Network visualization: mapping Shakespeare's tragedies

Martin Grandjean (1)

1 UNIL - Université de Lausanne = University of Lausanne

Are Shakespeare's tragedies all structured in the same way? Are the characters rather isolated, grouped, all connected? Narration, even fictional, contains a network of interacting characters. Constituting a well defined corpus, the eleven Shakespearean tragedies can easily be compared: We propose here a network visualization in which each character is represented by a node connected with the characters that appear in the same scenes. The result speaks for itself: the longest tragedy (Hamlet) is not the most structurally complex and is less dense than King Lear, Titus Andronicus or Othello. Some plays reveal clearly the groups that shape the drama: Montague and Capulets in Romeo and Juliet, Trojans and Greeks in Troilus and Cressida, the triumvirs parties and Egyptians in Antony and Cleopatra, the Volscians and the Romans in Coriolanus or the conspirators in Julius Caesar.

Mots clés: Digital Humanities; Narratology; Social Network Analysis; Graph Theory; Network visualization; Data visualisation; Data visualization

Domaines: Littératures; Méthodes et statistiques; Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences; Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Martin Grandjean. Network visualization: mapping Shakespeare's tragedies. 2015. ⟨halshs-01525566⟩