Why Shakespeare?
At the outset, I'd like to say I'm not an expert on Shakespeare, neither have I studied Shakespeare in depth. But my inspiration for doing this project was out of sheer respect, and curiosity. I was curious how Shakespeare stayed relevant; or if not that, at least talked about. A lot of themes and arcs from my favourite pieces of art; be it film or writing, have been inspired from Shakespeare. I wanted to find out patterns in his writing, his precarious usage of words. His use of the five act structure in his plays has been a central point of analysis in my project. The change of sentiment in his sonnets is also something that has been explored.
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
What does the data tell us?
A Shakespearean play consists of five acts that correspond to changes in the narrative of the play. In many of the plays, by looking at the changes in polarity of sentiment across the acts, we are able to ascertain which kind of Shakespearean play it is.
These plays are categorised as either comedies, tragedies or historical plays.
A tragedy is marked by a steady rise or a build up of sentiment till the middle acts, and then a sharp drop is seen.
In the case of Romeo and Juliet for example, the polarity of dialogues decreases after a rising of action.
More tragedies that follow the pattern :
But then again, not all follow such patterns. In the case of Julius Caesar, the last act comprises of the rise of Octavius and Antony. Though Julius Caesar is a tragedy, it isn’t that much so, from the perspective of Octavius. Maybe that explains the rise in polarity in the last act.
Comedies on the other hand end almost more positively than they began, or more positively than the act in which a crisis was introduced, unlike a tragedy that decays to a lower sentiment polarity. ‘As you like it’ follows a similar pattern.
Historical plays almost always converge to a larger polarity than at which it started.
Note that there are discrepancies. The language used by Shakespeare, or for the matter any novelist, is often highly allegorical, so proper sentiment analysis is rather difficult. The fact that patterns emerge despite such barriers is tempting; we should not be hasty in declaring that a definite pattern exists. Correlation does not imply causation. Having said that, it also doesn’t mean that this analysis was for naught. We have gained valuable insight into how a five act structure in a play is constructed. Whether it be comedy, historical or a tragedy, a Shakespearean play is never monotonous. Not only tonal changes, but a discernable change in sentiment, and that too, recognised by a program! I find it amazing that every act is so distinct from the other in its usage of words! Any narrative must be constructed in such a way.
Sonnets
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, and these were of varying themes. We plot the overall polarity of every sonnet on this plot.. An interesting observation here is that the first group of sonnets has an overall polarity of 0.24 compared to the polarity 0.15 shown by the following sonnets. This could be due to the fact that the first 17 sonnets are traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to the young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation. Other sonnets express the speaker's love for the young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name. The later sonnets take on a relatively darker tone compared to the initial sonnets
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