Many intriguing things to respond to in recent postings by Jonathan and Heather, but I’ll\u00a0begin with the observation that chimes most clearly with the work we’ve been doing in the rehearsal room this week. The strongest note of recognition comes from the increased usage of terms of address that Jonathan \u00a0has observed.<\/p>\n
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To reiterate the point from Jonathan’s post, there is a fairly tight social group presented in\u00a0Much Ado About Nothing<\/i>: although we move through the social scale from a don, the Prince of Aragon, down to Hugh Oatcake of the watch, the characters we meet in the play seem fairly comfortable interacting with one another.\u00a0 By that I mean we don’t see any obvious rift between social groups, there are no real strangers in the midst, no-one truly flouting convention, no licensed fool (unless you count Beatrice and Benedick) and no magical creatures or gods to challenge human hubris. Cupid seems to get name-checked as often as any Christian God and in fact, while we are in that realm, it’s interesting to note that there seems to be very little sense of any higher power at all (save for a few Biblical references and the presence of a fairly worldly Friar). \u00a0What we do have in our story is Don Pedro of Aragon and a small group of soldiers, who arrive at the home of Leonato and his family.\u00a0 They agree to stay a month and everyone seems reasonably comfortable with this arrangement.\u00a0 The ensuing marriages, friendships, confidences and liaisons (actual and possible) during their stay seem ‘easy’, in the sense that they cause no social ructions or conflicts when they are proposed, discussed or realised.<\/p>\n
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What we see, instead of a particularly broad social sweep, is that the narrowness of this social group seems to create a culture of anxiety, one of jealousy and rivalry, a place of comparison, ambition and social climbing.\u00a0 Claudio’s new honours from the wars are glories born of Don John’s overthrow (potentially even thwarting an attempted coup or challenge to the Prince\u2019s authority), and it seems that this resentment fuels, if not causes, Don John’s actions against Claudio in the thwarting of his marriage.\u00a0 His ally in the plotting, Borachio, is branded as “deformed” (dressing in a way he should not, namely above his social standing) for “going up and down like a gentleman”.\u00a0\u00a0 Then of course there are the many other disguises and tricks that are enacted during the play, where characters take on the guise of another person, which from the first creates the chief anxiety in the world of the play, that of being supplanted or more specifically cuckolded.<\/p>\n
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This for the most part is the great big nothing there\u2019s such an ado about.\u00a0 Claudio \u2013 even though Don Pedro (his Prince, companion and friend) swears he will woo Hero \u2018in his name\u2019, is quick to believe that this friend has actually wooed for himself and is seen to be \u201cof that jealous complexion\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 It is therefore no surprise to me that in this world of demob happy men where status is in a state of flux, people are keen to lock down identity where they can and name their roles to one another, to be known by their status or familial connection: \u00a0Prince, Count, Cousin, Brother, Signor, Father, Master Constable, Friend.<\/p>\n
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Even in the town scenes where we meet the watch (or more specifically the\u00a0Prince\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0Watch), where the social scale is further compacted, there are tussles over who\u2019s who.\u00a0 To write and read gives one some added status, but beyond this \u2013 and perhaps the respect that comes with age – there is no end of wrangling with plenty of intricacies amongst the sirs, sirrahs, friends, neighbours and the corrective \u201cI am a gentleman\u201d from Conrad. These can be played and received with varying degrees on sincerity or mocking of course, as we would today with the use of \u00a0‘mate’.<\/p>\n
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For Beatrice and Benedick and their dance toward marriage, they separately name and reiterate their roles as confirmed batchelors during the first half of the play and spend the second half working out how they might reinvent themselves if they volte face from those roles. \u00a0Even so, with the fairly constant titles of Lady Beatrice\u00a0and Signor Benedick many of their verbal parries involve name-calling or rechristening one another – Signor Mountanto, Lady Disdain, the Prince’s Jester – so that their playfulness parodies the society around them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
