Dramatic Structure and Social Status in Shakespeare’s Plays

Abstract

This article discusses ways that dramatic structure can be analyzed through the use of social titles in Shakespeare’s plays. Freytag’s (1863) pyramid of dramatic structure is based on patterns he found in Shakespearean and Greek tragedy; more recently, computational methods are being employed to model narrative structure at scale. However, there has not yet been a study which discusses whether or not specific lexical items can be indicative of dramatic structure. Using Shakespeare’s plays as an example, this essay fills the gap by observing how social titles can be used to explore the viability of narrative structure.

Full text

Journal of
Cultural Analytics
April 8, 2020
Dramatic Structure and Social Status in
Shakespeare’s Plays
Heather Froehlicha
aThe Pennsylvania State University
A R T I C L E I N F O
Peer-Reviewed By: Mark Algee-Hewitt & James
Jaehoon Lee
Article DOI: 10.22148/001c.12556
Dataverse DOI: 10.7910/DVN/PPD3OO
Journal ISSN: 2371-4549
A B S T R A C T
This article discusses ways that dramatic structure can be analyzed through the use of social
titles in Shakespeare’s plays. Freytag’s (1863) pyramid of dramatic structure is based on
patterns he found in Shakespearean and Greek tragedy; more recently, computational
methods are being employed to model narrative structure at scale. However, there has not
yet been a study which discusses whether or not specific lexical items can be indicative of
dramatic structure. Using Shakespeare’s plays as an example, this essay fills the gap by
observing how social titles can be used to explore the viability of narrative structure.
The nineteenth-century playwright, Gustav Freytag, argues that a clear division of
action exists across the five acts from Shakespearean and Greek tragedy, based on
repeated close readings of dramatic writing.
1
In this essay, I ask if this theory of
dramatic structure can be tracked or otherwise measured using linguistic evidence.
Focusing my attention on the linguistic class of vocatives, which include status terms
(your majesty, madam, sir) to identify specific features of social identity, I
hypothesize that the evocation of social class through the use of social referents
paired with a name may regularly cluster around specific moments and aid in the
construction of narrative, such as through act and scene divisions.
2
In this essay I
test this assumption by observing simple frequencies at scale: I trace how the use of
vocatives for social status are used in a bigram with a name occur in the whole of
Shakespeare’s plays and subsequently by genre (following conventions laid out by
the First Folio).
This essay begins by describing Freytag’s approach to dramatic structure, then
discusses why the identification of class status can be a useful model for thinking
about how to identify specific moments in narrative structure where status is
explicitly mentioned. In section 3, I suggest that vocatives as ways of linguistically

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
2
identifying social status are a potentially salient piece of information for character
construction. Moreover, it has potential to drive narrative action forward as a way to
mark for recurrent characterization. Because social class is often encoded in
vocatives directly referencing status or occupation, I argue that it is possible to assign
class status based on vocative use and observe where in the narrative structure they
are used. Social mobility underlies the storylines of many Shakespearean plays.
Busse shows that nouns in the vocative mode foreground social structure in Early
Modern English through semantically-derived relationships in Shakespeare’s plays.
3
She illustrates vocative distributions by act in Shakespeare’s plays, but assumes that
vocative marking for social class is indifferent to dramatic structure.
4
She does not
test this assumption, whereas I want to suggest that perhaps we can use vocatives as
a way for re-establishing social identity throughout the narrative structure of a play-
text.
Building on this, I produce a lexicon of potentially viable terms for status based on
dramatis personae lists for Shakespeare’s plays, then offer my own model of how to
observe many social titles across narrative time using concordance plots.
Concordance plots, a simple visualization showing locations where to find specific
search terms in a linear visualization (from left to right, or ‘start’ to ‘finish’).
5
Freytag focuses his analysis in part on Shakespearean tragedies, no doubt due to
Shakespeare’s perceived centrality as the canonical early modern playwright. Based
on Freytag’s initial inquiry into tragedies, I extend my study to cover all of
canonicized Shakespearean drama to observe if this theoretical framework scales to
other genres. Moreover, as Shakespeare’s plays are readily available in a variety of
formats, it is possible to cross-reference status terms across more than one edition.
To account for variation, I use two complementary digital editions of his plays as
my source texts in Section 3: the Wordhoard implementation of the Nameless
Shakespeare corpus and the Folger Digital Texts corpus.
6
To perform the
concordance plot analysis in Section 4, I use the plain-text Shakespeare plays
included in the Shakespeare His Contemporaries (Mueller 2015) corpus.
7
I replicate
the concordance plot analysis four times: first, observing all of Shakespeare’s plays
in aggregate, then by individual genre (history-comedy-tragedy), following their
classification by Mueller and Burns (2010) to observe if variation can be found
across genre.
8
Finally, I offer some conclusions and routes for further study,

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
3
suggesting that vocatives are a productive metric for observing stylistic variation
across genre.
Dramatic Structure
Freytag offers a well-received model of narrative structure. He uses Shakespearean
and Greek tragedies as the basis for a pyramid shape for visualizing dramatic plots.
9
Freytag’s model, commonly referred to as Freytag’s Pyramid, was designed for the
use of five-act plays.
10
In his description of narrative form, Freytag argues for a
clearly visible division of action in dramatic texts based on repeated close reading
of the texts. Figure 1 offers a visualization of Freytag’s pyramid model.
11
Figure 1. Freytag’s pyramid, based on his study of five-act Shakespearean and Greek tragedies as it is
commonly illustrated.
Freytag identifies a beginning with an “exposition”, introducing the main characters
and the situation at hand, and the “rising action”, presenting a series of events which
present the narrative’s purpose. Frytag’s pyramid offers a “climax” or high point of
the narrative structure, with the language of the text moving towards a specific peak
moment before a fall. This builds from the immediate introduction of the characters
and plot at hand through the rising action into a climax. For Frytag specifically, this
moment represents a turning point for the protagonist, in which their fate is changed
irrevocably. Hamlet killing Polonius through the curtain in Gertrude’s chamber is
one such example of Frytag’s climax, and the subsequent falling action, where
Hamlet sets up the dumbshow to catch Claudius, serves to illustrate and foreshadow

