Wine Dark Sea

Category: Shakespeare

  • The comic ‘I’ and the tragic ‘we’?

    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 until the final scene. Here’s what we said in more detail (we’re discussing Twelfth Night):

    The quick trading of I/you and my/your strings in Comic dialogue suggests a world in which predicates are attached to subjects from two, and only two, points of view. This is not a universe of one; nor is it a crowd. It is not surprising that Comic plotting, built as it is on sexual pairings, would favor this type of bivalent, perspectival tagging of action by speakers. But there is something else going on here. Olivia is trying to make something happen in this exchange. She says, “do not extort thy reasons from this clause,” and earlier, “I would you were as I would have you be!” (3.1/1392, 1381). The “thy” and “you” are important because the speaker is trying to create or assert a particular interpretation of how these two individuals relate to one another (and the words exchanged between them). The essential drama in this situation is the asymmetry of desire that obtains between the two characters, an asymmetry that keeps Viola from assenting to Olivia’s advances. That resistance is actually what forces Olivia to make these statements that are rich with I/you and me/my, since she uses these words as anchors for a broader interpretation that does not yet obtain. She really wants to say we. And Cesario doesn’t, so they remainin I/you dialogue…

    Shakespeare writes Comedies in which characters, sometimes quite perversely, find the wrong way to the ones they love. Often it is chance or an onstage helper who sorts this out. Shakespeare is actually quite reserved when it comes to showing love as naturally progressing through its obstacles unassisted. But given that in the initial stages of courtship Shakespearean lovers almost never meet and join in a perfectly symmetrical way—they don’t start out as stones set in an arch, leaning perfectly on a keystone—we should expect this asymmetry to show itself in the language. Where does it show up? It appears when a resistant individual, a “you,” prevents another “I” from arriving at an interpretation of a relationship that might be referred to as a “we” before others. Let’s call this the “resistant-you” hypothesis. Linguistically, the effect manifests itself in the assertion of the self (“FirstPerson”) and the rejection of suggested mental and emotional realities (“DenyDisclaim”).

    We’ve been finding that high frequencies of first person pronouns, and other features associated with rapid dialogue, are characteristic of most types of Early Modern comedy. But what of the implied correlative to this? If comedies are the genre of ‘I’; are tragedies the genre of ‘we’?

    A quick way to test this is to use Martin Mueller et al.’s excellent Wordhoard tool to run a log likelihood vocabulary test on Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies. This type of test takes an analysis corpus (in this case Shakespeare’s comedies), and compares it to a reference corpus (Shakespeare’s tragedies). The output flags those words that are either more or less frequent in the analysis corpus than we would expect, given the frequencies found in the reference corpus.

    The results in this case are as follows:

     

    What we are interested in here is the list of lemmas in column 1: ‘she’, ‘I’, ‘master’, ‘a’, ‘sir’ etc; and the symbol in column 3 ‘Relative use’ – which tells us if the frequency is greater (+) or less (-) than expected. (Column 4 gives the log likelihood value, and a number of asterisks indicating degree of statistical significance, but all the results we are looking at here are highly significant, so we can ignore this.)

    Behold: pronouns used more in the comedies than the tragedies are the singular ‘she’, ‘I’, ‘you’ (let’s assume these are mainly singular uses) – these are all marked + in column 3. Now look at the results for the plural pronouns ‘our’, ‘we’, ‘they’: all marked -, and so lowered in the comedies/raised in the tragedies.

    This is a very strong finding (especially considering how frequent pronouns are), and it invites further exploration of the dialogic nature of comedy in comparison with the communal nature of tragedy.
    jh/29.7.2011

  • Texts as Probability Clouds

    Electron probability density cloud of hydrogen atom

    We have thought a lot about what a “text” is in literary studies over the last few decades, spurred on by editorial theory, deconstruction, new media studies and book history. A nominalist by inclination, I tend to think of a text (real or digitized) as a provisional state of something, this other something being a hypothetical ideal or a fiction of analysis. So when I encounter a print version of a Shakespeare play, I am encountering an entity (for example, 1 Henry VI) in a state that is more or less suitable to the medium of print. But the printed play is not the performance. Nor is it whatever idea Shakespeare had when he began working with his company on the play.

    An additional complication: versions of any given Shakespeare play in print — those found in the 1623 First Folio — may contain variation at the level of the individual word or character, variation that (in the case of the Folio) is corrected during the print run. Whatever is “behind” the First Folio, then, that original is a reconstruction of something that can only be said to exist in an ideal sense. We can think of that meta-object as having a probabalistic character: different letters in particular positions have a likelihood of being x or y, for example. But in the end, the actual identity of even an individual character must be understood as a likelihood.

    None of these ideas except the last is particularly novel in Shakespeare studies. Peter Stallybrass and Margareta de Grazia, among many others, have already made the point that the sources behind Shakespeare plays are an editorial ideal — approximated in practice but unreachable in an ideal sense. Less has said, however, about the probabalistic nature of the text itself: its existence as a set of likelihoods that realized provisionally in different cases. A text as a cloud of probabilities. That’s interesting.

