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. As in the previous passage, which dealt with Cesario’s resistance of Olivia, we have a resistant “you” here who keeps the game going. (Had she succumbed, dismissing Maria to go practice her penmanship, the dialogue would look very different: first and second person singular pronouns would most likely disappear.)
A few things worth noting about the coding in this passage. Docuscope is ignoring the single quotation marks from the Moby Shakespeare. It does not matter that these words are being “mentioned” rather than “used” in the Austinian sense: all “sightings” by Docuscope occur in a kind of weird citational indicative: there is no way for the machine to catch the fact that the speaker, Malvolio, is note really telling Olivia “Go to, thou art made.” This is a flat earth in the rhetorical sense: no ironic depth can be perceived when every item is tagged because it occurs, not because its use in a certain context means a certain thing. One should not be mislead about Docuscope’s powers of interpretation here.
Switching analogies, we might say that – like a Spinozan deity – Docuscope contemplates words from the perspective of eternity: it does not itself follow events from the standpoint of a moving present against which it measures temporally marked events as they arrive and withdraw through time. (Docuscope does not engage in phenomenological protention or retention in the Husserlian sense.) Nor does it situate events in space in any perspectivally located way. The history of what happens in the world of the play, if we were to think of it that way, is a history of “mentioned happenings.” No one does anything; rather, words are mentioned, and Docuscope keeps track of which kinds of words are used (but never how).
Another interesting feature of the passage. Malvolio really doesn’t say anything directly to Olivia in this passage: he is talking past Maria, and is reciting to Olivia what he believes she actually wants to say to him. This sort of indirection, when it is not a group effort, also seems to be contributing to the proliferation of Interaction and First Person strings: the “how,” “what,” “what” paired with the “you” “thou” “thou.” We would expect to find a lot of passages like this in other plays that have disguise and supposition, most of all in Comedy of Errors. I suspect that in the future I will be able to put my finger on a number of passages which parallel this one in terms of their performance on the comedy factor that Docuscope found for the full plays.
A final observation. Here and elsewhere in the play, Malvolio is often the one who supplies the Description strings, which as I have mentioned below, this play lacks in comparison with other plays (just as it has more, on average, Interaction and First Person). Is there anything about this passage that shows us why one cannot put one’s weight on both sides of this equation – Description on the one hand, First Person/Interaction on the other – in a single play or passage? Is there something about the comic posture, linguistically, that prevents such combinations? Malvolio and Feste are the two characters in the play who use the most Description strings, and during the fabulous speech in which Malvolio fantasizes about being married to Olivia while Toby and Maria look on, the linguistic texture of the scene is that of a History play. But as principal component analysis tells us, such moments of “historical” writing – oversimplified as the definition is – may occur occasionally in Comedy, but they will not occur repeatedly. Malvolio can only give so many such monologues, and Feste can only produce his rich, descriptive banter for so long.
But isn’t it important that there is a “dash” of Description in the play, indeed, in this passage? One issue that we need to explore as we think about what it means to find “a lot” of something in a particular type of play is what it also means to find “a little” of something. Is there a sense in which things that occur in small amounts are important as well, and if so, how should we think about those “dashes” of a certain type of word?
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 form of an exemplary passage? That is the first question I’ll be looking in the next series of posts, entitled “Comic Twelfth Night, Tragic Othello?” But there is another, more interesting question to ask, given the results we have obtained: why does Othello look to Docuscope like a comedy? Literary critics such as Susan Snyder and Stephen Orgel have noted genealogical links to comedy in this “high tragedy,” so it is particularly intriguing to find unsupervised statistical analysis of the language coming to a similar conclusion. I will try to provide more than one exemplary passage in this series of posts, since these tend to be where the analysis gets interesting (or not).
