How long does it take to read the complete works of Shakespeare?

The 37 plays come to 835,997 words — a figure counted directly from the texts rather than estimated — which is about 59 hours of reading. That is longer than the Bible and shorter than the Harry Potter series by seventeen hours. Hamlet alone is roughly 30,000 words, about two hours to read and over four hours to perform uncut, which is why almost no production stages the full text. The plays were written to be heard rather than read, so reading time and performance time are genuinely different quantities here.

The numbers

Total

2 days 10 hours

In hours

58.6 hours

Non-stop

2.4 days without sleeping

Covers

37 plays, 835,997 words

At a realistic pace

an hour a night

That works out as

about 59 days

What this assumes

835,997 words at 238 words per minute, counting the 37 plays. The sonnets and narrative poems are excluded.

Word count is a direct count from Open Source Shakespeare. No reliable total exists for the combined performance runtime of all the plays.

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