James Lee is Assistant Professor of English, and Co-Director of the Digital Scholarship Center at the University of Cincinnati. His work has been published in
Jason Lee is a software engineer experienced with the tools of the internet, analytics, and big data. He has worked in a spectrum of industries and is currently in financial services.
This is the source
We propose that network visualization is a digital humanities method that can
Argues that network visualization can bridge text and performance in the study of Shakespeare.
Hence the question may legitimately be asked whether the space for discontinuity between text and performance was not used quite significantly. Was it, perhaps, potentially a site in which cultural difference between imaginary representations and physicality in performance could be presented, explored, negotiated, released, or otherwise delivered?
Robert Weimann has suggested that bridging the discontinuous
space between the literary
text and the theatrical performance would require us to reimagine the gap
between the two media as a productive site of cultural negotiation,
rather than an irreconcilable
methodological divide
Our network visualizations quantify from the beginning to the end of each scene
in Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays the number of words and lines spoken by each
character, which characters interact by responding to one another (i.e. if
character A speaks, and character B replies, the program counts this as a
reciprocal exchange of language) and how frequently the two characters interact
by this response mechanism. Here we have adapted Emma Pierson’s counting method,
which measures network interaction by counting the number of lines of A
spoken immediately after B, and vice versa, and summing them
The networks lead us to a new vantage point on Shakespeare’s dramatic art,
allowing us to revise a longstanding view that his plays draw their power from
the subversive portrayal of social disorder, either in the form of the
carnivalesque or as the conflict and
waste
of tragic violence. The network visualizations reveal a new,
more subtle logic of enantiosis, or
The attempt to use digital humanities tools to span the methodological distance
between textual criticism and theater studies responds directly to the recent
critical project exemplified by Lukas Erne, Patrick Cheney, David Scott Kastan,
and Peter Stallybrass, among many others, which has recuperated a vision of
Shakespeare as a literary artist, who did not simply write plays for theatrical
production, as the commonplace assumption has long held (reading
is used both
purposefully and provocatively here, since Shakespeareans have traditionally
recognized the limits of reading the plays as only one part of the range of
signification made possible by the text. As Gary Taylor, editor of the Oxford
editions of Shakespeare’s complete works, famously puts it, the written text depended upon an
unwritten para-text…an invisible life-support system of stage
directions, which Shakespeare could either expect his first readers (the
actors) to supply, or which those first readers would expect Shakespeare
to supply orally
ninety percent
of the materiality of
performance and staging lies beyond the scope of literary critics. The plain fact of the matter,
which has been ignored by most editors and by many academic critics, is
that while better than ninety percent of the dialogue text can be
recovered, with a good degree of accuracy, for most surviving plays of
the Elizabethan period, ninety percent of what actually happened on
stage in their performance is not to be found in the stage-directions of
any manuscript or printed text, or in the occasional descriptions of
performances, and illustrations. The actors’ movements, quite apart from
their body language, their positioning and grouping (what directors call
blocking
) and their business with props, is largely
unrecoverable terra incognita.avatars
to allow users to position characters on a virtual
stage. However, this tool does not base the organization of space on the
text of plays.
Recent work in the theory of dramatic narrative, however, offers an alternative
by not foreclosing performance from the gaze of the critic (they
tell us much about their understanding of the relationship between author
and production…in short, they tell us how and to what degree we should be
reading toward performance
both play and production,
or representational acting and
presentational playing
design for performance,
reading toward performance
and the corresponding trend in Shakespeare criticism is the latter’s emphasis on
space and not narrative (stage geography
where bodies act as signifiers in
theatre
Franco Moretti and his Literary Lab have participated in this effort to
understand the playtext as a stage geography
proposed by Lin. However,
unlike Shakespearean performance space critics such as Lin, Tiffany Stern and
Mariko Ichikawa, who employ a materialist method, the Literary Lab fashioned
networks as a way to analyze the space structured by the text of
a character-system arising out of many character-spaces
character-space,to borrow Alex Woloch’s terminology
perception of the plotby turning the interaction between characters into an array
visiblein space, and not just as the readerly printed text. His use of networks to examine the
character-spaceinscribed within the play moves the study of space as the medium linking the literary text and theatrical performance in a provocative new direction.
The present argument builds on the work of Moretti, but our visualization method
defines and constructs the Shakespearean networks differently than the Literary
Lab and other existing analyses of literary networks. A scan of previous network
methods would be useful here to sharpen the contrast with our own techniques. In
his pamphlet, Moretti defines a network as made of vertices and
edges...basically, two characters are linked if some words have passed
between them: an interaction is a speech act
The network structure calculations
were obtained by treating each speaking character as a node, and deeming
two characters to be linked if there was at least one time slice of the
play in which both were present (that is, if two characters spoke to
each other or were in each other’s presence, then they have a
link).
explicit
data - some words passed
between characters - as a measurement of social interaction, whereas Stiller, et
al. infer implicit
relationships as well, by using both verbal exchange (if two characters spoke to each other
) or
silent proximity on stage (if they were in each other’s presence
) by writing a computer program to
count how many lines each pair of characters in
There are strengths and weaknesses to each of these prior network methods.