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
4
Hamlet’s downfall. The ending, which Freytag deems the “denouement”, is a
cathartic conclusion in which the plot is cleanly resolved in some way. The
introduction of characters in the exposition would be a prime opportunity to establish
distinguishing features such as identity markers. An emphasis on social class can be
viewed primarily as a character-constructing event, rather than a non-vital piece of
social information appearing sporadically throughout a linear dramatic text.
Therefore, it is plausible to assume use of vocatives will cluster around specific
moments in narrative structure. As Freytag suggests, dramatic narratives have
broadly predictable structures: characters are introduced, something happens to
them, and the end of the play must satisfactorily resolve the circumstances. To
theorize this, we now move into a more socio-cognitive theoretical position.
In each defined moment of dramatic structure, the use of vocatives to identify
characters by status can be hypothesized following Fiske and Neuberg’s method for
understanding and recognizing figures aims to direct attention at the construction of
characterization and identification of figures within the available context.
12
Although
Culpeper
13
notes that this model is not entirely aimed at literary characterization, it
serves as a viable schema for conceptualization of new information and characters
within the performed world of dramatic play-texts.
14
Moreover, characterization
does not necessarily require understanding characters as real people: it is plausible
to consider them through models of schemata, prototypicality, and/or social
categories.
15
Regardless of the model used to consider new characters, they must be
introduced and must be indicated through a variety of social cues, such as spoken
language, dress, and address terms.
Following Fiske and Neuberg’s theory of characterization, the use of vocatives in
reference to a name should be greatest at the beginning of a play, introducing them
following and then decrease until the end of the play, when it may be useful to be
reminded of social status. After the introductory exposition, characters’ social class
will have been established and frequent reference should be unnecessary. By the
time the climax has been reached, the vocative constructions mentioned in a bigram
with a character’s name should have decreased, as the act of constructing a
characterization will have been cemented by now.

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
5
The characters with the most to lose are those with the highest social status; as a
result these characters may require the highest amount of social maintenance. As one
method to construct class is through overt references to social identity through the
use of vocatives, a resurgence of character names in a bigram with a name may be
anticipated at the peak of the dramatic structure.
16
These multimodal approaches
converge to construct class during the falling actions. By the resolution of the play,
social class should be re-established: social stratification and the potential for
mobility reinforce the importance of social class. For example, a character changing
position in the social hierarchy of Early Modern England through marriage might
invoke a sudden shift in vocatives relating to social class; similarly, the impending
downfall of a formerly powerful figure may invoke a reiteration of social class to
emphasize the tragic figure’s downfall. These would both be relevant moments to
reiterate social identity through the use of vocative constructions.
Within this hypothesis, characters whose name is attached to a vocative in a bigram,
such as Lord Bigot or King Richard or Sir Roger will be recurrent throughout the
play, as whenever they are the referenced by name, their social title is included.
While this helps reaffirm the social roles encoded in the texts overall, it does not
actively hurt the process of characterization either – if anything, reiteration of the
vocative serves as a reminder of characters. Additionally, the repetition of vocative
titles may be a way to illustrate scene shifts, potentially as a way of reintroducing
characters.
Social class in Early Modern England
Vocatives for social class often have a dual role as both a term of reference and a
term of address, and the use of an honorific invokes a politeness rather than a strict
naming practice; this only identifies the character, rather than the character’s title.
17
This duality means that as politeness markers used for speaking to an individual
above the speaker’s social status, terms such as lord and lady also act as class status
markers. These vocatives are indicative of social status for anyone, provided the
addressee is higher in rank than the speaker. There are two dominant models of social
class in Early Modern England. The first, offered by Nevalanien and Raumolin-
Brunberg, introduces a model of social hierarchy for Early Modern England.
18
The
classifications of social stratification outlined here by Nevalainen and Raumolin-
Brunberg are initially designed for their Corpus of Early English Correspondence,

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
6
so they use literacy as their measure of social class. Their model accounts for
gradiency from noblemen to gentlemen and professionals to non-gentry through
honorific marking. Members of the gentry are especially literate and independent.
This is presented in contrast to the illiterate non-gentry classes.
An alternative methodology for ranking characters by social status is modelled by
the Sociopragmatic corpus.
19
Culpeper and Archer’s class distinctions are
determined by discoursal references rather than literacy, and requires much more
manual annotation.
While Culpeper and Archer widen their scope by including trial transcripts, their
classification scheme is heavily skewed towards the lower classes, who are more
representative of the general population of Early Modern London. Busse also argues
for analysing Shakespeare’s use of vocatives in the clause through interpersonal co-
reference, considering forms of semantic colouring through the use of n-grams as
ways of informing Shakespearean vocative use and structure and uses patterns of
Latinate adjectives or personal pronouns in collocate to colour vocatives functioning
as an epithet.
20
In contrast, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg’s social ranking
schemas strive to be inclusive of multiple contexts in which one could be considered
part of the gentry.
While Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg emphasize differences between gentry
and non-gentry in letter-writing, their approach allows for much more flexibility in
identifying gentry figures for the needs of the study at hand.
21
They argue that the
label “gentry” does not necessarily exclude the nobility and the monarchy in Early
Modern England, whereas the label “commoners” explicitly excludes everyone else,
accounting for a division between the commoner and non-commoner. For these
reasons, this study follows Nevalaninen and Raumolin-Brunberg’s decision to
consider the non-commoners to be part of the gentry, offering a consistent division
in social organization.
Identifying courteous titles
In this section I outline how to identify vocatives which specifically function as
courteous titles. Importantly, Shakespeare’s 36 plays are a manageable size for hand-

