With their dense wordplay, old English phrases and complex poetic meter, Shakespeare plays can be notoriously difficult to understand.
Now, scientists have revealed the one which really is the trickiest to get your head around – and Antony and Cleopatra takes the top spot.
The play features over 40 short, jumpy scenes that span multiple countries and historical decades, along with an enormous cast.
Next in line comes Henry VI Part Two, followed by Henry VI Part One, both of which include complex political power struggles and a large cast of nobles.
Some of the most popular plays – including Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet – appear in the middle of the table.
Meanwhile The Tempest, with its relatively short, straightforward plot, was deemed the easiest to follow.
‘The most complex play – Antony and Cleopatra – was 5.9 times more complex than the least complex play, The Tempest,’ the team wrote in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
‘Under the assumption that even the least successful of Shakespeare’s plays is still successful by many standards, complexities across a broad range do not hinder success.’
Researchers have ranked Shakespeare’s plays in order of complexity based on the relationship networks between characters
Antony and Cleopatra took the top spot, scoring 83 out of 100 on the scale of complexity. Pictured: the play being performed at the Globe theatre
For the study the team, from Swiss university ETH Zurich, analysed more than 3,000 European plays – including 37 Shakespeare plays – written between the years 472 and 2017.
The smallest plays featured just three characters while the largest included a staggering 103.
They worked out the complexity of the plays based on the relationship networks between characters.
Overall, the plays had an average complexity of 11.20 out of a possible 100.
However, Shakespeare’s plays tended to lie at the upper end of the complexity scale, with an average of 41.22 out of 100.
The most complex – Antony and Cleopatra – scored 83 on the scale, while The Tempest scored a much lower 14.
‘Complexity varies substantially across Shakespeare’s plays,’ the team wrote.
Only four plays out of those studied were found to have been more complex than Antony and Cleopatra, including Danton’s Death by Georg Büchner, which has 103 characters, and The Land of Upside Down by Ludwig Tieck with 74 characters.
Overall, the plays had an average complexity of 11.20 out of a possible 100. However, Shakespeare’s plays tended to lie at the upper end of the complexity scale, with an average of 41.22 out of 100
Some of the most popular plays – including Romeo and Juliet (pictured) – appear in the middle of the table
The researchers said that most plays have few characters and a low complexity, while only a small number have many characters and a high complexity.
‘An obvious reason for this skew may be that plays with fewer characters are easier and cheaper to produce, making them more appealing to theatres aiming for practicality and profitability,’ they wrote.
However, they added: ‘Many, if not most, of the plays of one of the most popular European playwrights – William Shakespeare – lie at the upper end, both in terms of number of characters and complexity of character networks.
‘Putting relatively high demand on people might not make plays successful, but it also does not necessarily get in the way of success.’
The researchers suggest that by quantifying how hard it is to follow a narrative, theatre can be used to study the capacity of human cognition.
A recently released dictionary, called The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language, compiles over 20,000 words and phrases used by the Bard in his plays in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The fascinating two-volume, 900-page compendium shines a light on all the weird and wonderful words of the English language that have long since fallen out of use.
But it also includes the words that are still in use today that have a dramatically different meaning – such as ‘dotage’, ‘nag’ and ‘adamant’.
The Tempest (pictured), with its relatively short, straightforward plot, was deemed the easiest to follow
For example, Shakespeare used the word ‘dotage’ to refer to reduced mental ability or an infatuation (like being blindly in love) rather than as a quaint term for old age.
The term ‘bone ache’ was used by Shakespeare to refer to syphilis, while ‘ear-kissing’ meant whispering or spreading rumours.
Amazingly, ‘successes’ more generally referred to outcomes whether or not they were positive or negative – so in Shakespeare one could talk of a ‘bad success’.
‘Adamant’ referred to ‘impenetrably hard stone’ – and it wasn’t until the 1930s the word had evolved into its current meaning (refusing to be persuaded).
‘Dinner’ was preferred by Shakespeare for what we might think of as lunch (although the Bard’s contemporaries did use it to refer to an evening meal like we do now).
Other intriguing entries in the dictionary include ‘clock’ which meant to make a noise like a hen (although it also referred to a timepiece just like today).
The project was conceived and led by Jonathan Culpeper, a professor of English language and linguistics at Lancaster University.
William Shakespeare: The playwright, poet and actor whose reputation transcends all other writers
William Shakespeare (baptised April 26, 1564 – died April 23, 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor who is widely believed to have been the greatest dramatist of all time.
The playwright continues to occupy a position unique in world literature as someone whose reputation transcends that of all other popular writers.
He is credited with producing 39 plays, 154 sonnets and three long poems.
His plays, the most famous of which include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Othello, have been translated into every major language.
They are performed thousands of times a year by actors all across the world and are studied by millions of students across the UK and elsewhere.
William Shakespeare (baptised April 26, 1564 – died April 23, 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor who is widely believed to have been the greatest dramatist of all time
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire.
He married Anne Hathaway at the age of 18 and had three children with her: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith.
At some point between 1585 and 1592, Shakespeare began a career in London as an actor and writer.
He was the part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who later became known as the King’s Men.
They built the Globe Theatre, in Southwark, South London, at which they performed many of Shakespeare’s plays.
The theatre was destroyed by fire in 1613 but rebuilt the following year before being closed in 1642 and then pulled down.
A modern reconstruction of the Globe, named ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’, was built less than 800 feet from the site of the original theatre and opened in 1997.
At the age of 49, Shakespeare is believed to have retired back to Stratford, before he died three years later.
However, there are scant records of his private life and considerable speculation continues about his exact physical appearance.
Some questions have also been raised about whether all the works attributed to him were in fact written by others.