Moretti’s use of explicit
ties in language is a concrete and specific way to mark interaction, but he
admits that some questionable
decisions
were made in the study since he concedes that the edges
between characters
are not weighted
:
when Claudius tells Horatio in
the graveyard scene,
I pray thee, good
Horatio, wait upon him
, these eight words have in this Figure
exactly the same value as the four thousand words exchanged between Hamlet
and Horatioexactly
the same value
paints a picture that can’t be right.
Amounting to what he calls
the childhood of network
theory...before the stern adulthood of statistics,
Moretti recounts
a struggle to find a non-clumsy way
to visualize weight
of the speech between characters, and as a consequence, the networks in
(his) study were all made by hand.
He adopted this approach to
construct his networks since machine-gathering of the data, essential to large-scale quantification, was
not yet a realistic possibility
speech act.
The measurement of
some words
exchanged
between characters defines an imprecise approximation of how language structures
the links in the network.
In the case of the paper by Stiller, et al., the primary advantage of their
approach lies in the attempt to include implicit
stage presence alongside explicit
spoken language, but as in the case of the Literary Lab’s
network analysis, the problem of a lack of weighting arises. Their networks deem
two characters to be linked if there was
The >1 instance
approach treats a single encounter as being identical to many recurring
encounters, having the effect of flattening the distinction between strong
patterns of interaction and more sporadic ones. Additionally, their study does
not weight implicit
and explicit
interactions differently:
presence
is determined by two
characters (who) spoke to each other
The or
criterion defines explicit linguistic
interaction as being equivalent to implicit shared stage presence. This ignores
much of the nuance of dramatic performance by eliding the distinctions between
different kinds of relationships into a single generic metric of non-specific
social bonds.
In sum, both the Literary Lab and Stiller, et al. encounter problems with how to
accurately weight the volume and frequency of interactions (i.e. how do repeated
interactions have a greater weight than less frequent ones?) and in how to
weight the difference between explicit and implicit interactions (i.e. how do
direct linguistic exchanges have a different weight than characters who silently
share the stage?). The technical problem of weighting is not exclusive to
network analyses of Shakespeare. Hoyt Long and Richard So’s methodology in
examining modernist poetic networks treats every published poem as essentially equal, and thus commits to a
flagrant abstraction of the cultural content from which (their) network data
is derived.
This is a tactical choice on their part, however,
because they aim to identify broader
structural patterns
counting how many
lines each pair of characters in
but her study places a
self-imposed limit by focusing exclusively on dyads in Shakespeare’s love
stories, and does not consider multivalent relationships between several
characters across all of his many plays and numerous genres.
How can we resolve these problems of accurate weighting in measuring interaction
in Shakespeare’s plays? It is important to acknowledge that the strengths and
weaknesses of these existing network methods derive from the technical choices
these scholars have made in constructing their networks. As Borgatti explains, a
central assumption of network theory is that it is the researcher - by choosing a set of nodes
and a type of tie - that defines the network.
The choices involved
in building a given network should
not generally be regarded as an empirical question. Rather it should be
dictated by the research question and one’s explanatory theory.
This
necessary logic of selection stems from the fact that in contrast to groups, networks do not have
and are artificial
abstractions used to visualize complex systems
With this proviso in mind that the investigator’s methodological choices
governed by an explanatory theory inflect the structure of the network, our
network analysis uses actor-network-theory (ANT) as a theoretical framework
organizing our methodological decisions. ANT gives us a useful working
vocabulary to define our networks, and is the most robust network paradigm
dominant in the humanities, social sciences, and in business and organizational
studies today that specifically adopts linguistic exchanges as the medium of
social interaction composing the network’s structure. ANT is additionally useful
for literary criticism since it unabashedly places theatrical and literary
metaphors such as actor,
performance,
stage,
and narrative
at the center of their definition of how
networks constitute the social.a set of people or groups of
people with some pattern of contacts or interactions between
them
the idea of a network
as a
pattern of interconnections among a set of things
a network consists of a set
of actors or nodes along with a set of ties of a specified type (such
as friendship) that link them
actors
in space, in a process called translation.
The network thus offers to us a
model of the social that does not rely on the ordered arrangements of
hierarchies, institutions, ranks, categories, or taxonomies. ANT describes the
social order in a seemingly chaotic, unordered way, where the linguistic
transactions between actors in the network empirically determine the nature of
the social structure in the first place, without any formal,
The network organizes the competing factions in space, organized around the hubs
of Hamlet and Claudius, with Gertrude caught in between. This more closely
matches the experience of spectators who would first encounter power
relationships by inferring spatial and linguistic interactions between
characters, and would have to figure out for themselves the tensions and
allegiances driving the play’s plot. By contrast, modern text editions, such as
the Oxford Shakespeare shown in Figure 2, provide
the reader with a neat organization classified by rank, nationality, gender,
heredity, or among other rubrics, in the form of a cast of characters, which was
not provided to Renaissance audiences, or many theatergoers today
Unlike the seemingly codified hierarchy of the cast of characters, the social
relationships visualized in the network are not static. The network captures the
ephemeral dynamism of unstable and constantly shifting social vectors. It is
defined by its actors and their movements structuring relationships in a web.