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
7
curation, and have the added benefit of being made widely available in many
formats.
22
The dramatis personae, often supplied by editors, gives an independent
rating of social status which I use to test my method of assigning status by vocative.
To cover a range of opinions surrounding social class and nobility, I conflate
information from two highly-annotated editions to get a wider view of paratextual
information for Shakespeare’s plays. For this task, I use two digitally-annotated
editions of Shakespearean drama based on well-established critical print editions:
the Wordhoard Shakespeare corpus and the Folger Digital Texts corpus.
23
Crucially,
the Wordhoard and Folger Digital Text editions of Shakespeare’s plays contain
slightly different information about each character in their dramatis personae lists,
which provides the possibility to develop a more nuanced view of a character
status.
24
One such example can be found in 1 Henry VI. Henry Beaufort is described by the
Folger Digital Texts as “bishop of Winchester and afterwards cardinal”. While this
makes it clear that Henry Beaufort is a high-status individual in 1 Henry VI,
WordHoard includes that he is also the great-uncle to the King. This phenomenon
provides additional context which only one edition may not show. Using information
from the Folger Digital Texts cross-referenced with the Wordhoard corpus, one can
determine the minimum number of high-status figures in each Shakespeare play just
through dramatis personae lists. Dramatis personae lists tend to highlight speaking
roles, and these digitally-encoded texts will include moments where all or both
characters on stage will speak. It is difficult to discern the total number of characters
in each play, as an indefinite number of non-speaking parts could be available.
25
Due
to the intrinsic difficulty in identifying the total number of characters in a play, a
minimum quantity of upper-class figures by gender will be presented.
Cross-referencing social identity from two editions is especially useful when
considering how to categorise minor characters. For example, Wordhoard gives the
following information for The Comedy of Errors in the Dramatis Personae:
Solinus, duke of Ephesus
Aegeon, a merchant of Syracuse
Twin brothers, and sons to Aegeon and Aemilia
Antipholus of Ephesus

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
8
Antipholus of Syracuse
Twin brothers, and attendants on the two Antipholuses
Dromio of Ephesus
Dromio of Syracuse
Balthazar, a merchant
Angelo, a goldsmith
First Merchant, friend to Antipholus of Syracuse
Second Merchant, to whom Angelo is a debtor
Pinch, a schoolmaster
Aemilia, wife to Aegeon an abbess at Ephesus
Adriana, wife to Antipholus of Ephesus
Luciana, her sister
Luce, servant to Adriana
A Courtezan
An Officer
A Servant
A Gaoler
And other Attendants
Among the named characters (Balthazar, Dromio of Ephesus, Dromio of Syracuse,
Pinch) and several unnamed but unique characters (“a courtesan”, “An Officer”, “a
Gaoler”, “First Merchant”) there are also an unknown number of Attendants.
Although Wordhoard often only encodes the characters with speaking roles, the
Folger Digital Texts use a numbering convention of MinorCharacter X to list each
unnamed minor character with a speaking role in its underlying XML. Each minor
character with a speaking role gets an individual number in the Folger Digital Texts
(e.g. MinorCharacter 1, MinorCharacter 2) but the total number of minor characters
remains unclear. Not all of the minor characters have speaking roles, but could be
listed as an unknown quantity of ‘lords’. In other words, the total number of non-
speaking minor characters for each play remains debatable.
For example, characters with royal or noble titles included in their listing in the
dramatis personae, such as ‘Ferdinand, king of Navarre’ (Love’s Labours Lost)
would immediately be considered part of the upper classes, but not the gentry.
Similarly, characters who fall under a heading, such as ‘lords attending on the King:
Berowne, Longaville, Dumain’ (Love’s Labours Lost) would all be considered upper
class as well. In addition, the following rules were applied, iteratively:

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
9
1. If related to a figure of the upper classes (e.g. married, child of) still part of
the upper classes
2. Servants are not necessarily members of the gentry class
3. Unnamed multiple lords do not contribute to the final counts
4. Officers and soldiers are gentry figures, following Nevalainen and Raumolin-
Brunberg’s Table 4.1, which places them largely in the gentry rather than the
non-gentry.
5. Merchants are gentry, following Nevalainen and Ramoulin-Brumberg’s Table
4.1, Model 3.
Rule 3 in particular accounts for minor characters who are unnamed, unspecified,
and listed in dramatis personae, especially minor characters who be considered
nobles or gentry by virtue of their title, but the total number of minor characters
remains unclear. For this reason, the quantitative results produce a view of ‘At least
X percent of the dramatis personae for each play represents characters from the upper
classes’. There is another confounding issue underpinning this analysis: there are
also various members of the court such as attendants and servants who are not
explicitly members of the gentry.
Citizens, neighbours and various members of the larger community are also quite
unlikely to be gentry, as they represent the common man and woman, especially in
history plays. There are also characters such as murderers, witches, soothsayers and
messengers who have also not been counted as members of the higher status, as their
social rank is unclear from their included characterization. Each character must be
specifically a part of the upper classes through the invoking of rank either explicitly
(through titles and/or status) or implicitly (through relationships which directly link
figures to gentry status). Compiling a list of characters – who may not have
sufficient details of their social status included in the dramatis personae – to the
vocative title and name bigrams provides us with the ability to infer social class
based on status. Although ambiguous and/or polysemous titles such as mistress may
not be as straightforward as creating a rule that all characters with the title of duke
are members of the nobility or that all named lord characters are part of the gentry,
the identification of vocatives means it is possible to categorize characters by status
in Shakespeare’s plays using their title paired with a name.

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
10
Moreover, each title investigated here correlates exactly to the social status of an
individual character. The vocative title king, for example, is used only for heads of
state and earl and duke are applied to figures of that status. It would be rare to find
evidence of up-talking through the use of higher-status titles applied to a character
of lower status: titles which reference the nobility are not going to be applied to
anyone who is not in that specific social class, due to the rigidity of Early Modern
English social structures. As a result, class-specific titles applied characters are
almost always applied to named male characters of that specific social class. So
while sir, lord and master can be used interchangeably towards any non-commoner
male character, the titles esquire/squire, duke and earl are more closely tied to a
specific social status and identity.
Meanwhile, the social titles available for women in Shakespeare’s plays are more
complicated. For example, the title lady describes a woman with authority over
servants, attendants and serves as a head of the household in addition to functioning
as an honorific for lower-status servants. Lady is “a term referring to a woman to
indicate social superiority, as the head of a household or one who rules over subjects,
servants or attendants. The title was honorific, referring to a woman of high rank”
but “paradoxically, it was also used to signify a servant to a woman of high rank,
such as those who waited on a queen or noblewoman and might well be nobly born
themselves”
26
. The title of lady is therefore also applicable to any high-status
character who also serves another high-status character. Mistress is another complex
social title: it alternately denotes a female head of a household or a woman with
authority over servants and attendants.
27
But the title mistress can also be a term for
prostitutes, and miss is a diminutive form of mistress, which usually appears with a
name and “is a form of polite address to a married woman, or an unmarried woman
or girl”.
28
So not all characters that take the title “Mistress” are part of the gentry-
class, although the term suggests that the character in question could be. For
example, Mistress Quickly from Merry Wives and Henry IV parts 1 and 2 is a
professional, rather than a member of the gentry class, whereas Mistress Bianca
(from Taming of the Shrew) would be a gentry figure.
Understandably, there is some distrust surrounding vocatives as a reliable way to
identify social class because this process requires heavy contextualization within the
dramatic world of the play-text. For example, “‘Sir’ in Sir Credulous gives us a

