Internalizing production costs and changes of tastes: More recent theatre plays feature fewer roles.

This paper shows that the number of roles in theatre plays has decreased over time. Playwrights seem to internalize the costs of producing plays by downsizing the number of roles. This downsizing is not a recent phenomenon: it already started a long time ago. This is not surprising, since production costs increase over time and the Baumol cost disease is obviously one of the reasons, though one cannot exclude that fashion has changed given the time elapsed between William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]