The actions composing the network involves a range of verbs describing the
tracing and writing performed by the actors: there is an actor whose definition
of the world outlines, traces, delineate, limn, describe, shadow forth,
inscroll, file, list, record, mark, or tag a trajectory that is called a
network
renders the movement of the
social visible to the reader
actor.
Latour
attempts to reactivate
the
actor’s theatrical signification as a way to redefine agency in the network borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced,
dominated, betrayed, translated
in a constant linguistic negotiation
of social energy with other actors and agents in the fictional space of the
stage. The collective agency performed on the theatrical stage serves as a
useful paradigm for ANT by providing a well-developed model describing how
linguistic exchanges between actors in space create a social world in miniature.
Our network analysis of Shakespeare’s plays thus enacts a productive cross-talk
between theater and the network. ANT has appropriated the technical vocabulary
of drama to define its actors
in space, while we are reciprocally using
ANT as a framework to define the space of the stage latent in Shakespearean
language.playing parts
and the enactment of performance
echoes Jaques’ famous declaration in all the world’s
a stage / … and one man in his time plays many parts
(2.7.138-141), as well as Antonio’s melancholic assertion in the world
is a stage where every man must play a part
(1.1.79) world
as immanently theatrical, precisely as network
theory has begun to do four centuries later.actors,
performance,
and the stage
of the network gives us a specific
framework to work with the language of the plays as the medium of social
interaction.
ANT’s definition of language as the tissue binding the performance network
together also suggests a way to resolve some of the problems of weighting found
in the prior network analyses of Shakespeare’s plays and literary works. To
address Moretti’s admitted issue of a lack of weighting the volume and frequency
of dialogue between characters, we have adapted Pierson’s method of using the
number of lines exchanged between speakers as a way to weight different
magnitudes of interaction. The result of Pierson’s quantitative weighting of
line numbers provides a way to avoid hand-drawn diagrams, and permits the
development of a machine-based technique of constructing the play’s networks
that Moretti has suggested was not yet possible. This technique defines each
line of the play as an discrete and transitory nature
and can be counted over time...Cumulated over time, event-type ties can be
dimensionalized in terms of frequency of occurrence...It is these kinds of
ties that researchers have in mind when they define networks as a
(recurring pattern of ties
.
Our own network visualization method aims to learn from the existing range of
network analyses outlined above. To trace the relationships between characters
in all of Shakespeare’s plays, we created the diagrams using the Python library
NetworkX, which has been used by scientists to examine complex systems and by
social scientists to visualize social media networks. The network visualizations
are divided by scene, and not the whole play, which was a shared problem of
scale in the networks of Moretti, Stiller, Nettle, and Dunbar, and Pierson. Each
network layers four dimensions of textual information into a single
visualization: interaction between characters measured by who a speaker directly
responds to (the edges between the nodes), frequency of interaction with other
characters (the length of the edges between nodes), volume of each character’s
speech (the radius of the node), and network density (the number of edges
surrounding each character). In developing this definition of interaction
or ties
in the program producing the network visualization, we concur
with Moretti, and draw from actor-network-theory, by using explicit textual
criteria to determine whether two characters are linked
if words have passed between them
as a type
of speech act
constituting interaction in the network. Pierson’s counting method also gives us
a basic rubric for measuring these linguistically based interactions
programmatically (as opposed to manually), by counting the number of lines of A
spoken immediately after B, and vice versa, and summing them
strong
versus weak
ties. Network theorists define
strong
ties as recurrent, direct, mutual, reciprocal relationships
and weak
ties as indirect, uni-directional, faint, or sporadically
occurring relationships (strong
reciprocal bonds where speakers respond directly to the person
speaking before them in the dialogue to engage in a conversation.
Based on this definition of reciprocal, strong interactions as a response in the
dialogue that can be counted as event ties,
the some
words
passed between characters (in the case of Moretti) or at least one
interaction (in the case of
Stiller, et al.) to create connections that are not precisely scaled to the
actual amount of interaction that takes place in the play. Thus our network
method does not employ an absolute scale in which any interaction greater than a
single occurrence creates an unweighted edge between speakers. Rather, our
scalable model modulates the length of the edge between characters’ nodes as a
proportion of the number of direct responses between them.counted the number of lines A
spoke in scenes in which B was present, and vice versa, and added these
two numbers together.
We then computed the above number but, for each
character in each scene, multiplied by a
The three
methods agreed at a much larger scale than in Pierson’s analysis, which
aggregated the results for whole plays and only focusing on the romances,
while we applied this methodological verification to all of Shakespeare’s
plays at the more local context of the scene normalization factor
equivalent to the number of lines that character spoke in the scene
divided by the total number of lines in that scene.
Iago: Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.
Lodovico: What, not to pray?
Gratiano: Torments will ope your lips. (Othello , 5.2.349-352)
Second, the reverse also held true: when one character speaks to several characters at once, such as in Act 1, Scene 5 of
swearfrom offstage. This is not a conversation, but in responding to Hamlet, he also directs his imperative to the other two characters. Third, eavesdropping and spying interactions were difficult to account for, with a famous example being Claudius eavesdropping on Hamlet in Act 3, Scene 1. Eavesdropping is a boundary case, because Claudius doesn’t directly engage with Hamlet (i.e. he listens, but they don’t exchange words), but for the sake of accuracy we included these moments. Overall, the manual reading found that characters do indeed predominantly respond to the speaker before them as a general rule shaping Shakespearean dialogue.
