The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language: Character Networks

Dialogue is at the heart of Shakespeare’s plays, and when his characters exchange words, they create social communities. This book is the first to present, explore and compare those verbal communities in all of Shakespeare plays using computational social network analysis.

Part of The Arden Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language series, with volumes exploring how Shakespeare uses words to create meaning and shape characters, themes and genres, Volume 4: Character Networks presents another aspect of what Shakespeare’s words do: create social worlds. The book illustrates how alliances or missed encounters can shape characters and plot; it explores gender, social and geographic differences in the plays’ communities, and alerts readers to the function of minor characters - who often go unnoticed in criticism. Above all, it shows that what matters in Shakespeare’s plays is not only the words characters speak, but also the company they keep.

For each of Shakespeare’s plays, the book includes information about the size and density of each play’s character network as well as providing a visual network representation. Readers will also find a table for each play with scores that measure the centrality of all characters in terms of the importance, strength and number of their social ties. In addition, an accessible commentary on each play highlights salient features of the network data and explains what it means for our understanding of the play. A final chapter explores the broader patterns in Shakespeare’s works by comparing the networks.

Jakob Ladegaard is an associate professor in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He was the PI of a research project that used computational methods to explore English literature. With Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan he has written articles on early modern English drama using corpus linguistic methods and social network analysis.

Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan is an assistant professor in Cognitive Science and Humanities Computing based at the Center for Humanities Computing at Aarhus University, Denmark. His background is in computational, cognitive, and corpus linguistic approaches to the study of register, genre, and style.