As I mentioned earlier, my planned approach was to look for and analyze ways that the text follows the definition of a comedy. The definition I used was basically the idea of chaos being overcome and restored to order, the unbalanced world being brought to a balanced state, etc. This is usually manifest by lovers overcome hardship in their romance, characters being separated and reunified, lots of intertwining plots, and a happy ending. (I recommend reading the enlightening Wikipedia entry on Shakespearean comedy if you want to learn more about it.) After analyzing these aspects of the text, my intention was to interpret my findings visually, perhaps through the use of infographics, timelines, and other illustrations. It is a time-consuming process, but it is fun.
Understanding-Shakespeare.com—
In have, in the past, run across a few different visual interpretations of the text, plot, and characters of different Shakespeare plays. Recently, though, I discovered the fantastic understanding-shakespeare.com, the B.A. thesis project of Stephen Thiel. For his project, Thiel analyzed the text of Shakespeare's plays looking for patterns of use by character based upon the words they used; summarizing the plays using computer algorithms that analyze the frequency of words in the text; listing the references of the main characters to the pronouns I, you, me, and them; graphing the stage directions of the play; and visually interpreting popular quotes from the play based upon Google search results. Each of these different approaches to analysis is then represented visually. It's a very interesting way to quickly see trends and patterns in Shakespeare's plays. At the same time, it abstracts away the text itself and can leave a very interesting piece of art generated by these modes of analysis. It is quite similar to what I am working on; the difference is that I am not using any numerical analysis of the text or anything like that. My work, I think, is much more subjective.
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| Some of the work posted on understanding-shakespeare.com |
Abstraction—
At the beginning of this post, I linked to an earlier post of mine entitled "Abstraction of a Dream." In retrospect, I am not sure that I did a good job of explaining what I meant by that. I think that this is a good opportunity to do so.
I love the idea of abstracting the usual interface that we employ to interact with Shakespeare, which is the text. We use the text itself, or perhaps our interpretation of it, to derive a new way of looking at it. This is a very visual concept, but sometimes I find it useful to think of it mathematically.
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| Example of a derivative. The black line is the original, the purple line is the derivative. |
Say you have a curve on a graph. Each point of that curve has a slope. If you go through and graph the slope of that curve for each point, you get a new line on the graph. This second line is called the derivative of the first. The concept is interesting to me, because both of these lines reference the other and really cannot exist independently. Sure, you may only graph one of them, but the derivative and anti-derivative of the line will still exist, regardless of whether or not it is being displayed. I think of this as being similar to the concept of an abstraction. It is the same information being represented on a different level. It is kind of like saying, "It is the graph of the graph." Well, an abstraction is a picture of the picture. (A quick disclaimer: I know that this understanding of these concepts is not necessarily completely accurate—rather, its a subjective understanding of them that is personal to me. I am explaining this personal understanding only because I think it is relevant to the manner in which I am going to be analyzing my play.)
Value—
What is the value of doing analyses like this, or abstracting what we already have? What can we learn about the plot structure if it is graphed and interpreted in a visual fashion? If two different people were to create a visual interpretation, would they be different? How different? What sort of insights could we gain from comparing visual interpretations of the same play? I am actually very excited about this, and it has very much increased my interest in looking further into this type of visual analysis. In fact, I think I will pursue this idea further as the medium for my final project in my Shakespeare class. I don't think I will be able to give it the full amount of attention and time that I would like to for this assignment alone.
Anyways, I recommend checking out understanding-shakespeare.com. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
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