So, Twelfth Night. In terms of plot, it has three interesting devices — a set of identical twins, a shipwreck, and a disguise, all of which introduce a high degree of unintentional confusion into the action, driving it forward. In a plot that is driven on by accident and what you might call “congruent misunderstanding” (when two people don’t realize that they are speaking at cross-purposes), you expect to find a lot of back and forth between characters as they synch-up their erroneous suppositions (which is funny in and of itself), then more back and forth as they backtrack in order to rehearse why they didn’t understand what was going on when they were so deeply engaged with one another. I haven’t yet looked at the color coded play as I write this, but I expect to find the comic strings at the end, where the confusion is being unravelled, and in scenes of comic abuse (which I know from experience involves a lot of “I”/”thou” exchange characteristic of comedy). The exemplars are below, one from Open Source Shakespeare, the other a screen shot of the same passage as tagged by Docuscope:
The first thing I notice about this exchange is that it involves an extended miscommunication, culminating in the wonderful line “I am not what I am.” The doubled first person is emblematic of the doubling of Viola’s person in Cesario (or in Olivia’s apprehension of Viola as Cesario). The underlined red passages refer to the Docuscope category First Person, which as we remember from the component loadings is high in all of the items on the upper half of the scatterplot. The other type of strings that push plays upward are those underlined in blue, which are coded in Docuscope under the category of Interactions. First person is fairly self-explanatory here — look at the red items — but Interaction is worth pausing at. Notice first that question marks are being tagged here: a piece of punctuation and so not definitively Shakespearean. Maybe it matters that something that could have been added by a compositor is at work in this category, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t think question marks are as open to interpretation, grammatically, as say a comma or semicolon, but this is something for my colleague Jonathan to weigh in on. We see lots of “thee” and “thou” under Interaction, and these words seem to be the mainstay of comedy as a whole from what I’ve seen. “Thee,” “thou,” “thine,” “you,” and “your” are some of the most common words in the Shakespearean corpus that Docuscope tags, so we can be fairly sure that when we find First Person coming up as a relevant loading in a component, it is words such as “these” that are driving the underlying pattern.
Red and blue strings are pushing mostly comic plays up toward the top of the scatterplot. Yellow strings will push plays to the right, which means that the comedies clustering in the upper left exhibit a lack of yellow or Descriptive strings. The entire component that characterizes Comedy, then, is one in which First Person and Interaction strings are mutually elevated from the mean score of all plays, while Descriptive strings are (simultaneously) below the mean. Perhaps there is a reason that a linguist could provide that would explain this pattern as a general feature of the language. That is, someone might be able to show that our language is something that can only “bend” in certain ways, making it quite difficult to use a lot of concrete descriptive nouns and words describing motion or changes in states of objects while simultaneously juggling lots of I/you, my/your strings. But this would not be enough of an explanation for me. We need to say why this type of language pattern –whether or not it is constrained by limits in our grammar, cognition, or underlying semantic maps — coincides with genre classifications made by discriminating humans (Heminges and Condell, Shakespeare’s editors).
Returning the the passage above, I would point out two things. First, the quick trading of I/you, my/your strings in comic dialogue suggests a world in which predicates are being 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 here. She says, “do not extort thy reasons from this clause,” and earlier, “I would you were as I would have you be.” The “thy” and “you” here 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 traded 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, me/my, since she is using 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 remain in I/you dialogue.
So we could offer a preliminary hypothesis here. 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 begin 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? When a resistant individual, a “you,” prevents another “I” from arriving at an interpretation of their relationship that can be referred to as a “we” before others. Let’s call this the “resistant you” hypothesis. We can perhaps test it in the next passage, and in the passages we encounter from Othello.
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, both of which can be seen in the Docuscope screen shot below. We are looking at something slightly more complicated in this visualization of the text, however, because I have “turned on” the First Person and Interaction strings in the Docuscope Single Text Viewer. I did this because I want to show what cannot be shown: a relative lack of blue (Interaction) and red (First Person) strings combined with a relative abundance of yellow (Description) ones. To really “see” this in the wild, you would have to consult a completely color tagged text of the complete Folio Works and — while reading — keep track of the relative differences in quantities of blue, red and yellow in the different containers (the plays themselves). Only an Argus-eyed text tagger and a statistical analysis can do this. The results are heuristic in that they lead us toward certain areas of the text for continued interpretation. In this case, I have used the color coding facility in Docuscope to scan the entire play (once I knew the categories I was interested in) in order to find a passage like the one above: one that has lots of yellow and very little blue or red.
Inspection of such candidate “History” passages reveals a number of pedantic exchanges like this one between Sir Nathaniel, Holofernes and Dull. This scene is a hilarious sendup of of rhetorical display and vacuous learning, and it burlesques the famous Renaissance idea of verbal variety or copia that was recommended by Erasmus. It makes sense that this kind of passage would withdraw the play from the type of comic verbal interaction analyzed in the previous post. Because these characters are not speaking with one another, but rather are addressing an invisible audience of discerning rhetorical literates, there is not much interaction in the form of second person pronouns or corresponding first person singular pronouns — the very strings one would tend to find in Comic exchanges about acts or actions taken by characters themselves.
