A Bibliographical Review of the Italian Academic Production on Shakespeare's History Plays (2000-2022): a Data-based Approach

The aim of this paper is to offer a systematic review of the scholarly literature on William Shakespeare’s history plays, and of those new translations (or new editions of the same translations) of the same plays, appeared in Italy in the last twenty years, i.e. from 2000 to 2022. This is an attempt to offer a possible systematic digital approach to a bibliographical review, especially in view of the new trends of web-based research, statistical analysis and pattern recognition. By resorting to open-access resources that are well-known to scholars, such as Google Scholar and OPAC, the essay shows how it is possible to carry out a rigorous and accurate search of scientific productions in a given field with a data-based approach. A quantitative method will be adopted to critically present the results collected during the examination of the related bibliographical resources here investigated, while a qualitative approach will be used to organise data and the reference categories for the analysis.