  • Shakespeare Quarterly Article Goes Live

    I’ve just received word that our piece in Shakespeare Quarterly has gone online via JSTOR. The illustrations for the paper copy of the article are monochrome (with the exception of the cover), while there are color illustrations in the online version. The most complete illustrations, however, including the entire Figure 9 (the “very large dendrogram”) can be found at the post below.

  • Adding Knobs to the Analysis

    A year  ago I had a conversation with Miron Livny (UW Computer Science, Morgridge Institute) about the work we’ve been doing with Docuscope, and he asked an interesting question. “Are there any knobs that can be twisted?” he asked. Livny was alluding to the fact that tagging is a static procedure: once you’ve decided what tokens will be classified as a particular type, your will always get the results you are going to get through counting. Findings are determined the instant you decide what to count, since you are only counting these things. But what about any incremental variables or procedures that might allow us to see what happens when there is more or less of something – a more or less that we, rather than the author, control?

    One idea was to systematically begin perturbing the dictionaries used by Docuscope, migrating, say, every nth word from one LAT type to the next, and doing this sequentially until one began to find results that were “more” interpretable. This would be computationally quite demanding and so a further development of our techniques in the direction of high throughput computing. But it might also raise basic questions about the nature of the dictionaries, their susceptibility to random or arbitrary re-disposition, and the sensitivity of our results to such dispositions. One might think of such an experiment as a variation on the Oulipian “N + 7” rule, and there is definitely some connection between this type of computational approach that Hope and I have been calling “iterative criticism” and the exploitation of the arbitrary one finds in Oulipo poetics, or even Burroughsian cut-up and collage.

    Mike Stumpf has found a knob to turn – the amount of a particular character’s lines in a play – and has been turning it, with some interesting results. I’ve posted some questions on the post itself, but I think it is an interesting and provocative extension of some of the techniques we have been exploring.

  • Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 Figures

    The color figures below correspond to those published in black and white in the print edition of Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, “‘The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of ‘Green Sleeves’: Digital Approaches to Shakespeare’s Language of Genre,” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (fall 2010), Special Issue: New Media Approaches to Shakespeare, edited by Katherine Rowe. These figures can also be found at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial library server.

    Figure 1 (above): A total of 776 pieces of Shakespeare’s plays from the First Folio, each piece consisting of 1,000 words, rated on two scaled PCs (1 and 4). The cumulative proportion of variation accounted for by the first four principal components is 12.33 percent, with component 1 accounting for 3.83 percent and component 4 accounting for 2.35 percent.

    Figure 2 (above): Loadings biplot for scaled PCs 1 and 4 used to create the scatterplot in Figure 1.

    Figure 3 (above): Docuscope screenshot of exemplary Comic strings from Twelfth Night, 3.1. “SelfDisclosure” and “FirstPerson” strings appear in red; “Uncertainty” in orange; “DenyDisclaim” in cyan; “DirectAddress” in blue; “LanguageReference” in violet.

    Figure 4 (above): A total of 767 1,000-word pieces of the Folio plays rated on scaled PCs 1 and 4. This image is the same as Figure 1, except that all the plays are displayed as red dots with the exception of Othello, which is displayed as blue dots and collects mostly in the upper-right-hand quadrant where the Comedies tend to cluster.

    Figure 5 (above): Docuscope screenshot illustrating exemplary Comic strings from Othello, 3.3. “SelfDisclosure” and “FirstPerson” strings appear in red; “Uncertainty” in orange; “DenyDisclaim” in cyan; “DirectAddress” in blue.

    Figure 6 (above): Docuscope screenshot illustrating exemplary Comic strings from Othello, 4.2. “SelfDisclosure” and “FirstPerson” strings appear in red; “Uncertainty” in orange; “DenyDisclaim” in cyan; “DirectAddress” in blue; “LanguageReference” in violet.

    Figure 7 (above): Docuscope screenshot illustrating exemplary History strings from Richard II, 1.3. “CommonplaceAuthority” strings appear in lime green; “Inclusiveness” in olive; “SenseProperties,” “Sense Objects,” and “Motion” in yellow.

    Figure 8 (above): Docuscope screenshot illustrating exemplary History strings from Romeo and Juliet, 1.1. “CommonplaceAuthority” strings appear in lime green; “Inclusiveness” in olive; “SenseProperties,” “Sense Objects,” and “Motion” in yellow.

    Figure 9 (above): Dendrogram produced by Ward’s clustering method on scaled data using ninety-eight LATs to profile 320 plays written between 1519 and 1659. Individual items are colored according to genre, with the exception of plays written by Shakespeare, which all appear in yellow. To examine the diagram, click on it. We are grateful to Martin Mueller at Northwestern University for providing us with the modernized versions of these texts from the TCP collection.

    The authors would like to thank the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library for its assistance in hosting these illustrations on a permanent basis. Thanks also go to Kate Fedewa for her assistance in preparing Figure 9.