In our Shakespeare Quarterly paper, we used Docuscope to come up with a description of Shakespeare’s comic language which centres on the rapid exchange of singular pronouns: I/you and my/your. We claimed there that Shakespearean comedies typically involve people arguing about things, striving to arrive at a ‘we’ of agreement, but not being able to […]
Tag Archives: Twelfth Night
The comic ‘I’ and the tragic ‘we’?
Posted in Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare
Also tagged comedies, I, log likelihood, pronouns, tragedies, we, Wordhoard, you
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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 […]