Old Timey Announcement

[RiverNotch]

THE ORDER HAS BEEN REVISED

to make each document closer in length to each other,

although the chronological arrangement, by necessity,

is less traditional, instead conforming to more statistical

and technological analyses of Shakespeare's works.

Volume One. Prefaces.

Volume Two. The Early Plays.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona,

The First Part of Henry VI,

The Second Part of Henry VI,

and The Third Part of Henry VI.

Volume Three. The Early Plays.

The Life and Death of Richard III

Titus Andronicus,

The Taming of the Shrew,

and The Comedy of Errors.

Volume Four. The Lyrical Plays.

Love's Labour's Lost,

Romeo and Juliet,

A Midsummer-Night's Dream,

and The Life and Death of Richard II.

Volume Five. The Central Plays.

The Life and Death of King John,

The Merchant of Venice,

Much Ado About Nothing,

and As You Like It.

Volume Six. Falstaff and Hamlet.

The First Part of Henry IV,

The Second Part of Henry IV,

Julius Caesar,

and Hamlet.

Volume Seven. The Central Plays.

The Merry Wives of Windsor,

The Life of Henry V,

Twelfth-Night,

and Troilus and Cressida.

Volume Eight. The Later Plays.

Measure for Measure,

All's Well That Ends Well,

Othello,

and King Lear.

Volume Nine. The Later Plays.

Timon of Athens,

Macbeth,

Antony and Cleopatra,

and Coriolanus.

Volume Ten. The Late Romances.

Cymbeline, 

The Winter's Tale,

The Tempest,

and Henry VIII.
Appendices and Indices.

---

What I did this time was to compile word and line counts of Shakespeare's plays, put them next to a list of ranks (from earliest to latest) based on what sources I could find -- Chambers, Brainerd, three Oxford releases, and Bruster-Smith -- form an aggregate ranking based on the averages of all the ranks, then compare all of the ranks with the word and line counts to create nine or eleven -- ultimately I went with nine, because the differences in word and line counts were less outrageous -- volumes which had the least amount of deviation from the mean number of words and lines per book. Ultimately, I found the 1987 Oxford Chronology to be the most precise in terms of word and line count, but the Bruster-Smith one I found to be the most thematically interesting, so I sort-of fused those two together with the aggregate ranking to form this chronology. Science and art perfectly misapplied.

---

Oh, and progress report: I've finished chopping up, bookmarking, and inserting the pictures to 7 1/2 of the 10 original volumes. Hopefully I finish all these by this weekend.