Read All of Shakespeare's Works at Once

I built a tool that will let you compare word frequencies across all of the Bard's plays. It's dope.

For many years now, I have had this vision. I’ve wanted to make it really easy for any reader to compare word frequencies across all of Shakespeare’s plays at once. You see, when I was an English teacher I was always struck by the fact that the Bard’s plays all have five acts. That meant it could be fascinating to see, for instance, how often the words love and death occurred not just in Romeo and Juliet but all his plays. Comparing works by the same author can be deeply enriching for readers of all ages, in and out of the classroom.

Building a tool like that was out of scope for me, though. My coding chops were elementary, my patience pre-K.

Enter: vibe coding. Now with all these vibe coding tools available, my little projects (like the Wilde Cards game here) are actually possible. I hunkered down with Claude for an hour, resurrected some data sets I created years ago, and got to work.

And here it is: the Plotting Plots Shakespeare Explorer. Now you can easily look up multiple words in Shakespeare’s plays and compare them across all 36 works.

Ready to test it out? Click below to get started. And make sure to tell me what you think and share it around.