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
11
reasonable identification that he is of gentry status but ‘sir’ alone used by one
individual to address another provides no reliable indication of status”.
29
That said,
it is possible to use regular expressions to pair each relevant title with a name using
regular expressions where every example of the search string will be identified in a
bigram with a proper noun. Regular expressions are string-matching queries
producing matches on a symbol-by-symbol basis which can be then used to identify
specific strings which are more complex than a simple letter-matching query.
By using the search string queen [A-Z], every instance of letters which matches the
pattern of queenspaceAnyCapitalLetter produces entries such as queen Elizabeth,
queen Dido, queen Elinor, queen Mab, queen Bess, queen Margaret, queen Mary,
among others. The search strings used in the regular expressions are case insensitive,
so proper-noun Queen or all-lowercase queen left-adjacent to a string which contains
a capital letter after the space right-adjacent to the n are both identifiable. This
process produces a list of every instance from the corpus through a list of
concordance lines containing every instance of the specified conditions and provides
the filename the line was pulled from. However, this process will occasionally
produce irrelevant hits, such as instances of the first-person singular pronoun I as
right-adjacent to the title query, producing irrelevant outputs but accurate to the
query such as the string queen I. While examples of title I are indeed within the
parameters of the query provided, they do not produce evidence of a title paired with
a name and are discarded. With the aid of a text editor, this query can be double-
checked to ensure relevant examples, such as queen Isabel, would be retained.
Using a concordance program supporting regular expressions, such as AntConc, a
search string which matches the general pattern of title [A-Z] can be used to identify
all proper nouns which are referenced through the use of a vocative for social status
in a bigram in a corpus.
30
This process produces a list of every instance from the
corpus through a keyword in context viewer.
31
Based on the titles referenced in the
dramatis personae lists, and supplemented by other potentially synonymous forms
with the aid of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
32
, the
below table lists all potential titles under investigation.
33

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
12
sir [A-Z]
lady [A-Z]
master [A-Z]
mistress [A-Z]
lord [A-Z]
mrs [A-Z]
king [A-Z]
goodwife [A-Z]
duke [A-Z]
goody [A-Z]
earl [A-Z]
widow [A-Z]
goodman [A-Z]
madam [A-Z]
sirrah [A-Z]
miss [A-Z]
signor [A-Z]
missus [A-Z]
signior [A-Z]
dame [A-Z]
father [A-Z]
queen [A-Z]
friar [A-Z]
gentlewoman [A-Z]
squire [A-Z]
countess [A-Z]
esquire [A-Z]
marquis [A-Z]
Table 1. All regular expressions included in the search queries from
These titles have been arranged in order of social status and by gender. Although
this is not designed to implicitly skew male, there are two more titles for men than
women.
34
Once irrelevant examples, such as title I are manually removed from the
results, it is possible to use simple frequency counting to observe which vocatives
for social class Shakespeare uses in his writing. Table 2 shows that although these
terms are potentially available for use, Shakespeare does not use all of them.
Vocative title as a regular expression
Total relevant examples
sir [A-Z]
399
master [A-Z]
144
lord [A-Z]
303
king [A-Z]
150
duke [A-Z]
33
earl [A-Z]
3
goodman [A-Z]
2
sirrah [A-Z]
7
signor [A-Z]
0
signior [A-Z]
102
father [A-Z]
21
friar [A-Z]
61
squire [A-Z]
0
esquire [A-Z]
0
brother [A-Z]
84

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
13
Table 2. Vocative titles in use in Shakespeare’s plays
There are more mentions of status titles which mark for male characters than those
for female characters, and some titles are very rarely used. Squire is not used at all
in Shakespeare’s corpus, although squires are contemporary to the period. It is
possible that they may be considered amongst the unnamed characters, or that their
title was never mentioned: after all, boys who aspire to be knights may not
necessarily be titled, either. The clergy covers a variety of roles, including bishops,
deacons, priests, pastors and ministers; bishops are established members of the
gentry, whereas the role of a deacon is a less prestigious title than priesthood and
ministry. Table 6 also considers friar and father as potential gentry titles, as clergy
are often on the cusp of gentryhood, following Nevalainen and Raumolin-
Brunberg.
35
Though priests and fathers are more likely to be members of the gentry
class because they are ordained, Table 6 shows that Friar is more frequent than
Father, probably due to the presence of Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet.
The noted a lack of signor attached to a name in the Shakespeare corpus is very
worrisome, as Italian gentlemen are common roles in comedies such as Taming of
the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado about Nothing. These characters are
referenced using the Italian title of address for men repeatedly in the plays, but none
of these results come up in a regular expression search for signor [A-Z], because
they are considered under the variant spelling signior. It is quite likely that in
preprocessing the texts, signor was corrected to become signior. Rather than making
marquis [A-Z]
5
lady [A-Z]
66
mistress [A-Z]
111
mrs [A-Z]
0
goodwife [A-Z]
0
goody [A-Z]
0
widow [A-Z]
6
madam [A-Z]
12
miss [A-Z]
0
missus [A-Z]
0
dame [A-Z]
0
queen [A-Z]
14
gentlewoman [A-Z]
0
countess [A-Z]
2

