SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare and the Color Blue
A color in absentia
This weekend past, I thought I would test my memory. I had a vague sense that Shakespeare seldom mentions the color blue in his work. I am not entirely sure why it suddenly came to mind, but I had a feeling that he didn’t. I expected Black or Red to be most common, and probably white or grey after that.
So, I did the work. Well, I ran a word search on an online PDF of the Complete Works, and then checked the results to get things right. I kept the search to the names that any five-year-old might know — no crimsons or ochre’s were searched for, though I did allow for variants on spelling.
Black: 184
White: 158
Red: 84
Green: 96
Yellow: 32
Grey: 29 (including 2 spelt gray)
Blue: 27
Brown: 26
Purple: 18
Orange: 5
I took some time to also screen out words that either were a proper / not descriptive name, or in any sense did not featuring the color as its name. The first removed a lot of Greens, particularly a character name in Richard III, as well as a few place names. The same was the case for Grey too. That latter…
