5 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 23.9 ms ] thread
There are some really interesting things you can find when treating Shakespeare as a DB.

There are some characters with no lines: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/02/characters-in-shakespeare-w...

And at least once character exits the stage without entering! https://github.com/edent/Open-Source-Shakespeare/pull/2

In grad school, I did a project for a Shakespeare class that involved picking at how characters used gendered pronouns to see if I could find anything interesting. (I think I built an sqlite3 db from the playshakespeare XML version; I don't recall being able to _find_ another at the time--I think this was early 2010.)

One thing I remember finding interesting (if a bit unexpected and frustrating) was how many pronouns were implied in contractions. In the case of ` 's`, the contraction suffix is even double-used for contracted forms of "us" and "his". I ended up having to get a concordance, skim it for potential pronoun-implying contractions, and then verify them in the text. I'm sure I missed a few :)

Shakespeare.

Shake spear.

Masturbator.

Just putting it out there.

How can I read a play with lots of hyperlinks to help me understand old English words, insults, and jokes? Or even better, commentary available to help better understand a passage?
Hypothes.is and Web Annotations would be suited for this, but the problem is getting people to write the commentary.