This Thing of Darkness (Part III)

To finish this trio of posts, I would like to provide a response to Mike Witmore’s post at Wine Dark Sea labeled Shakespeare Out of Place?.  In this post Witmore notes that “when we did a further study of the clusters containing works by Shakespeare, we noticed that their elevated levels of two different LATs that dealt with punctuation – TimeDate and LanguageReference – was an artifact of hand modernization.”  These two Language Attribute Types (LATs) lie within the Docuscope’s Dimensions of Narrative Time and Reference Language and Docuscope’s Clusters of Narrative and Special Referencing respectively.  Witmore notes the difference between the clustering of Shakespeare’s plays among their contemporaries before and after the emendation of these LATs.  I must presume that Witmore also chose to use Ward’s Test at the LAT level of Docuscope’s output in JMP to create his diagrams, since he doesn’t mention adjusting any of the Dimensions or Clusters so therefore wouldn’t have changed diagrams.  I created similar diagrams to reflect on the diagrams I created when first starting out, for my post Epic.  For that post, I made a diagram looking solely at Shakespeare’s corpus in the First Folio.  I then recreated the experiment a second time, but left out the two LATs mentioned by Witmore above.  Both portraits are side by side for comparison below.

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To Be or Not To Be a Romance

Whilst going over older materials I have stored, I came across an article by Witmore and Hope dealing with the Romances or Late Plays of Shakespeare.  It was a journal in Early Modern Tragicomedy (2007), the twenty-second installment of the “Studies in Renaissance Literature” series.   In it, Witmore and Hope write that John Fletcher’s “definition of genre not only specifies what must be in a play to qualify it for membership in a genre, but also what it must lack”.  Fletcher’s postulation of what must be present, but also not present, to belong to a genre is similar to what I tested in my last post by adding and removing the characters that plays were named after.  In review, it was a mixed bag of results leading towards both the idiolects of the play’s main characters and the texture of plays themselves as the primary reasons for clustering.  However Witmore and Hope’s article sparked a new thought process in my head.  Since readers and critics as far back in time as Fletcher have noted the peculiar differences between the Romances and the rest of Shakespeare’s corpus, does that mean by following Fletcher’s formula that adding or subtracting characters will affect a play’s genre classification?  One of Witmore’s earliest views from Docuscope was a simplified dendrogram noting a genre specific clustering result from an unbiased word tagging program.  I have since noticed particular genre related movement in the Romeo and Juliet post, but I am now trying to combine a three hundred year-old literary critic’s mind with a modern machine’s processes.  In sum, I wish to determine if the idiolects of the main characters assist the Romances in clustering differently from the rest of Shakespeare’s corpus and whether or not the isolation of these particular characters’ lines from the whole play reacts with the genre specific clustering already present.