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 Folio was published. This contained the works of 36 of the 38 currently existing texts of Shakespeare’s plays. It also placed each of the plays into one of three categories: comedy, tragedy, and history.  These categories are based on both specific plot points as well as general features and structures of each play. For an example we are all familiar with, a traditional comedy will end with a marriage and a traditional tragedy ends with death. Yet already with this simple classification confusion can arise. History, the third category included in the First Folio, are traditionally biographies of the English royalty yet Shakespeare’s histories contain fantastical elements and are frequently embellished to follow tragedies tropes. This distinction between history and the other two genres is even less clear when we realize that plays such as Macbeth and Cymbeline featuring historical kings.

    To begin our analysis, I have a corpus of all 38 of Shakespeare’s works, downloaded from Folger Digital Texts. I then label each of the texts as “Comedy”, “Tragedy” or “History” based on the classification from the First Folio, excluding the two plays not included in the First Folio (Pericles, Noble Kinsmen). Following this labeling both HCA and PCA is run on the corpus, removing stop words and using TF-IDF. The results are graphed here:

 

 

    As we can see the First Folio and the stylometric analysis agree. The PCA and HCA both have three distinct groupings of plays and broadly groups plays of a similar type together. We can also see the blurred line between Tragedy and Histories with Macbeth and King Lear being placed near the other histories in the dendrogram and Henry VII being placed smack in the middle of the Tragedy branch in the dendrogram. To further understand this analysis, we can look at the loadings of the PCA:

 

    The loadings creating the tragedy grouping is mythical and Roman terms. This is to be expected as four of the twelve tragedies are set in Rome (Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar), and one of them is set during Roman times (Cymbeline). Naturally, we can also see the importance of King to the histories and love to the comedies.

    Turning to the two plays that were discovered later we can run the same PCA and HCA and see where they are placed. Traditionally they are both categorized as comedies. Looking at the figure on the next page we can see that this loosely holds up. Pericles is placed in a group with other comedies in the dendrogram and in the center of the PCA, suggesting a loose connection. Two Noble Kinsmen is placed in almost a separate category in the dendrogram and is more related to other comedies such as Measure for Measure than most of the tragedies. 

    There are other classifications of Shakespeare's plays that have been proposed. These are the Problem Plays and the Late Romances. The Problem Plays, loosely, are Comedies that veer remarkably close to tragedy. Instead of having one tone throughout the whole play like more simple comedies the tone is more ambiguous. They also may or may not have a satisfying resolution, so much for everybody getting married! While scholars disagree about which plays specifically are problem plays (and comparing different scholars choice of problem plays would be an interesting next step) they generally agree that the following are problem plays: Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, All’s Well that Ends Well, The Winters Tale, Troilus and Cressida, and Timon of Athens. Running a similar analysis, the results are graphed below. Looking at them there appears to be a lot less cohesion. This could explain why there is so much debate about the problem play classification for Shakespeare’s works.

    Finally, another classification proposed for Shakespeare’s works is the late romance. These works were influenced by the emerging genre of tragicomedy towards the end of Shakespeare’s career. They focus more on a central problem than love, they have magic or other mythical features, and have a mix of country and pastoral scenes. Included in this classification is Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winters Tale, The Tempest, and Two Noble Kinsmen. Henry VII is also considered similar to the late romances . Looking at the graphs and compared to the problem play classification the late romances are more coherent. They are in a similar family in the Dendrogram and in the PCA they cluster in the middle. This clustering suggests the complex and boundary breaking nature of Shakespeare’s later works. 

 

In conclusion, there is a broad justification for the different classifications of Shakespeare’s work. The First Folio’s classification of comedy, tragedy, and history are supported by HCA and PCA analysis. Looking at more modern attempts to classify genre, results are mixed. The placement of works not in the first folio as comedies is slightly supported for Pericles and not supported for Two Noble Kinsmen. The problem plays do not seem to have any coherence and are debated by modern scholars. Statistical work will not be able to sort out that disagreement. On the other hand, the classification of late romance seems to be appropriate for several Shakespeare’s plays and sorts out our confusion with Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen and potentially Henry VII. If there is a correct classification to be adopted,  it seems that not only should we teach, comedy, tragedy, and history, but late romance as well.