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
14
the dominant spelling signor the default, it has become regularized to a variant
spelling.
36
Because this is a fairly frequent politeness marker for gentlemen in plays
set in Italy, it is simple enough to substitute a spelling variation producing results
into the list of terms for further investigation.
And although female characters are present in Shakespearean drama, Table 2 shows
that they are less likely to be addressed by title and their name. The one exception,
mistress, can function both as a social title and as part of a naming convention. A
character can be called mistress as an honorific and as part of her character’s name
in a way unavailable to other titles.
37
Although lady is less likely to be used to
describe a high-status female character as part of a name, Lady Macbeth is the most
prominent character using this construction in Shakespeare’s plays. Instead, mistress
appears to be the title of choice, and is used for characters such as Mistress Quickly
and Mistress Ford. Mistress may be used in place of missus and miss, which also
may contribute to these terms’ overall absence. Other female-gendered forms are
generally absent in comparison to the male-gendered social titles.
With a sense of which terms are more frequent than others in Shakespeare, following
the lists of vocatives outlined in Tables 1 and 2, I now focus my attention on the
highest-frequency vocatives from Table 6. Because examples with n > 20 are so
infrequent, their contributions to an overall picture may introduce noise to an
aggregated view. To observe overall use of these terms in the plays, one can
construct a regular expression which consists of the most-frequent forms in from
Table 2. Titles chosen are strung together by pipelines, so that the full query asks
for ‘or’ rather than ‘and’. The full search string reads as follows:
lord [A-Z]|sir [A-Z]|master [A-Z]|duke [A-Z]|earl [A-Z]|king [A-
Z]|signior [A-Z]|lady [A-Z]|mistress [A-Z]|madam [A-Z]|queen [A-
Z]|dame [A-Z]
When the query encounters a play without one or more of these specific regular
expressions, it will continue to loop through until all parts in the query have run.
With this search string, it is now possible to observe how the most-frequently
appearing bigrams appear in Shakespeare’s plays, and whether or not their

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
15
invocation has any correlation to the idea of dramatic structure with the aid of a
simple visualization process.
Applying models of dramatic structure to Early Modern
drama
Where Freytag uses a graph to model the overall appearance of dramatic structure, I
am more interested in observing the placement of specific lexical items throughout
a text. Applying AntConc’s concordance plot visualization
38
to the Shakespeare
plays included in Muller’s 2014 Shakespeare His Contemporaries corpus is a simple
way to view lexical frequency in a text, normalized for length. Like Freytag’s
visualizations of dramatic structure, they are read from left (“start”) to right
(“finish”). A dark line represents one instance of the search query in use; white space
means the search query is not present. Converting from a keyword-in-context
concordance view to a concordance plot view, each hit is translated into one line;
each play gets its own concordance plot, again to be read from left to right (or start
to finish). Any character string matching the above regular expressions are counted
and recorded as one hit.
39
Several plays are provided as an example in Figure 1
below.
Figure 2: Concordance plots as seen in the AntConc interface

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
16
Individually, these plays do not cover a lot of examples. Merry Wives of Windsor,
labelled as ‘mww’ above (third concordance plot from the top and from the bottom),
has quite a lot of examples of our search string, whereas As You Like It (‘ayl’, second
from bottom) shows comparatively little usage. But in aggregate they represent a
much larger part of dramatic language. Once each individual concordance plot from
Figure 1 is saved as an individual image, it is possible to combine each concordance
plot into an aggregated, average view of all concordance plots for an overall picture
of vocative use across the aggregated corpus.
Despite the popularity of the so-called ‘bag of words’ model which ignores
lexicogrammar and syntax
40
, this essay follows the theoretical and statistical position
voiced by Kilgarriff (2005) and echoed by Evert (2005), Gries (2005) and Dunning
(1993). He correctly notes that the use of language can be neither random nor
arbitrary, and in fact governed by a range of syntactic rules, making the null
hypothesis that words can appear more often than simply by chance impossible:
Language is non-random and hence, when we look at linguistic
phenomena in corpora, the null hypothesis will never be true.
Moreover, where there is enough data, we shall (almost) always be able
to establish that it is not true. In corpus studies, we frequently do have
enough data, so the fact that a relation between two phenomena is
demonstrably nonrandom, does not support the inference that it is not
arbitrary. Hypothesis testing is rarely useful for distinguishing
associated from non-associated pairs of phenomena in large corpora.
Where used, it has often led to unhelpful or misleading results.
41
Lijffijt et al agree: “the use of the X2 and log-likelihood ratio tests is problematic in
this context, as they are based on the assumption that all samples are statistically
independent of each other.”
42
While Lijffijt et al do argue later in their article that
there are moments when such a test would be appropriate, such as the study of
variation and statistical significance between discrete corpora,
43
this study is not
looking at totally discrete corpora but rather subcorpora culled from one coherent
body of work broadly conceived as belonging to a solo author.
44
Therefore, the
present essay adheres to Kilgarriff’s initial claim, and is bolstered by the fact that
literary language is even less likely to be randomly distributed, making a chi-test or

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
17
other significance score especially inappropriate. Following Zipf’s law
45
, literary
language is even less likely to be randomly distributed: aside from the question of
lexicogrammar, overall vocabulary frequency is governed by type: the most frequent
terms in any given corpus are high-frequency function words, whereas content-
driven language is far less frequent throughout the corpus and must be distributed in
a way that presents a meaningful narrative. For these reasons, this project foregoes
questions of statistical significance for the rhetoric of visualization.
I use Forster’s methods
46
for aggregating images using ImageMagick, a command-
line software package for image manipulation, makes it possible to produce average
concordance plots for all of Shakespeare’s plays to see if vocatives marking for
social class are visible at the level of narrative structure.
47
Forster describes this
process as “taking 50 images setting each to 2% transparency and then stacking them
all together so that you have a single page […] it is comparing the same pixel
location across multiple images, so size is key”.
48
Despite the differences in each play’s individual word counts, each concordance plot
is identical in dimensions regardless of length, meaning it is possible to consider
each play as part of a larger aggregated whole. Following Forster’s advice, each
concordance plot was cropped to an identical size and layered to construct an
aggregated image.
49
Figure 3 shows vocatives for social class in Shakespeare’s plays
can appear anywhere:
Figure 3. Average view of 36 concordance plots for Shakespeare’s plays
While there are moments of relative darkness (presence) and lightness (absence),
there are no sustained moments where a vocative for social class is completely
absent. Even if one is to divide Figure 3 into thirds representing the beginning,
middle and end of a play, these vocatives are equally available throughout the
narrative structure. The fact that these plays use vocatives to mark for social titles
should not be a surprise. Figure 4 shows that there is no coherent, sustained gap in
the whole of the corpus. However, the question remains if this will hold when we