#MuchAdo #AboutData update 3<\/p>\n
The cast are now well into rehearsals, and you can see photos on\u00a0@PallantPallant<\/a>‘s twitter feed.<\/p>\n Meanwhile the data miners are about to get on planes to go to the Renaissance Society of America meeting in New York (#rsa14<\/a>).\u00a0Here’s a contribution from @heatherfro<\/a>\u00a0on the big pronoun question:<\/p>\n This is really interesting for me, though I can’t yet explain why – I suspect there’s something to be said about agency here.<\/p>\n After much\u00a0I\/me<\/i>\u00a0discussion between Benedick and Beatrice, we want her to be ending with Benedick by saying\u00a0we<\/i>, she doesn’t say\u00a0we<\/i>\u00a0after Act Two, Scene I (2.i.45, 2.1.139; previously there’s one instance of\u00a0we<\/i>\u00a0in 1.i.54). Benedick is the one to say it**, declaring:<\/p>\n \u00a0Benedick:<\/b>\u00a0Come, come, we are friends: let’s have a dance\u00a0ere we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts\u00a0and our wives’ heels.<\/p>\n (5.iv.117-118) and this raises more agency questions for me … I wonder what Emma \u00a0can say about Beatrice’s role, especially at the end of the play?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n **Note by JH: my reading of these lines is that the\u00a0we<\/i>\u00a0here is Benedick and Claudio, not Benedick and Beratrice – though the point stands, as Benedick uses a plural pronoun to refer to himself and Beatrice at 5.iv.91-2:<\/p>\n \u00a0A miracle! Here’s our own hands against our hearts!<\/p>\n \u00a0He immediately shifts back into the singular as the two re-establish their witty antagonism:<\/p>\n \u00a0Come, I will have thee, but by this light I take thee for pity.<\/p>\n \u00a0And Beatrice, perhaps true to character, never shifts:<\/p>\n \u00a0Beatrice<\/b>: I would not deny you, but by this good day I yield upon great persuasion – and partly to save your life, for I was\u00a0told you were in a consumption.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n #MuchAdo #AboutData update 2 (scroll down for the intro to these posts)<\/p>\n The previous finding was about the pronoun ‘she’. This one also uses Log-likelihood to identify words used far more frequently in\u00a0Much Ado<\/em> than they are in Shakespeare’s other work.<\/p>\n While ‘she’ is the highest scoring word on Log-likelihood, maybe more striking is a run of words that come next:<\/p>\n signor<\/p>\n prince<\/p>\n count<\/p>\n lady<\/p>\n don<\/p>\n cousin<\/p>\n brother<\/p>\n daughter<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Aside from the last two, these are all *very* significantly raised: and they clearly share a function\/meaning in that they are terms of address. Some (signor, don) might be said to be plot-related, in that they may reflect the particular setting of\u00a0Much Ado<\/em> – but that’s not true for most, and the finding is very robust (they are all strongly raised, even those not associated with this particular setting).<\/p>\n My initial explanation for this is that this tracks a relatively unusual format\u00a0Much Ado<\/em> has (unusual compared to Shakespeare’s other work): i.e., it depicts a relatively large group of relatively equal social status interacting relatively equally (note the relativelies!) – and does so in lots of prose. My impression is that most other plays focus on smaller groups, and feature interactions up and down the social scale more. There’s an unusually ‘flat’ social structure in\u00a0Much Ado<\/em> – and this is reflected in the profusion of address terms. I think there may be a comparison with City comedy to be made here, but that’s for later posts.<\/p>\n I wonder if Emma and the rest of the cast have noticed anything that chimes with this?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n #MuchAdo #AboutData update 1<\/p>\n Word frequency findings:\u00a0Loglikelihood<\/a>\u00a0(done with\u00a0Wordhoard<\/a>)<\/p>\n Method: this test looks at word frequency in the play, but not simple frequency (which is often not that interesting: words like \u2018the\u2019 and \u2018and\u2019 are the most frequent in every play).<\/p>\n What it looks for is words that are used more frequently or less frequently in the play than you would expect given Shakespeare\u2019s usage in his other work. The program counts the totals for each word in the play (= \u2018the analysis sample\u2019) and compares them to the totals for the same words in all of Shakespeare (= \u2018the reference sample\u2019).