The methods described above, and the technical and theoretical choices informing
our measurement of interactions between characters in the network diagrams aim
to quantify strong ties, or as Moretti puts it, the explicit
links created by direct verbal address
and response. But what about weak or implicit ties, such as being present on
stage without directly conversing? The effort to include implicit ties was a
strength of the study by Stiller, et al., but their lack of weighting made both
explicit linguistic interactions, and implicit spatial ones, equivalent. This
assumption of equivalence seems to go against the spirit of dramatic
performance, which consciously plays between the two. Our method accounts for
these weak ties implicitly by structuring the network visualizations at the
scale of the scene and not the whole play, as Moretti, Stiller, Nettle, and
Dunbar, and Pierson all chose to do. An aggregate whole-play network makes it
difficult to infer who shares the stage with whom at any given point. They are
also difficult to interpret since they tend to create, as Nathan Yau puts it,
graphs that in total look
hairball-ish,
and which are fairly nonspecific in flattening subtle
differences between plays, possessing similar network densities, which suggests similar story structures
across texts
Some of this information, however, is already encoded by the plays, within the structure of each scene as a narrative unit that groups a set of characters, selected by Shakespeare himself, to interact both explicitly and implicitly in the frame of the stage. The more focused scale of our method inherently limits the number of ties that are possible because only a certain set of characters, determined by the text, can be present on stage during a scene, and all possible connections in that scene can only occur between these characters. By chunking our network visualizations to represent the local narrative context of the scene, and not the macro-level agglomeration of all interactions in the entire play, our networks capture the range of characters who share the narrative space of each scene implicitly by respecting Shakespeare’s own organizational rules.
To enrich the layers of information represented in the networks, our
visualizations have two further dimensions. Within the network, we have scaled
the
The final dimension in our network method is
The network visualization method transforms the language of Shakespeare’s plays into an array of spatial relationships structuring the network based on four different measurements. The four metrics encapsulated in our network diagrams - character interaction, frequency of interaction, the volume of each character’s speech, and network density - give us multiple scalable methods of visualizing how the language of Shakespeare’s playtexts structures a lattice of social interactions. Our approach attempts to build on the aforementioned precedents in network analysis. This technique with multiple dimensions in a single visualization offers a richer, and more granular understanding of Shakespeare’s social networks than previous network studies that elided the difference between scenes by constructing aggregate networks for whole plays, flattened the key distinction between strong and weak ties, and did not weight interactions precisely. We propose that our networks learning from these precedents open up a new method using visualization technologies to study a literary or dramatic text from multiple angles simultaneously in a single network diagram.
With the visualization method we have developed, what types of network analysis
are made possible? How might other critics use this network technique to find
new avenues of research in the study of Shakespearean drama and dramatic
literature more generally? In the case study that follows, we demonstrate how
the networks constructed by our methodology function as a blocking
or the positioning and grouping of
characters in space is unrecoverable
for the Shakespearean critic, we
propose that the network visualizations allow us to imagine such a spatial
arrangement. The network analysis does not create a single, inescapable way of
staging inherent in the text, but it does offer to us a way to envision how the
text structures the character-space that embodied performances ultimately occupy
through the decisions of directors and actors. Ultimately, we propose that
Shakespeare’s drama must be shown and not exclusively read, but through a
visualization method that is fundamentally textual and rooted in the structure
of Shakespeare’s language. By aligning Shakespeare’s text and images from staged
performances alongside our network diagrams, we suggest that the playtext itself
can be used as a template to begin to organize the space of the Shakespearean
stage.
Using the network visualizations, we aim to address a live question in the
digital humanities today: can computational methods teach us something new about
literary texts, or do algorithms and visualizations simply confirm readings,
arguments, and theories we already know well? The promise of the network method
lies precisely in offering to critics a new vantage point that would otherwise
not be possible through a conventional reading of the text. The network allows
us to rethink one of the oldest stories in Shakespeare criticism and pedagogy,
what we will call the social disorder hypothesis. Since A.C. Bradley
influentially defined the essence of Shakespearean tragedy as division of spirit involving conflict
and waste,
and not the ultimate reconciliation or renewal suggested
by Hegel, generations of critics to the present have described the tragic nature
of
express the inexpressibly horriblethat is marred by
excess
incoherentand it represents a confusion or
disarrayof the social world
scatteringand a
total disproportionof social connections. Moretti’s conclusion from the networks simply reconfirms the standard story of tragedy as disorder
the overthrowing of law - in particular, the laws of nature
This canonical account of Shakespearean drama as a fictional space for the eruption of disorder severing social bonds and overthrowing political hierarchies certainly holds true at the level of plot, and Act 5, Scene 2 of
The network density at the end of
tragedies tend to move towards the isolation of a single figure on the stage, getting rid of other people, moving towards a kind of solitude, whereas comedies tend to end with a big scene at the end where everybody’s on stage
This counterintuitive network structure adds an important level of historical
nuance to contemporary network theory, which defines social networks most
frequently as affinity or affiliation groups bound by positive relationships
between people. The assumption of positive bonds defining network links is most
readily apparent in the persistent example of close friends
and
acquaintances
make
up a social network the collection of social ties
among friends
A more precise way to define network relationships lies in the concept of
clustering
from quantitative network theory. Mark Newman explains
network clustering as a type of transitive relationship in space: If vertex A is connected to vertex B,
and vertex B to vertex C, then there is a heightened probability that vertex
A will also be connected to vertex C. In the language of social networks,
the friend of your friend is likely also to be your friend
hub and spoke
model of 1.2, where Hamlet and
Claudius serve as the social hubs around which the spokes of the network gather
(Figure 1). The culminating violence of 5.2
displays a far more dense network clustering pattern, with the characters in the
network interacting far more frequently with others, and not simply relaying
their communication through the central figures of Hamlet or Claudius.
