Part II: Midsummer Night’s Dream, Distant Reading
My earlier analysis attempted to focus on the power dynamic between men and women and how Shakespeare uses two different scenarios to show how this dynamic worked. For the second part of this assignment, I wanted to build on my connections to find out if those power dynamics played out in different comedic plays and if there was a difference in the period the play was produced in. I hypothesized that Shakespeare had more agency and flexibility to depict society under Elizabeth’s rule than under the Jacobean or King James era because of the stability she provided. King James lived his life in Scotland before his reign in England. I expected that his reign would be more unstable, unlike, Queen Elizabeth who was a more experienced ruler by the time Shakespeare began his career.
Because I had chosen Midsummer’s Night Dream as my text, I chose to look at other romantic comedic plays. I compared the comedic plays from the Elizabethan era to the Jacobean era. Shakespeare was born during Queen Elizabeth’s reign which ranged from 1559 to 1603, and he passed away in 1616 during the Jacobean era which lasted from 1603 to 1625. Ordinarily, there were more Elizabethan plays than in the Jacobean era. Born in 1564, Shakespeare had more time in the Elizabethan era. There were seven plays in the Jacobean era and eleven plays in the Elizabethan period.
My data provided me with inconclusive results. I knew that the plays would have most of the dialogues performed by men. However, I was hoping to see an increase or decrease in the amount based on who was the current monarch. My computer science team provided me with all the characters and number of dialogues each had. I ranked the top three in each play. I found that out of the eleven comedic plays written under the Elizabethan period, eight of them had at least one woman as one of the top three characters to have the most dialogue. The numbers played out differently in the Jacobean era. From 1603 to 1610, at least one woman was in the top three of each of the four plays written and none in the corresponding three plays in the next decade. The ratio between the two eras places the Jacobean era as the period with the most female dialogues. But this does not mean that the women were completely silent, because as the numbers shows, they were incredibly involved in their own construction in the plays.
More contradictory evidence is the ranges of length in the Jacobean and Elizabethan era. My team found that the Jacobean era play length was 28,636 words, compared to the Elizabethan era which was 18,199 words. Additionally, there is a much larger range of dialogues for the Jacobean era than the Elizabethan era. In the Jacobean era, the number of dialogue ranges from 18,985 (Pericles) to 56,318 (Tempest) words. This is different in the Elizabethan era, where the ranges are from 14,790 (Comedy of Errors) to 26001 (Troilus and Cressida). I thought the opposite would occur. The instability of King James’ reign or the different developments in his reign may have created the need to have different plays that had various focuses and length. For example, in the Jacobean era, colonization and the exploration of various parts of the world had begun to be more prevalent. This might have influenced the context of plays like the Tempest, the play with the greatest number of dialogues. It seems as if the instability may have brought on more interesting subjects and topics.
The research questions I provided my computer science team did not produce the needed results to test my hypothesis. I was going to used the information I had to compare how Midsummer was an either an anomaly or the norm. The information and data I need exists, but I asked the wrong questions. I asked for the most used words in each era, other allusions to mythological figures, how many dialogues in each play, which characters had the most dialogue or words, which play was the longest, and the average play length in each era. I thought there was a correlation between agency and dialogue. The data I found did not reject or back-up my claim.