A short genre analysis of Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s Genres Any school child will be familiar with the classification of Shakespeare's plays into comedy, tragedy, and history. Yet these classifications, that are so old they appear in the first published collection of his work, are not as simple as they seem. Since the beginning of Shakespeare’s writing and especially towards the end of his career the lines between the genres blur. As a result, alternative classifications of Shakespeare’s canon have been proposed. Along with this blurring of lines between traditional sorting’s, new plays have been discovered. This has led to the question of what genres these new plays belong in. I decided to use PCA and HCA analysis to see if a quantitative method can provide clues as to what classifications are useful, and where new plays belong. Seven years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616 the First Fol...