Have you ever been reading Shakespeare out loud with a group of children and accidentally assigned a not-entirely-fluent-reader a part with way too many lines?
Have you ever accidentally assigned a child a part in a scene, only to realize at the end of the scene that this person didn't actually say anything?
Have you ever spent spent a big chunk of time carefully counting and logging all the lines spoken in a play so that you don't accidentally do what I described above?
Have you ever had to disrupt the flow of the play by assigning parts on the fly because someone new wandered into the scene that wasn't mentioned in the beginning?
Have you ever wondered why no one has created a simple list of all the line counts for each scene in a Shakespeare play?
I have done all these things (and more, I'm sure) in the eight years we've been reading Shakespeare in our family and the five years I've been leading a Shakespeare class with other families.
And after making an offhand comment to my husband about these problems, he whipped up a little script and voila! scene by scene line counts for Shakespeare's plays.
The index is linked in the top navigation of this website for easy access as well as right here. I just added Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth today.
We haven't run it on all of the plays yet--only the ones we've read in the last couple of years--so if you have a request, leave a comment and I'll see what we can do.
UPDATED: I added Midsummer Night's Dream too.