A second way to think about the density of the network in this instance is the distance between nodes. The close positioning of Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, Osric, and Horatio at the center of the network signals a greater frequency of interaction between the characters than we have seen in previous scenes. In the dense clustering of the network, characters speak to more people, more frequently: the density of lines between characters traces the increase in interaction, and the decreased distance between nodes signifies a greater intensity of communication, with more frequent speech exchanged. To describe the density of the network in quantitative terms, 5.2 has 34 total network connections between characters, or 23.6% of total network links in the play as a whole, as opposed to the symmetrically organized scene of Act 1, Scene 2 above, which displays 9 network connections or 13% of the play’s total network links. Additionally, 5.2’s 34 connections creates a network that is approximately 450% more dense than the play’s average of 7.57 connections per scene (Figure 4).
The clustering density of 5.2 describes a world unraveling with more frenetic
social energy and thickly intermeshed social connections than we have seen in
the previous scene, which had exhibited a relatively diffuse network
characterized by greater distance between characters and fewer total network
connections between them. In the scene representing the destruction of the
social order of Elsinore, the play constructs a social network to bind the
characters being destroyed together at the moment of the greatest
scattering
and chaos. The positive act of theatrically connecting
bodies in a dense network tells the story of the negative act of breaking apart
the social bonds between characters that had held Elsinore together.
The dense clustering of characters and bodies in scenes of social disordering is not isolated to
Act 1, Scene 1 depicts Lear’s famous opening move dividing his kingdom into thirds in return for verbal affirmations of the strength of his paternal bond with his daughters, Act 2, Scene 4 represents the scene of conflict where Goneril and Regan strip Lear of his retainers, and Act 5, Scene 3 is the moment of tragic reversal where the web of filial and political betrayals leads to the deaths of Lear, Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, Gloucester, and Edmund. All of these scenes representing the rending of family bonds and the established political order exhibit heavily concatenated networks marked by clustering behavior, with a high number of connections between characters and a dense clustering of speakers in close spatial relation to one another.
As an internal point of reference or control, Figure 8 shows Act 4, Scene 7, which depicts Lear’s reunion with Cordelia.
This scene of re-establishing a family bond, a reunification and a linking
together of father and daughter, results in a sparse network, with greater
distance between affectively
That a single scene containing the greatest moment of social discord has the
densest network of the play by far, with 33% of the entire play’s social links
or over 300% of the network ties compared to the scene of reconciliation with
Cordelia, and over 850% of the average network connections per scene, shows that
the dissolving
(5.3.202) and decay
(5.3.296) of the play’s social
world densely packs the stage with speakers and with bodies as the performance
strategy necessary to depict the act of dissolving
the bonds between
those speakers - a clustering in space so as to divide in the plot. The network
thus visualizes the manner in which the play’s structure - the internal
relationships between speakers formed by the text’s language - works according
to a logic that is the reverse of the content or plot of the scene. The network
functions according to a logic of clustering and increased social interaction
that is the reverse mechanism of the plot’s dissolution of social bonds.
A census of Shakespeare’s tragedies, including
These pointed scenes of disarray, ranging from Coriolanus’ brawl in the Senate, Julius Caesar’s assassination, Cleopatra’s suicide and Octavius Caesar’s conquest of Egypt, the violent introduction to Titus’ perverse Rome, and the fatal conclusion to
The networks from this cross section of Shakespeare’s tragedies suggest a
performance strategy of binding in a social network so as to break apart the
social. The plays also describe in their own language the structure of dense
binding and knitting that occurs in the final scenes of chaos. Cleopatra defines
her own suicide as being wound in a knot intrinsicate
in 5.2.295 visualized above (Figure 12).
