Chronology topics by estimated first-performance / composition decade, in this corpus
The works of this corpus grouped by the decade of their estimated first performance or, for closet and unacted plays, composition, and the mean share of each included topic within comedy, tragedy and history in each decade. These are distributions of the works that survive and were selected for the corpus — not counts of what was performed or written in a decade, and not a history of the stage. The page is exploratory: it shows sample sizes first, then means, and lets every cell be traced back to its works.
Run runs_Qwen_Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B_masked_hdb10, seed 42 · 53 included topics · result files: chronology (2026-09-27) · page built 2026-09-29. Measure: one representative edition per work, works equal-weighted, topic shares as a share of ALL words of a work (outliers and non-included topics stay in the denominator).
156 (39)two sources differ (in a different decade)
Works of this corpus by decade of the adopted date, stacked by genre group; totals above the bars. Click to enlarge.
Works set aside: Albertus Wallenstein — only source is marked incorrect in DEEP — pending. The rest of the site keeps all 516 works; only this page works with the 515. Genre groups are those of the Genre page (British Drama label, Annals fallback, or other/multi).
Works per decade and genre composition (table)
decade
works
comedy
tragedy
other/multi
masque
history
tragicomedy
moral
romance
pastoral
interlude
first_performance
composition
kind_unclear
first perf.
composition
unclear
1490–1499
2
2
2
2
0
0
1500–1509
0
0
0
0
1510–1519
3
2
1
3
3
0
0
1520–1529
7
1
6
7
7
0
0
1530–1539
4
1
2
1
4
4
0
0
1540–1549
0
0
0
0
1550–1559
10
2
1
1
6
9
1
9
1
0
1560–1569
23
2
14
6
1
15
8
15
8
0
1570–1579
11
2
1
3
1
4
8
1
2
8
1
2
1580–1589
33
10
12
2
4
3
1
1
31
2
31
2
0
1590–1599
69
20
12
6
18
1
2
8
2
63
5
1
63
5
1
1600–1609
113
45
29
10
7
6
6
3
4
3
106
5
2
106
5
2
1610–1619
81
20
19
20
11
3
3
3
2
79
2
79
2
0
1620–1629
73
22
13
19
8
2
7
1
1
69
3
1
69
3
1
1630–1639
84
26
9
17
10
1
12
1
2
6
72
4
8
72
4
8
1640–1649
2
1
1
1
1
1
0
1
B. Sample size and coverage
Before any topic is read by decade: how many works each genre has in each decade, and how much of those works' text the included topics cover. Cells with fewer than five works are not shown in the heatmaps; five to nine are shown but marked sparse; ten or more are shown — a display rule, not a reliability claim. No decades were merged.
Top row: works per decade (dashed lines at 5 and 10). Bottom row: equal-weighted mean of the share of a work's words in the included topics. Click to enlarge.
C. Topics by decade
Within each genre, the mean share of each included topic in the works of each decade. The heatmap shows at most 15 topics; the full table below it and the download hold all included topics. Nothing here is a test: a higher value in one decade is a description of the works that fall in that decade, and the cells can be traced back to their works in section D.
Mean share of a work's words (%), raw values, one colour scale for the three genres; hatched = fewer than five works. Topics shown: the 15 topics with the largest range (max − min) of decade means across the 6 decades with ten or more works. Click to enlarge.
All included topics by decade (mean share %, cells with ≥ 5 works)
Mean share of a work's words (%), raw values, one colour scale for the three genres; hatched = fewer than five works. Topics shown: the 15 topics with the largest range (max − min) of decade means across the 6 decades with ten or more works. Click to enlarge.
All included topics by decade (mean share %, cells with ≥ 5 works)
History has only one decade with ten or more works; the conditions for a comparison between decades are not met, and no statement about change over time is made for history here.
Mean share of a work's words (%), raw values, one colour scale for the three genres; hatched = fewer than five works. Topics shown: the 15 topics with the largest overall mean share in the genre (fewer than two decades have ten or more works, so no "largest change" selection was made). Click to enlarge.
All included topics by decade (mean share %, cells with ≥ 5 works)
Pick a genre, a decade and a topic. The card gives the mean and median share of the topic across the works of that cell, how many of them contain the topic, and the three works supplying most of the mean (contribution = share ÷ number of works in the cell). The table below lists every work of the cell with its adopted year, the source of that year, the bracketed limits, the date kind, and its topic share within the play (percentage of the representative text's words assigned to the selected topic, unassigned text included in the denominator). Works with the same title are distinguished by work id and author.
How the dates were chosen
The date of a work is the British Drama first-performance date (Wiggins & Richardson, via DEEP); the Annals of English Drama date is used only when British Drama has no entry, and the reason is recorded for every work. The leading year of the source string is the adopted year; the bracketed limits of the same source are the lower and upper limit. Notes such as "licensed" or "revised" are accompanying events and do not disqualify the year; later revision dates never widen the limits. Publication years are never used as substitutes and the two sources are never averaged. The kind of date follows the DEEP play type: estimated first performance where a performance setting is named, composition where the play type is closet or unacted only, and unclear where both or neither apply; a translation is not thereby unacted. A date whose meaning cannot be settled is set aside rather than guessed.
Two kinds of decade on this site. The Map filters by publication decade of the edition. This page groups by the estimated first-performance / composition decade of the work. Chunk and play pages print the Annals date as DEEP records it; section D shows the source actually adopted for each work, so a work can carry an Annals date on its page and a British Drama date here without any contradiction. Nothing here claims that the whole text of the representative edition existed in the estimated year, and counts per decade describe the works that survive and were selected for this corpus, not how many plays were written or staged.
Sensitivity of the grouping
Works whose limits cross a decade boundary (112) were regrouped by their lower limit and, separately, by their upper limit; all other works keep their decade. These two groupings are boundary cases for the sensitivity of the decade grouping — not two claims about the real dates, and they do not exhaust the dating uncertainty. Circa or queried years without limits were not given ± years. Works whose two sources give different years (156) are listed in the download; no further dating research was done.