We expect this kind of thing from the pedants, but the analysis reveals a continuity of this History-like pattern among the French nobles who have vowed to live a life of Platonic study, characters like Biron who can never resist plumping their own rhetorical plumage. Don Armado, another parodic figure with an almost Quixotic appreciation for his own courtly expression, is also linguistically self-indulgent, and his passages would look similar to the one I have excerpted here and shown color coded below (although with Don Armado, there are marginally more interactions with his Page). The point of this analysis is to show that there are reasons why Docuscope would place Love’s Labour’s Lost with the Histories, and these reasons make sense to us once we begin to think about how the play is put together. This is a world of narcissists, something the Princess and her ladies point out when they defer the proposed courtship that is offered at the end of the play. That narcissism shows itself as a tendency to monologue, which cuts out the interaction that is characteristic of comedy and highlights instead a description-rich kind of oration that pushes these plays into the realm of History.
Would it be fair then to call Love’s Labour’s Lost a History? It depends. I would be comfortable saying that on the level of plot it has the elements of a Comedy, but on the level of its language, it is a History.
What, then, do we make of the historical decision made by Heminges and Condell to call this play a Comedy? Unsupervised statistical analysis has shown us (1) a pattern of groupings among the plays that roughly approximates at least two of H&Cs generic groupings of 1623 but also (2) exceptions to those classifications that make a certain amount of critical sense when we look at the construction of those plays. I would argue that we need an ontology here to sort out what elements of the analysis are fundamental as opposed to derivative. We could have an ontology of levels, for example, which says that “on the linguistic level, the play belongs with one group,” but “on the level of plot, the play belongs with another group.”
But eventually we would have to decide how the levels go together. That is also part of the point of this kind of work, since the overlap-with-divergence of linguistic and historical groupings of the plays introduce the possibility that there are levels of coherence here whose interaction needs to be explained. The language of levels needs a compliment in a theory of objects: what are the things that are being compared here? Aren’t the tagged texts themselves a kind of hypothetical or abstracted version of the text itself? And what is the relationship between this hypothetical object and those that are arrayed into a generic group by, say, the historical editors of the First Folio? I will try, in future posts, to show why these are not trivial metaphysical questions.
By way of preview, however, I think the most fundamental “level” here is the one on which individuals or groups make decisions and act. So I would say that Heminges and Condell’s decision about how to order the plays in the First Folio is the most real thing in the analysis, while the statistical objects (tagged texts, Principal Components, regions of a scatterplot) are derivative. How else could we be “surprised” to find LLL clustering with the Histories, unless we were already enticed by the idea (as I was) that the initial clusterings themselves coincided with the classes stipulated by Shakespeare’s editors? More interesting: what is the abstract recipe of family resemblances or species traits that human beings like Heminges and Condell are carrying around in their heads? Their decision to sort the plays a certain way is real. It is a historical fact. But the “sensibility” or “weightings” that led them to take this empirical action must itself be hypothesized or modeled. We might be able to reconstruct this model, but even H&C may not have had direct access to it. This detour might change the way we think about the status of our statistical model, since that model may be only an approximation of something far more comprehensive — capacity for literary judgment in historical actors — whose dynamic, differential powers of comparison are suggestively approximated things like “principal components.”
The latitude in linguistic practice that makes Loves Labour’s Lost look like a History is evidently something that Heminges and Condell did not notice, and I’m not sure why they should have. But once we have noticed it, this latitude in terms of linguistic practice may makes sense to us. Why couldn’t there be a filiation of Love’s Labour’s Lost with Histories on the level of stance and language that does not “show up” on the level of plot? Surely this filiation is real too. The question is, where and on what level?
The passage from Richard II 3.3 above, taken from the Open Source Shakespeare, is statistically speaking particularly illustrative of some of the things that Shakespeare does when he writes History plays. While it is tempting to go straight to Docuscope and the statistics, it is better to post the passage without any markup, since we don’t want to prejudge what is going on in the language here. So, we read the passage.
One of the things I have been saying about working with statistics and texts is that statistics can tell you that there is a pattern, but only a human being can tell you what that pattern is. The what/that distinction is crucial if we want to be precise about the division of labor that occurs in this kind of work. It is easy to think that statistics have “found” something from out of nowhere in the text, when what is really going on is that they have found “something,” and this something is a reflection of prior decisions we have made about what is worth counting. Perhaps it will become clearer as postings on this blog continue why this distinction is important. For now I’ll try to be as accurate as we can about why this is “History writing:” this is a piece of History because a certain class of words that Docuscope counts are more abundantly present here than in plays of other genres. Now let’s go to the same passage as marked up by Docuscope. (Click on the image to get a good look.)