being wrought, / perplexed in the extreme(5.2.355). Being
perplexedgestures to his confusion upon being
enmeshedin Iago’s
net.However, the etymology of
perplexedadds a second level of meaning to Othello’s final self-definition. The verb
to perplexderives from the Latin
perplexfrom classical Latin as:
wicked bandsas a state of
great perplexitie
perplexeda basic state of being confused, but based on the Latin root, also defines himself in an
extremeknotted or tangled state. Othello’s state of perplexity reflects the play’s sustained obsession with how individuals become bound in intersubjective nets. The network traces in spatial form the play’s own vocabulary of nets and webs entangling individuals with others. In Act 2, Scene 2, Iago voices the broad strokes of his plot as a web:
With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio…I will gyve thee in thine own courtship.(2.2.169-171) The
little webexpands beyond Cassio in Act 2, Scene 3, to
enmeshCassio, Desdemona, and Othello in a
net:
His soul is so enfettered to her love That she may make, unmake, and do what she list, […] And out of her own goodness make the net That shall enmesh them all. (2.3.319-336)
Iago’s consistent use of the language of webs
and nets
as the
method to ensnare,
gyve,
and enmesh
others into his scheme does not suggest that
Shakespeare was thinking in terms of networks, in the contemporary sense of the
word, when the play's characters speak of webs,
nets,
mesh,
snares,
and being perplexed.
The play does, however, persistently mobilize
the language of webs and nets as a way to dramatize the discord between them.
The network captures how the playtext spins a web
or net
of
conflict between the characters in the language of the text and between the
bodies of the speakers on stage as a linguistic and physical way to structure
intersubjective tension.
The network visualization of Act 5, Scene 2, alongside frames from two
performances of the play, show the extent to which Othello is perplexed in the extreme
in a
web of other characters (enmeshes
Othello in this scene of murderous
unraveling in a perplexed
relationship to others that matches the density and clustering found in other
tragedies (Figures 16-20).
The final scene of violence, then, demonstrates that Othello is not all-in-all sufficient
(4.1.262), but comes
to be defined by his binding in a network of other characters circumscribing him
at the moment of his self-destruction. For Othello, his binding in the network
precipitated by Iago's scheme signifies a basic confusion or perplexity
in defining the self.
To extend the visual homology, the network of Act 5, Scene 2 in
In the networks and the performance staging, Hamlet lies at the focal point of
the network of bodies defining the final scene. Claudius, Laertes, Gertrude,
Horatio, Osric, Fortinbras, the Ambassador from England, and the
The network and each film’s
These claims may seem terribly abstracted from the content of the play itself.
But Shakespeare’s text demonstrates a persistent metatheatrical preoccupation
with precisely this translation of words into embodied performance, or how
language can be represented in space. Hamlet defines himself in his final
moments not in terms of an ontology - moving away from the question of to be or not to be
- but rather in terms
of his literariness: in this harsh world draw
thy breath in pain / To tell my story
(5.2.290-291). By impelling
Horatio to report
him aright
and by giving Fortinbras his dying voice,
(5.2.298) Hamlet transforms
his afterlife, that undiscovered
country
into an act of correct narration, a story.
Hamlet’s final transplantation of voice focuses
on the act of linguistic articulation and report.
However, Horatio’s
final story is not vocative or oratorical in nature. Rather, Horatio and
Fortinbras perform a crucial modification in transforming Hamlet’s story into a
spatial arrangement of bodies on a stage
:
Horatio’s account
moves away from the idiom of story,
report,
and voice,
dictated by Hamlet. He instead orders that
these bodies / High on a stage be placed to
the view,
translating Hamlet’s story
and the act of
reporting
from the articulation of the voice to a spatial arrangement
of bodies. The story is told not only in words, but also in the placement of
bodies high on stage
as the
materials of carnal, bloody, and unnatural
acts, / Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, / Of deaths put on by
cunning and forced cause.
These bodies function in the plane of
vision - they are placed to the view
-
transmuting Hamlet’s story into an act of spectatorship. Fortinbras compounds
this definition of the metatheatrical space by calling the audience
and commanding that the soldiers bear Hamlet
to the stage.
Horatio insists that
the story
will not take the form of an
ode or an oratory. He argues that the voice given to him by Hamlet is
insufficient to represent the events of the tragedy, since he will have to
draw on more
than speaking alone.
The ultimate account of Hamlet’s life takes on the form of a theatrical
performance: it will be presently
performed.
The performance in question exerts a
plot
will paradoxically be
most accurate, with the fewest errors
and mischance,
in this state
of wildness. As in the preceding reading of the network, the bodies densely
clustered on stage for the performance of Hamlet’s story reflects the state of
wildness that concludes the play. The network analysis corresponds with
Horatio’s own metatheatrical appraisal of performance. Both lead to the
conclusion that the gathering and performance of bodies in the space of the
stage is the most accurate way to recount the wild
disordering of
Elsinore’s social bonds.
Reading the contours of the network as a way to translate the text into the
relationship of bodies in space is not an anachronistic imposition of digital
tools onto the Shakespearean text. The network visualization follows the rules
of Hamlet’s own metatheatrical commentary, and a commonplace understanding in
the Renaissance of the crosstalk between the body and the text. If anything,
this reading strategy converting language into spatial relationships takes
seriously the metatheatrical rules of performance that Hamlet himself
articulates in the play. In the purpose of playing
speech in Act 3, Scene
2, Hamlet advises the players to suit the action to the word, the word to the action,
insisting that
proper performance technique requires a movement beyond the enunciated word to a
more dynamic conversion of the written word into the actions
of the moving body. The
translation of word to action occurs in space, indicated in Hamlet’s statement
of the purpose of
playing.
