In the previous post we were examining three dimensional clusterings of the Platonic dialogues as rated on scaled Principal Components 1, 2 and 5, a technique that allowed us to see the early Platonic dialogues (as defined by Vlastos) standing apart from the middle and later ones. Vlastos’ claim, we remember, was that these early […]
Tag Archives: comedy
The Funniest Thing Shakespeare Wrote? 767 Pieces of the Plays
Now for something a little different. I mentioned before that we can conduct similar analyses on pieces of the plays rather than the plays as a whole. In this experiment, I have been working with 1000 word chunks of Shakespeare plays, which allows me to use many more variables in the analysis. (This was the […]
Comic Twelfth Night, Tragic Othello (Part 2)
Here is a second comic exchange from Twelfth Night. Maria’s plan has worked wonderfully. Malvolio has arrived cross-gartered and is quoting to Olivia little bits of the love letter he believes she has written to him. The blue and red strings, First Person and Interaction, are again appearing fast and thick as the incomprehension builds. […]
Comic Twelfth Night, Tragic Othello? (Part I)
Twelfth Night is one of the classic Shakespearean comedies and so it is unsurprising that it appears in the Comedy quadrant that we obtained in our initial analysis. What is it about the language in this play that pushes it toward this quadrant, and would we recognize this comic “itness” if we saw it in the […]
Love’s Labour’s Lost: The History
This passage from the Open Source Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost shows language patterns that push the play into the area where the Histories cluster, something visible in the scatterplot discussed below. Returning to the taxonomy of Docuscope, this passage has a lot of Description strings combined with a relative lack of Interaction and First Person strings, […]