The underlined words here and in other passages of Richard II are the ones that are responsible for “driving” this and other history plays to the right hand side of the scatterplot from the previous post. These words all belong to a cluster called “Description” in Docuscope’s taxonomy, one that contains various subcategories that are not visible to us at this level of the analysis. (Short story why: with only 36 plays to look at, we need for statistical reasons to be looking for fewer classes of things-to-count than items-in-which-to-count-them. In statistics-speak: we can’t have the number of variables exceed the number of observations.) What kind of words does Docuscope count as “Description?” The best answer is: “the words that are underlined in yellow here.” Jonathan Hope and I have tried to remain agnostic about the explanatory power of the names that have been given to Docuscope’s categories and just look at what the words, as a collection, are doing on the page. But you can begin to guess what the rationale cluster is here: they are words that describe the properties of objects (“little,” “small”), objects themselves (“dish,” “wood”), spatial relations (“buried in the”), and verbs showing changes of physical state (“sighs,” “lodge”). Notice that some strings here are contiguous word seqments, such as “buried in the.” Docuscope can count strings from 1-10 words in length, and counts 200 million of them, classifying them into up to 101 categories at its finest level of resolution.
In this case I have consulted the results of the Principal Component Analysis (see last post), in particular the component loadings shown below, which tell me what cluster does the most work in pulling plays that score highly on PC1 to the right in the scatterplot we were looking at. On the left hand of the loadings chart below, we are looking at the various clusters that Docuscope counts by their cluster names. In the columns to the right, we are seeing the “loadings” of each of these clusters on the different components (PC1-PC5) that carve up the variation within Shakespeare’s writings into underlying patterns. As you can see from the bold item under PC1, Description is overwhelmingly powerful in the first component, scoring 0.913 on a scale from 0 to 1. The yellow underlined items above are those that were tagged as Description by Docuscope, which I know from having pulled up the play in Docuscope’s single text viewer and “turning on” only the items in this cluster (the yellow one on the left) so that I could find a passage that had a lot of yellow in it. (I picked this passage by eyeballing the play for yellowness. We are developing an algorithm to identify exemplary passages of different lengths using a hands-off statistical method; but for now we can use this.) So these words or tokens tell us why the pink dots in the biplot are moved to the right of the origin. But why do they move down? That is the work of PC2, and to understand that, we must look once again at the component loadings:
Component Loadings from Principal Component Analysis of Shakespeare Plays in R
Now components can be combinations of correlated high and low items — a bit like a trend in a fixed deck of cards which has lots of face cards but very few low numbered cards. The loadings on a principal component can work in a similar way: a component, that is, can pull out a pattern in which Docuscope finds that plays containing lots of Emotion strings (as in PC3) also tend to have a lack of “Special Referencing” strings. This tells us that when Shakespeare does one thing, he is constrained — by genre, expectation, the limits of his actors, taste, style — not to do others. Explaining why this must be the case is for me perhaps the most interesting aspect of working quantitatively with the plays. Now, for PC2: it shows a corellation of high amounts of “First Person” strings with another group of strings called “Interaction.” Because the history plays cluster at the bottom right of the scatterplot, they score low on the second factor, and so lack the items that are highly loaded on this component. (Here we are focusing on boldfaced loadings that are greater than + or – 0.4, a significant statistical threshold.) So PC2 is really describing something that History plays lack: something that you probably wouldn’t look for when reading these plays, but which nevertheless is important to their construction and your experience of them. It is now time to find an un-Historical — untimely? — piece of Richard II that has these First Person and Interactivity strings: this item may show us, by negative example, what History plays and this play do not generally do in comparison to other plays.
Having read through the passage above, we can now look at how it was marked up by Docuscope. Remember that speech prefixes and stage directions have been stripped off of the Moby Shakespeare (which is the same one used by Open Source Shakespeare displayed above).
I have highlighted the Interaction and First Person strings from this passage in Richard II 4.1 that are atypical for history plays, and I think this is an interesting result. First Person includes the first person singular pronouns, first person possessive pronouns, but also references that relate actions or events to a speaker who is marking his or her relationship to those actions or events (“Make me,” “to me”). (Another post will deal with the question of the perspective from which utterances appear as marked; I suspect that Docuscope treats all terms as if they are being “mentioned” according to J.L. Austin’s criteria: use would be a far more complicated thing to tag.) Interaction includes several items, but here the ones that are shown are second person pronouns and possessive pronouns and verbs attached to such pronouns indicating something like recognition of a social relation or mediation (“mayst thou,” “Your care”). Notice that Docuscope is picking up a few archaic forms (“thee” and “mayst”). So what is it that Histories in general lack, but that this passage in particular has in an atypically high degree? The most accurate answer is: the underlined words. Principal Component Analysis tells us that there is a lower proportion of these strings in the Histories than in plays of other genres and says, in a mathematically defensible way, that this “lower” proportion is probably not-accidental. But it is our job to say what is going on, and perhaps why, not simply that something is the case. And so my provisional description (which is always a shorthand form of analysis) of this trend would be the following: History plays lack the verbal back and forth over personal matters and fortunes that is more common in other Shakespearean dramatic texts, a back and forth which seems to correlate — in its absence — with a high degree of concrete language about things and events. That’s what Docuscope “sees” when it sees History plays. I see stories about groups of people rather than individuals, stories whose action revolves around physical rather than emotional conflicts and so requires the description of concrete objects and events. The interpersonal or you-me back and forth style, on the other hand, is reserved for another of Shakespeare’s genres, one that lacks extensive descriptions of objects and things: his Comedies. Shakespeare’s Comedies will be the subject of another post. The next one, however, will treat an entire play that is high in what Histories have and low in what Histories lack, but is not itself a History: Shakespeare’s early comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost.
