius Caesar	47
Henry V	44
Pericles, Prince of Tyre	43
Henry VIII	43
Henry VI - Part 3	43
Macbeth	38
Cymbeline	37
Richard II	34
The Taming of the Shrew	34
Henry IV - Part 1	34
The Winter's Tale	33
Romeo and Juliet	32
Hamlet	30
Troilus and Cressida	27
King John	27
As You Like It	26
King Lear	25
Othello	25
Titus Andronicus	24
The Merry Wives of Windsor	23
Measure for Measure	23
Much Ado About Nothing	23
The Merchant of Venice	22
All's Well That Ends Well	22
A Midsummer Night's Dream	22
Love's Labour's Lost	19
The Comedy of Errors	19
The Tempest	19
Twelfth Night	18
The Two Gentlemen of Verona	17

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Release date

October 2019

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Region

United Kingdom

Survey time period

1589 to 1613

Supplementary notes

* Characters with more than one name in the same play have been counted as one character. When multiple characters speak in unison, this has not been included (e.g. these characters are often listed as "all", "both", "citizens", "princes", etc).
Please note: The figures in this graph may be smaller than in other lists online, however this is because other sources often use crawling software that counts the same characters twice (when they speak in unison with other characters, or when their name appears in the title),

Release date is date of extraction.

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