William Shakespeare, one of the greatest playwrights of all times, died 400 years ago, in 1616. At this occasion, we analyzed the content of three of his most popular plays solely via our text analytics software the Interpretor.
Despite being written more than 400 years ago, Shakespeare’s comedies and dramas still speak to us. They are performed on theatre stages all around the world on a daily basis. Thanks to modern technology, new ways of exploring these literary works have emerged. To give an example the Interpretor finds topics, keywords or entities such as persons and locations in large amounts of texts in a very short period of time. Showing a little piece of what the Interpretor could do for you, we applied text analytics to three of Shakespeare’s plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The following sociograms show how the individual characters are interconnected by mentioning each other in the play.
HAMLET
Number of characters: 23 (2 women, 21 men, and the ghost of Hamlet’s father)
Number of words: 26,155
Average word count per line: 21
Five most frequently used keywords in the play: prince, Hamlet, king, God, father
ROMEO AND JULIET
Number of characters: 26 (4 women and 22 men)
Number of words: 20,931
Average word count per line: 24
Five most frequently used keywords in the play: Romeo, love, Juliet, God, Nurse
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Number of characters: 21 (4 women, 13 men and 4 elves/fairies)
Number of words: 14,437
Average word count per line: 26
Five most frequently used keywords in the play: love, Demetrius, Bottom, Quince, Hermia