The following image, produced using the statistical package R, represents the position of the plays from Shakespeare’s First Folio according patterns discerned using inferential statistics. The plays themselves were “tagged” by Docuscope and then the frequency scores of each play were analyzed with standard unsupervised statistical procedures (prcomp, center=True, scale=False), producing two principal components that define underlying patterns of correlation and opposition in Shakespeare’s use of certain kinds of words in different genres. In this post, the first of several, I want to discuss what can be learned from such a map and how it either confirms or diverges from current critical understandings of Shakespeare’s genres as understood by Shakespeare’s contemporaries or later critics (who became interested in the so called “Late Plays”).
The first thing to notice is that these two components are doing a reasonable job of separating out at least two types of plays — Comedies and Histories — by placing them in opposite corners of the scatterplot. The two scatterplots you see here are really the same scatter viewed from two positions, so we will concentrate on the one in the upper right, which rates the plays on Principal Component 1 (PC1) on the horizontal axis and Principal Component 2 (PC2) on the vertical axis. In Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the earlier components tend to “suck up” more variation than later ones, which means they define progressively less powerful avenues for simplifying relationships among the variable — here, the types of words Shakespeare uses (or doesn’t use) in different types of plays. So PC1 does an excellent job of pushing the pink circles, the Histories, to the right of the scatter, which means they all use a proportionally higher degree of the types of words that are either favored or shunted by this factor. (More anon.) Note that the pink dots are plays classed as Histories in the First Folio, except for one green dot which is Henry VIII (we’ve pulled out four “late plays” in green: Henry VIII, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale and Tempest). PC2 finished the job, pushing these histories down on the vertical axis and so partitioning them (roughly) in the lower right-hand corner of the scatter. Here we would say that the Histories or pink dots have comparatively fewer of the types of words favored by PC2 (and more of the words that it discriminates against). Think of components, then, as representing correlations of things that Shakespeare does and doesn’t do over the course of all his writing published in F: later we will see how his choice of one type of word — for example, first person singular pronouns — almost always “goes with” a lack of other types of words. Here the point is to show that a basic pattern emerges with so called unsupervised statistical techniques, the most powerful because they do not use any groupings provided by us, but rather look for latent patterns among the words classed by Docuscope.
Let’s “believe” what we’re seeing here and assume that these linguistic patterns correspond to something like the genre distinctions that Shakespeare’s editors, Heminges and Condell, saw when they classed the plays into three genres on the contents page of the First Folio. (Hope and I have argued for this assumption elsewhere.) Now there are two ways to proceed at this point. We could provide a spreadsheet detailing the loadings of the variables on each of the components, which would be interesting to you if you already knew Docuscope well and had a decent sense of how PCA works. But a more immediately useful thing to do would be to show passages that contain lots of the tagged words that are pulling the plays in these different directions — the one’s that “magnetize” the plays into groups, so to speak — so that we can have a sense of what is an “exemplary” History passage according to PCA, or an exemplary Comedy passage. (Note that the comedies are also being situated in the opposite quadrant — the upper left — from the histories: this is a pattern we see again and again at different levels of analysis.) So what does a historical passage look like from Richard II? What, more interestingly, does a “historical” passage look like from Love’s Labour’s Lost, which is “out of its quadrant” here? What does a typically comic passage from Twelfth Night look like? And what kind of passages in Othello are pushing it up into the comic quadrant? Do these “correct” and “incorrect” classings make sense to us from a literary critical standpoint? It has been claimed before that Othello contain many elements of Shakespeare’s comedy writing, so this would be a good place to start thinking about the value of statistically assisted linguistic analysis of genre, which I will do in the next post. (Jonathan may join in with comments, which will make this more of a back and forth.)