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
18
consider plays based on generic classification. Does genre have any influence in how
characters’ social status is presented?
The larger the corpus, the more information which has to get layered into the average
concordance plot. This may be a limiting factor in Figure 3. To reduce some of this
noise, I split the corpus into three discrete genres following the First Folio
conventions: 14 comedies, 11 histories and 11 tragedies.
50
Applying the same
methodology as outlined above, a generic study of Shakespeare’s plays will allow
us to see if his use of vocatives for social class is consistent across gender. I will
begin with Shakespeare’s history plays, then move to his comedies and end with his
tragedies.
History plays include many members of court, making them especially heavily
skewed towards gentry. Many of the examples are embedded in character names, so
it is not tremendously surprising to find that the Shakespeare’s histories use
vocatives for social class extremely frequently. However, while there are lots of
examples available in the history plays, based on characterization alone, Figure 4
shows that there is no particular sustained portion of these plays which are without
vocatives.
Figure 4. Average view of Shakespeare’s histories
Like Figure 3, which offers the overall picture of Shakespeare’s plays, Figure 4
shows that vocatives can appear anywhere in the history plays. As a genre, history
plays are quite stable for literary scholars; they centre around historical figures with
established status and social ranks. Thus it is should not be a huge surprise that there
is no general pattern of sustained absence in these plays. Figure 5 simply confirms
what literary scholars have long known about this particular genre, which is that it
is primarily concerned with retelling stories of historical figures of rank and status.
Meanwhile, it could be argued that comedy plays are just as much about social class
as histories: a female character’s change in status from daughter to wife is the widely

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
19
recognized defining feature of a comedy. This shift in status for a female character
would be very closely tied to her impending marriage; the narrative of the
Shakespeare’s comedies centres around the success of this change in social status.
This makes comedies intrinsically unlike histories, as the plot functions quite
differently. As a result, it may be expected that the first third may establish
individuals’ social status with a heavy use of vocatives. The shift in status
surrounding a successful match would introduce a second rise in vocative use in the
final third of the play, with a more marked decrease in the middle third. However,
this proposed outcome is quickly proven untrue in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Average view of Shakespeare’s comedies
Figure 5 illustrates that vocatives for social class again do not show any particular
patterns or clusters in the start, middle, or end of plays. There is no large, clearly
defined moment where there is a noticeable absence of vocatives, nor is there a clear
moment where vocatives are most strongly concentrated in Figure 3, Figure 5, or
Figure 4. Thus far, none of vocatives under investigation do offer any strong
correlation to a five-act dramatic structure.
Given all the evidence presented thus far, it is reasonable to expect that
Shakespeare’s tragedies will continue to show this kind of trend. But, as Figure 6
below shows, Shakespeare’s tragedies show a different distribution than the previous
two genres. Figure 5 shows a marked decrease in vocatives for social class around
the middle half of the aggregated concordance plot, and a slight resurgence near the
middle of the final third, but again a noticeable absence at the end of the final third.
Unlike in histories and comedies, where these vocatives could appear anywhere in
the narrative structure, Shakespeare’s tragedies include comparative periods of
absence.

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
20
Figure 6. Average view of Shakespeare’s tragedies
Distribution is not nearly as uniform here as in Figure 3, 4 or 5; Figure 6 also shows
that the tragedies have fewer examples of our vocatives overall.
51
This is especially
noticeable around the halfway point in the middle third of the overall image, which
shows a much-decreased frequency of vocatives for social class to the point of
showing extended stretches with extremely infrequent use (marked by white spaces).
This is in stark contrast to Figures 4 and 5, where the terms under investigation are
heavily used throughout the plays. Instead, the use of vocatives for social class in
direct reference to a characters’ name completely drops off by the end of the play
and are broadly missing from the middle third.
Figure 6 therefore may be indicative of Freytag’s theory of a literary climax, in
which he claims that Shakespearean and Greek tragedies reach their emotional high
point somewhere in the third act in a five-act structure. By broadly refraining from
using vocatives for social class at this particular moment, Shakespeare’s tragedies
may indeed illustrate a specific kind of shift in style in which linguistic politeness
strategies and social class become briefly less important. The sudden lack of
vocatives marking for social class between male and female characters suggests that
the breakdown of the dialectic begins around Act III. The tragic downfall of the
heroic Self could be marked by a temporary shift in style and tone away from
conventional courteously terms during this time.
52
As Figure 6 suggests, the social status of the main character is motioned to rather
than made explicit during the construction of the tragic Self’s downfall. This gap is
available for each Shakespearean tragedy around roughly the same general location
in the play as figure 7 illustrates. However, the exact moment is slightly different in
each play, as Table 3 outlines:
Play name
Part of play without vocatives for social class as a naming strategy
Titus Andronicus
From II.xx to IV.i
Romeo and Juliet
From II.iv to III.iii

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21
Julius Caesar
Lord Brutus: from II.i to IV.iii; master Antony appears once in III.i.
Hamlet
From III.i to IV.ii
King Lear
Two instances: once in IV.iii and IV.v
Troilus
From III.ii to IV.i
Othello
From II.iii to V.i
Antony and Cleopatra
From III.vi to IV.v
Timon of Athens
From III.iv to IV.i
Table 3. Points in Shakespearean tragedies without vocatives for social class attached to a name
Macbeth and Coriolanus have no instances of these particular vocatives, so they are
excluded from Table 3. A lack of vocatives marking for social class in a bigram with
a name suggests Act III broadly marks the beginning of tragic hero’s downfall and
foreshadows the impending tragic ending. They reappear around the start of Act IV
in each play. In Hamlet, during the gap between instances of lord Hamlet (Act III,
scene I, and Act IV, scene 2), Hamlet tells Horatio to watch Claudius during their
dumbshow. The players frame King Claudius, and Hamlet readies himself behind a
curtain to kill the praying King Claudius; Gertrude demands to talk to her son and
he instead murders Polonius, and finally in Act IV scene 2 Gertrude reflects on Lord
Hamlet’s actions, and his title of “Lord Hamlet” returns. After setting actions in
motion implicating Claudius and between his decision to enact revenge and his rash
change of heart to kill the man behind the curtain, Hamlet has set his downfall into
motion. A similar example is available in Titus Andronicus, where Act III as a whole
is devoid of vocatives marking social class with a name, though phrases marking for
status are used throughout Titus’ investigation of Aaron and Luicius’ abuse towards
Lavinia. Titus wants information out of them, and he must appease them to get the
answers he wants: he must use face-saving strategies to coerce them into confessing
their actions. The success of his efforts is questionable, leading to Titus’ decision to
take revenge after Lavinia’s ravishing.
In Antony and Cleopatra, this phenomenon is delayed slightly, occurring between
III.6 and IV.5, but the sudden absence of vocatives marking for an individual
character by status also occurs; here, Antony escapes from Rome to Egypt to fight
alongside Cleopatra. The parts of the play without reference to naming practices
including vocatives for social class are during Antony’s battle, and he blames
Cleopatra for making him abandon his previously noble self in his pursuit for her
affection. Finally in this section of the play, Caesar prepares to conquer Antony’s

