Visualizing text is challenging. Nice investigation; good choice of data set. I stillneed some guidance into HOW to read the diagrams. Are there axis-labels or text-balloons you could use (labelling the introductions of new characters for example)? Or labels for char names on the Y-axis? What if you broke the plays into divisions that reflected their actual structure (e.g. Acts) — you could put one Act on each Row, to use the page better…. 
Recommend open-sourcing your parser for shakespeare plays! People will love you.

(Golan, do you remember when … Rebecca(?) tried to do this?)
Yes. I was right… http://www.rebeccaaviva.com/images/rebeccaaviva_shakespeare.pdf
Check out that link – beautiful design but i think she did this by hand… -pgk

Show the  character names on the y axis, or show them as you mouse over the row.

could also be interesting to where characters are, there could be a dialogue going on but a crowd of people present. how did you deal with text like “they all exclaimed ‘yay’ ”

Really cool topic–I love Shakespeare.  But, I agree with everything else–there is some information missing (character names) and the information is hard to interpret. I like the close up views though.  Pretty cool stuff!  It would be really cool if you could continue this! -Amanda

It would be great if data input was interactive so that you could add arbitrary books from project gutenberg or something. -MH

How did you measure “length”? I’m guessing the unit is each time a person has a line. It’d be cool to see where the monologues are. I think I remember some project which visualized character interactions which was interesting, which is somewhat portrayed in your project.

I see the patterns, but its difficult to know what the lines mean.. you might benefit from labeling them

It would be nice if we could get the character names  Also try using faint gridlines behind the visualization so you can follow where one character may come in and not confuse it with the ones above or below Also maybe a few vertical lines to indicate where one act ends and the next begins.

Having name of characters on the PDF would be really helpful
That poetry thing is really interesting 😀
Adding chapters may be helpful.