<\/p>\n It looks for big rises or falls, and adjusts these against the overall frequency of the word to give a score for how unusual the result is, and how likely it is to be due to chance or not (significance). Results unlikely to be due to chance are given stars: highest rating is four stars.<\/p>\n In this test\u00a0I excluded names, since it isn\u2019t very interesting to find that Shakespeare uses Beatrice more in\u00a0Much Ado<\/i>\u00a0than he does in his other work.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Standout findings<\/p>\n Finding 1.1<\/p>\n The word* with the biggest shift in usage compared to Shakespeare\u2019s norm is the pronoun \u2018she\/her\u2019 \u2013 with a significance rating of four stars, it is raised in this play way over its frequency elsewhere. To give you a sense of how much it is raised, Shakespeare normally uses \u2018she\u2019 53 times every 10,000 words. In\u00a0Much Ado<\/i>, he uses it 131 times every 10,000 words.<\/p>\n There are just over 21,000 words in\u00a0Much Ado<\/i>. Let\u2019s call that 20,000 for simplicity. This means Shakespeare uses \u2018she\u2019 around 262 times in the play. If he was behaving normally, he\u2019d use it 106 times.<\/p>\n This is a big shift \u2013 an already frequent word is used two and a half times as often.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n It is tempting to wonder if female characters are more prominent in\u00a0Much Ado<\/i>: are there more of them? Do they speak more lines? (We’ll ask\u00a0Heather Froehlich<\/a>\u00a0if she has suggestions re this.)<\/p>\n But this result isn\u2019t necessarily telling us that. What it tells us is that women are\u00a0referred to<\/i>\u00a0more frequently in this play. Maybe it\u2019s just that men talk\u00a0about<\/i>\u00a0women a lot \u2013 or maybe men and women talk about women.<\/p>\n Anyway: there’s the first finding. Now over to Emma in the rehearsal room…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n *I did this search on \u2018lemma\u2019, which automatically includes different forms of the \u2018same\u2019 word \u2013 so \u2018she\u2019 and \u2018her\u2019 are counted together.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We’ve posted<\/a> in the past about advising actors at Shakespeare’s Globe in London on the language of plays they are rehearsing.\u00a0This is the first in an experimental series of short posts building on that process.<\/p>\n I’m going to be running some analyses on the language of Much Ado About Nothing<\/em>\u00a0and discussing the results with Emma Pallant (@PallantPallant), who will be playing Beatrice in a Globe touring production this year (2014).<\/p>\n Emma is an outstanding, and really thoughtful, actor (who crops up on the cover of this book<\/a> on women making Shakespeare) -so whether I come up with anything interesting or not, the production is sure to be worth seeing.\u00a0If you are in the UK, or Austria, there’s a chance the production will be close to you at some point in spring\/summer (details of venues and ticket booking\u00a0here<\/a>).<\/p>\n We’ll also tweet about the data, using the hashtags #MuchAdo #AboutData<\/p>\n As a teaser\/taster, click on the image at the top of this post for a quick overview of the distribution of the word ‘she’ across the play. Notice anything?<\/p>\n Jonathan (@wellsheisnt)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" #MuchAdo #AboutData update 4 Emma Pallant writes: Many intriguing things to respond to in recent postings by Jonathan and Heather, but I’ll\u00a0begin with the observation that chimes most clearly with the work we’ve been doing in the rehearsal room this week. The strongest note of recognition comes from the increased usage of terms of address […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[162,161,164,163,113],"class_list":["post-1850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shakespeare","tag-aboutdata","tag-muchado","tag-emma-pallant","tag-much-ado-about-nothing","tag-shakespeares-globe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1850"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1902,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850\/revisions\/1902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"she_much_ado_Cast\"](\"http:\/\/winedarksea.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/she_much_ado_Cast.png\")
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