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
22
army. While Cleopatra shoulders the blame for Antony’s defeat, his role as tragic
hero is cemented at a great cost to Cleopatra. In each example outlined here, the
tragic downfall of a character is contingent on others responding to their attempts at
face-saving strategies and getting information out of them as to why they acted as
they did, and introduces the tragic hero’s downfall from Act III onwards.
The visual reintroduction of vocatives as part of a naming strategy we see in Act IV
suggests that this relative absence in the middle of tragedies may be an additional
distinguishing feature of Shakespearean tragedies from the rest of his dramatic
corpus. Instead of using explicit naming, Shakespearean tragedies offer a highly
localized form of social titles; rather than emphasizing one individual’s status as
tragic hero, we see him using politeness markers and register-raising strategies such
as “sir”, “my lord”, “your honour”, and others towards others. He aims to flatter
those around him in hopes of getting them to act on his behalf and/or to encourage
them to divulge information to him. Of course, this backfires, and prompts the tragic
hero to enact a series of events leading to his downfall. The shift back into vocatives
as a naming strategy around Act IV and into the beginning of Act V serves primarily
as reminders of the tragic hero’s status within the world of the play. This is very
much in contrast to Shakespeare’s comedies and histories, which show frequent use
from start to finish in the concordance plots.
The primary finding of this study is Shakespeare’s tragedies are sufficiently different
to the comedies and histories in their use of vocatives marking explicitly for class.
This suggests several new directions for the study of genre and vocatives. In
particular, there may be something specific about tragedy that affects ways that
social status terms are used. First, it would be good to replicate this study on both a
larger selection of authors and a larger scale more generally. This may be indicative
of something that makes Shakespearean tragedy different from other playwrights in
Early Modern England writing tragedies, or it may be a larger generic difference
which can be traced. With that in mind, I would also be very reluctant to call this a
universal feature without ample research across many periods and many years,
which will require a much larger lexicon of status terms. In addition, this may be
something which Freytag had initially identified in his initial claims about tragedy
in his study of dramatic structure. Because Freytag’s model is primarily based on
Shakespearean and Greek tragedy, another route would be to replicate this study

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
23
using the corpora driving other studies and updating the terms for investigation
accordingly to see if it their models can account for other kinds of vocative features.
This study also suggests that simple visualizations are more productive than complex
graphs for observing lots of lexical examples at once.
Conclusions
In this essay, I investigate ways that courteous or otherwise socially elevated titles
appear as part of character name, to show that the dramatis personae lists from
Shakespeare’s plays are a useful way to categorise individuals by social status. I
show that issues of socially courteous titles are completely independent of the
process of characterization and narrative. In Shakespearean drama, vocatives
marking for social class are identifiable through the use of concordance plots.
Following Freytag’s visualization of dramatic structure, this essay shows that
concordance plots are an alternative model of visualizing narrative structure. This
study shows that there is no particularly strong correlation between vocatives for
social class and dramatic structure except in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Their noted
absence offers several new research questions for further investigation about genre
in plays written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
As the overall picture of Shakespeare’s plays (Figure 4) shows, the use of vocatives
to mark out individual characters does not appear to have any bearing on character
or narrative construction. Figure 4 shows that vocatives marking for social class
appear equally throughout the whole concordance plot rather than a strong pattern
of presence and absence at any particular moment. It is possible what Figure 4 shows
is an aggregated view of scene shifts in many plays at once, where characters move
on and off stage and their social title becomes a salient feature for identifying the
character.
In performance, the divisions of acts and scenes are often imperceptible; act and
scene divisions may well be an artefact of print culture rather than a feature of the
plays in the first instance. In Shakespeare’s plays, scene length is far from
normalised; very short scenes of a hundred lines or less can be juxtaposed with
comparatively longer scenes. However, it is difficult to trace this, as each
concordance plot is normalized for length regardless of how many words are in each

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
24
text. Furthermore, scene length is also quite irregular; there is no standard scene
length. And, very short scenes of a hundred lines or less can be juxtaposed with
comparatively longer. As a result, scenes do not necessarily correspond; moreover,
imposing even a broad act division model on this image may be retrofitting a
structure to the texts which is not necessarily accurate. With this in mind, I would
also like to suggest that each instance of a vocative is not necessarily indicative of a
specific character’s presence on stage. Although there are individual moments
without reference to vocatives for social class, it would be very difficult to identify
exactly where these absences would be precisely located and if they overlap
completely: although these concordance plots have been normalized for length, it is
very difficult to identify exact moments across a layered image like this. In
performance, the divisions of acts and scenes are often imperceptible, and act and
scene divisions may well be an artefact of print culture rather than a feature of the
plays in the first instance, and that the many repeated instances of social titles
referencing a character may be indicative of scene changes or other forms of
movement across the corpus. This study therefore also suggests that markers for
social class may be not be always be visible at the level of dramatic structure.
I would therefore like to close by offering one final possibility about the
visualizations offered. The uses of vocatives for names serve as a way to re-
introduce and re-establish characters entering and exiting the stage. Here, social re-
identification becomes interactional, allowing individuals to be re-established
alongside other social cues such as costuming and setting and also enacting motive-
driven narrative techniques. A performative strategy to imply closeness and/or
intimacy between two or more character, this is an effective way of manipulating
someone into completing the speaker’s desired effect, such as acting performing
courtship practices, acting on behalf of another, or exposing the hearer of the
speaker’s intentions.
Each instance of a vocative is therefore not necessarily indicative of a specific
character’s presence on stage; instances may be more indicative of characters
following social courtesy based on rank.
53
Each time socially courteous titles are
used, it does not necessarily mean that they are on stage, or that they are even part
of the action at hand. Referencing these characters by their full name with the title
as a feature of social politeness and modes of social courtesy in the period means

