Comparing frequency of word use across Shakespeare's plays

Question

There are numerous concordances that list all of the words, and their frequency of use within each of Shakespeare's plays. However, I am interested in the presence and frequency of use of words across those plays.

For example, I would like to compare the frequency of the term beauty in "Hamlet" with its use in "The Tempest."

While this can be done manually by looking up the instance in the separate concordances of each of the plays, is there a project or program that does this for all of the plays (or some subset of them)?

Answer 1

I have used this in the past: Open Source Shakespeare: Concordance of Shakespeare's complete works. For example, you can type “beauty” into the box and get this page that shows the occurrences in each work. Here's Hamlet to The Tempest, showing that there are 5 occurrences in Hamlet and 2 occurrences in The Tempest:

(In this case there seems to be a bug—after clicking on Tempest I see just one result—so I'd prefer to download data and write a program myself... but this may be useful to you as a start, and you can report a bug to the site owners.)

Answer 2

The Folger Shakespeare Library's Miranda Digital Asset Platform is due for launch and release in the fall of 2018. As stated on their website the goal is to "build a full digital asset platform".

A digital analysis of Shakespeare's plays using off-the-shelf plagiarism software was recently published that may offer a more immediate answer to your query: "Plagiarism Software Unveils a New Source for 11 of Shakespeare’s Plays" (by Michael Blanding,The New York Times, 7 February 2018).