No problem at all. It looks like the winner here is Hamlet - but that presents a problem, since I believe that’s Shakespeare’s second longest play. The longest is Richard III, also mentioned in this thread. I’d go with Macbeth: it has murders throughout, ends with a beheading (and a number of deaths in the preceding scenes), and it’s short by comparison.
The number of lines in Hamlet varies according to who you believe, but it runs between circa 3,900 and 4,050. Richard III contains about 3,620 lines.
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So is there any Shakespearean traagedy where the title character does not die?
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No. However, in Julius Caesar, the title character dies fairly early in the play, not in the last scene as normally happens. There was an 18th century version (rewritten by the Duke of Buckingham) called The Tragedy of Marcus Brutus to reflect the fact that Brutus is really the tragic hero of this play.
Yup, you’re right. I had a feeling I was getting them backward but I didn’t bother to check. Hamlet is the longest, and Richard III is the second-longest.
The reason why the number of lines in Hamlet varies is because we have two good texts, the Second Quarto of 1604-5 and the First Folio of 1623. Each of these texts contain substaintial amounts of text that the other omits.
(If we only had the First Quarto (1603) text of Hamlet, it would probably be Shakespeare’s shortest play.)