Shakespeare Top 20

The team at British Theatre Guide are inordinately proud that what was once our bouncing new baby has now come of age.

Indeed, our site is about the same age as many drama school graduates desperate to take their first tentative steps on what they hope will be long and fulfilling careers.

Over two decades, we have built one of the most comprehensive archives of theatre reviews freely available on the Internet. It therefore seemed timely to trawl through the back catalogue to determine which of Shakespeare’s plays have been the most popular in the current millennium.

Given the large sample size, this survey should be relatively representative, although the amount of effort needed to weed out the occasional misleading entry seemed disproportionate and therefore everything here should be taken with a wee pinch of salt.

The totals will include some book reviews, reviews of films, operas and ballets and assorted adaptations in addition to traditional, staged productions from anywhere and everywhere primarily London’s major theatres and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Before starting, this critic assumed that the most regularly performed plays from the Bard’s 37-strong canon were almost certainly going to be the tragedies, some of the popular comedies and a couple of obvious history plays.

Without thinking too hard, the expectation was that Hamlet might lead Macbeth with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night heading the comedies and Henry V and Richard III vying for the last top five position. The results demonstrate that perception can be misleading.

At the other end of the scale, there were unlikely to be too many surprises with some early comedies and later plays where attribution is questionable struggling to make it into the top 30.

Shakespeare Top 20

		Macbeth	141
		Romeo and Juliet	124
		A Midsummer Night's Dream	107
		Hamlet	100
		Twelfth Night	84
		The Tempest	71
		Much Ado About Nothing	63
		Othello	56
		Richard III	51
		King Lear	50
		A Winter's Tale	43
		The Taming of the Shrew	37
		Henry V	34
		The Comedy of Errors	31
		Measure For Measure	30
		Julius Caesar	29
		As You Like It	29
		The Merchant of Venice	25
		Cymbeline	18
		The Merry Wives of Windsor	17

The other end of the scale is a little sadder. In over two decades, there have only been three reviews of Timon of Athens, seven of Henry VIII and eight of All’s Well That Ends Well.

It is hard to imagine that the top 10 will change too much in the foreseeable future, especially as Shakespeare disappears from many school curriculums and the number of productions diminishes.

However, fads and fashions come and go, meaning that some plays that were popular in previous centuries are now very rarely produced, while others come to the fore. For example, in a post-trust world, could Timon be ripe for a comeback?