…the purpose of playing, whose
end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up
to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very
age and body of the time his form and pressure. (3.2.19-22)
Transmuting the word into dramatic action functions as a mirror up to nature
in space, showing,
representing images,
and revealing to the
very age and body of the
time
the physical contours of his form and pressure.
The mirror analogy,
and the gesture to Aristotle’s image of the wax seal as a form and pressure
defines playing
as a play in space - a specular optics or an experience of spectatorship -
constituted by a visual array of images, bodies, and forms playing.
Beyond his specific
fate, however, Hamlet’s injunction to suit the action to the word, the word to the
action
reflects a broad Renaissance
There was speech in their dumbnesse, Language in their very gesture(5.2.11-12). The convertibility of body and language was not simply theatrical, however, with Thomas Wilson’s rhetorical manual calling for
the whole bodie stirring togetheras an embodied component of rhetorical eloquence and delivery
denotesthe spatial
playof actions and of bodies is precisely what the network analysis attempts to accomplish by using the language of the text as the basis of tracing the social links between different characters in space. This is not to claim over-literally that Hamlet urges us to create networks. He is, however, concerned with the translation of the linguistic
wordof the playtext into the
playof bodies in visual space, which is the basic logic of the network analysis method. For Hamlet, theater is not meant to be read as the word, but rather
The methodological problem lies in the fact that broad themes of conflict,
violence, and social disorder at the level of content and plot can be readily
perceived through reading, but visualizing the web of social relationships in
the reading process proves to be more difficult. Reading the Shakespearean text
necessarily requires a linear syntax, the unidirectional physical movement
through the language arranged in the space of the line on the page Figure 27. To begin to think about how the page translates to the stage,
Shakespeareans have taken up Jerome McGann’s famous dictum that the reading eye is a scanning mechanism as
well as a linear decoder
by attempting to understand how the spatial
structure of the printed play influences the reading experience and performance
two-axis
reading beyond linear syntax,
suggests that the printed page contains impressions of activity
encoding actions to
be performed on stage impressions of activity
) traced on the printed or inscribed page
into the space of a network. The network organizes the language of the play into
coordinates in graphical space that can more accurately delineate the complex
relationships between multiple characters across all of the scenes composing the
play. The network graphing method therefore functions as an intermediate step in
the conversion of the unidimensional syntax of the written playtext into the 3D
performance of bodies in the space of the stage.
The network’s visualization of character interactions within the space of
performance more accurately matches early modern understandings of the stage
itself as a place framing the actors’ bodies. The 1595 Swan sketch, which is the
only surviving drawing of the interior of an Elizabethan theater, shows a
performance in progress on the proscenium, with the actor’s bodies serving as
the focal point of the theatrical space. The positioning, motion, and embodied
gestures of the three characters on stage in the Swan sketch begin to tell a
story of social interaction based on the proximity and distance, and the
intensity of physical connection in space in precisely the same way that the
network attempts to capture based on the text’s language (Figure 28). By contrast, influential modern renderings of the Globe Theatre’s
interior by C. Walter Hodges an enormously active, dynamic blocking plan
that was almost violently active
and mobile, rather like a rugby league match
in order to ensure that
the audience could see what was happening action to the word, word to the action.
We have much more evidence about the importance of character-space and stage geography in contemporary productions of Shakespeare. The director Gregory Doran describes the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production of
translationthat begins with a bibliographical examination of the Company’s First Folio edition, exploring the text
word-by-word, line-by-linein order to structure the blocking and positioning of the
stage geography.The meticulous process of close reading reveals the characters’
relationships with each other,and Doran insists that the playtext itself contains a sort of blueprint for the organization of, and movement within, space, apart from the director’s intervention:
the scenes begin to move themselves
translationbetween
wordsand
stage geographypracticed by the Royal Shakespeare Company today.
Shakespeare’s plays and Renaissance theatrical discourse thus contain a latent
meditation on the movement from text to performance, from words to bodies
performing on stage, which the network method allows the critic to perceive.
Hamlet’s final metatheatrical preoccupation with how story,
voice,
and linguistic report
can be translated into bodies high on a stage placed to the view
to be presently performed
before an
audience
shows that the
Shakespearean text contains within itself a blueprint of sorts describing how to
perform the movement from text to stage. With network visualizations, the critic
is able to conduct a form of double reading, unpacking the signification of the
printed language composing the text simultaneously with a spatial analysis
showing how the text’s language structures a relationship between speakers on
stage.
We are beginning to move our understanding of Shakespearean tragedy away from
the division of spirit involving conflict and
waste
attempted to reject the Hegelian and Nietzschean view of
tragedy as a dialectic of order and disorder, the network visualization shows
that Shakespeare’s playtext itself structures the space of tragic scenes in a
more nuanced, if paradoxical, way
The network visualizations thus demonstrate spatially that the anti-social
explosions of violence tearing apart the social order of the play’s world
require the assembly of a dense social network on stage in order to be
represented to the audience. Shakespeare’s plays represent systems of increased
disorder in these paradigmatic scenes of tragedy by creating a different form of
order - the network - on stage. The clustering patterns of the network differ
substantially from the social order of the beginning of the plays, defined by
hierarchies characterized by a neat hub and spoke organization in space. The
counterintuitive play of a disordering made possible by the ordering of a
network corresponds to actor network theory’s appropriation of Michel Serres’
definition of social systems. As John Law describes, ANT has embraced Serres’
description of the social world as patches of order in a sea of disorder
as an organizing principle of
networks Universality or order are not the rule but the
exceptions that have to be accounted for. Loci, contingencies or
clusters are more like archipelagos on a sea than like lakes dotting a
solid land.
boundaries between order and
disorder
and is capable of imagining the uncertain messengers
that pass between different orders or between order and disorder
reduction of complexity
in a sea
of disorder and maximum entropy
The present analysis of the networks traced within Shakespeare’s plays reverses
these precedents set by actor network theory and by Luhmann. The Shakespearean
networks do not create order as something different or partitioned from a
surrounding state of disorder, and networks do not represent an oasis of order
in a bleak entropic desert of disorder. Rather, Shakespeare’s plays present a
dramatic social world that turns the logic of the empirical networks suggested
by Law, Latour, and Luhmann on its head. Shakespearean tragedy stirs the reader
and audience by representing a state of chaotic social disorder emerging from
the assembly of a densely organized network of bodies and characters on stage.
The characteristic disordering of the social world in the plot of Shakespearean
tragedy requires the construction of an ever-increasingly dense social network
of actors, agents, bodies, witnesses, combatants, interlocutors, or characters
crowding the theatrical space where the chaos unfolds. Tearing apart the
relationships structuring the play’s initial social world - ordered by laws,
decrees, rules, ranks, filial bonds, gender norms, national or geographical
allegiances, and hierarchies - requires a new form of social order that
represents the complete overthrow of that original hierarchy. The new social
order resulting from Shakespeare’s tragedies is a state of disorder most
appropriately represented in the form of the network that visualizes this
counterintuitive spatial organization that is not based upon sharp boundaries
between order and disorder. In this seemingly paradoxical inversion of social
cause and effect, a new order captured by the network rises from a state of
chaotic tragic disorder, which is defined in terms of the asymmetrical,
seemingly chaotic form of network complexity, density, and clustering. The
network coalesces according to a logic best described as diffuse, non-linear,
intercalcated, non-hierarchical, multidimensional, and perhaps rhizomatic
What can we make of network theory after this analysis of Shakespeare’s plays? This analysis of Shakespeare's tragedies reveals a more nuanced model of a social network, which does not simply describe a mode of reduced complexity or heightened organization (as Luhmann argues) or shape the relationships between subjects and objects (as argued by Latour and Law). The network demonstrates a counterintuitive mechanism where actors perform a disordering of the basic coherence of the social by organizing bodies together into a network. Shakespeare’s plays use these eruptions of social disorder as an occasion to forge a new mode of non-hierarchical, non-linear sociality in the form of the network. This analysis stands as an early modern revision of network theories that have been created with contemporary data, and have not adequately studied the historicity of networks across time.
Our case study on Shakespearean tragedy performs the methodological shift from
network theory to the description and analysis of actual networks that Bruno
Latour has proposed. Latour laments that although the scholarly community has
access to a mass of data,
this
information is only accessible through an incredibly
poor visual landscape
transform the mass of
quali-quantitative data
into a visual datascape
performances,
parts
and actors
working in relation to one another, precisely in
the way that the dramatic performance visualizes the playtext as an embodied,
visual performance of actors interacting on stage.
We have argued that the network method suggested by Latour is a way to harness the technical resources of the digital humanities to bridge the age-old divide between text and stage in the study of Shakespeare. The networks decipher how Shakespeare encodes within the text the spatial relationships of characters in performance space, and his plays give us a rule book of sorts to accomplish this, by meta-theatrically meditating upon how this translation of word to bodies in space occurs. The digital method reveals a network structure that allows us to revise a widely accepted story on social disorder and the overthrow of law in Shakespeare’s plays, but this is by no means exhaustive, and it represents the beginning of new readings made possible by network visualization. The network method allows us to tell new stories about Shakespeare, and provides us a different technical vantage point fusing textual close reading and the study of performance in space. As a critical tool, the networks open up a multi-tiered method that tests the digital visualizations against the results of close readings and staged theatrical productions of the same scenes. Our case study of the social networks of Shakespeare’s tragedies proposes a hybrid methodology that investigators and students can use to engage in several parallel techniques so as to gain multiple critical perspectives on a single literary problem. Ultimately, we propose that the network methodology opens a new perspective on Shakespeare’s dramatic art. Far from turning his body of work into a cold, inert dataset that seems antithetical to humanistic inquiry, the network method enlivens the text, allowing a wide range of readers - from scholars publishing research to undergraduates encountering his plays for the first time - to perceive the subtle manner by which the movements and energies of embodied theatrical performance inhere within the Shakespearean text.
James Lee was generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry Grant. The authors would like to thank Erik Simpson, Blaine Greteman, Steve Andrews, Tim Arner, and Bill Ingram for their input and useful discussions along the way.
Penand
Voicein Shakespeare's Theater,