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
25
that they can be used regardless of whether or not the character in question is on-
stage. As Early Modern stage productions required actors to play several roles, this
may be a way to re-establish and constantly reappraise character’s status throughout
the plays rather than limiting descriptions of characters early in the plays.
54
Therefore, when we visualize language at scale like this this, we are really observing
very small interactive moments which aggregate into a larger narrative whole, which
is more complicated than practitioners of quantitative methods have anticipated.
Notes
1
Freytag, Gustav, and Elias J. MacEwan, trans. Freytag’s Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic
Composition and Art. An Authorized Translation from the 6th German Ed. by Elias J. MacEwan. (1900 [1863]).
2
Huddleston, Rodney D., and Pullum, Geoffrey K. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. (2002) 522-
523; Busse, Beatrix, Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare. (2006).
3
Busse, Beatrix. Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare. (2006): 133; 137.
4
Busse, Beatrix.. Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare. (2006): 77-79; 91-92; 415-423.
5
Anthony, L. AntConc (Version 3.3.5) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University.
http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/ (2013).
6
Martin, P. Burns, et al. Wordhoard, Version 1.4.4,. Web applet. (1 March 2011)
http://wordhoard.northwestern.edu/userman/index.html; Mueller, Martin.. “The Nameless Shakespeare”. TEXT
Technology: the journal of computer text processing 14.1. (2005).; Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s
Plays from Folger Digital Texts. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles.
(2014.) http://folgerdigitaltexts.org/.
7
The exact texts used in this study came from an early version of the Shakespeare His Contemporaries corpus,
which was published during the writing of this essay (Mueller 2015). See the associated Dataverse repository to
replicate this study.
8
This essay does not take contemporary debates about authorship into consideration, instead using Wordhoard’s
divisions of genres as its guiding principle.
9
Freytag, Gustav, and Elias J. MacEwan, trans. Freytag’s Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic
Composition and Art. An Authorized Translation from the 6th German Ed. by Elias J. MacEwan. (1900 [1863]).
10
A similar structure is outlined by Aristotle in Poetics, but it has been argued that this is better suited to three-act
plays. Freytag’s pyramid has been the dominant mode of understanding dramatic structure since 1863, and lifts
heavily from Aristotle’s three modes of protasis, epitasis and catastrophe (18.1-2). While an Aristotelian model of
dramatic structure in Early Modern drama seems to have fallen out of fashion by the 1980s, Freytag’s model
continues to be an accepted narrative structure by literary scholars.

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
26
12
Fiske, S. T., & Neuberg, S. L. A continuum of impression formation, from category-based to individuating
processes: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances
in experimental social psychology, Vol. 23. (1990): pp. 4-8.
13
Culpeper, Jonathan. Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. (2001). 85.
14
Literary studies in particular are indebted to Barthes (1970 [1974]), in which lists of character traits are
considered; Frye (1957: 171) prefers a pragmatic model of characterization, in which presentation influences
character.
15
Bartlett, F.C.. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. (1995 [1932]; Rosch, E. et al.
“Basic Objects in Natural Categories”. Cognitive Psychology 8.3 (1976) 382–439; Propp, Propp, V. Morphology of
the Folktale: Second Edition. Austin: University of (2010 [1968]).
16
Alternate modes of constructing social class, which may be used in collaboration with the use of vocatives include
(re)establishing setting, include emphasizing clothing (e.g. “enter Lear, fantastically dressed with weeds”, which
stresses how far he has removed himself from courtly dress).
17
Demmen, Jane Elizabeth Judson. “Charmed and Chattering Tongues: Investigating the Functions and Effects of
Key Word Clusters in the Dialogue of Shakespeare’s Female Characters.” (2009) 146.
18
Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. ‘Sociolinguistics and Language History: The Helsinki
Corpus of Early English Correspondence’. Journal of Linguistics 13. (1994). p.140, based on Laslett, Peter. The
World We Have Lost (1983): 38.
19
Archer, Dawn, and Jonathan Culpeper. ‘Sociopragmatic Annotation: New Directions and Possibilities in
Historical Corpus Linguistics’. Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech. Ed. Paul Rayson,
Anthony McEnery, and Andrew Wilson, Geoffrey N. Leech. (2003): 37–58; Archer, Dawn. Questions and Answers
in the English Courtroom (1640–1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis. (2005); Sociopragmatic Corpus. A Derivative
of A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, Compiled Under the Supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University)
and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University), (2007); Lutzky, Ursula. Discourse Markers in Early Modern English
(2012).
20
Busse, Beatrix. Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare. (2006): 109-127, 211-231
21
For example, Palander-Collin (2007) discusses the need for multiple sociopragmatic annotation schemes, arguing
that different projects have different needs, such as conversational analysis compared to variationist sociolinguistics
(online, section 2).
22
This manual curation model is very unlikely to scale well, especially for dramatic plays that is less well-
documented than the Shakespearean corpus. However, for an individual author’s corpus or a small corpus
comprising a sample of several different authors, it would certainly be possible to apply the methods displayed here.
23
Martin, P. Burns, et al. Wordhoard, Version 1.4.4,. Web applet. (1 March 2011)
http://wordhoard.northwestern.edu/userman/index.html; Mueller, Martin.. “The Nameless Shakespeare”. TEXT
Technology: the journal of computer text processing 14.1. (2005).; Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s
Plays from Folger Digital Texts. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles.
24
Dramatis personae lists are usually considered paratextual and often editorial in nature. This is part of the reason it
is worth looking at more than one specific edition of the plays, though theoretically this could be extended to many
more editions for a more robust view.

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
27
25
In addition, instances of speech assigned to ‘all’ characters or ‘both’ characters (if there are just two) have been
removed from this analysis.
26
Findlay, Alison. Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary. (2010): 226
27
Findlay, Alison. Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary. (2010): 271
28
Findlay, Alison. Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary. (2010): 271. Moreover, the diminutive form miss does not
appear in the Shakespeare corpus. Perhaps the diminuitive was less popular in the early modern period, whereas
mistress was more widely used, though this requires further study with a larger corpus.
29
Archer, Dawn, and Jonathan Culpeper. ‘Sociopragmatic Annotation: New Directions and Possibilities in
Historical Corpus Linguistics’. Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech. (2003): 53
30
Anthony, L. AntConc (Version 3.3.5) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University.
http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/ (2013).
31
The search strings used in the regular expressions explored in Table 4 are case insensitive to account for variation,
so that capitalization for the social title is irrelevant, but the word to its immediate left must be capitalized.
32
See Froehlich (2017).
33
Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irené Wotherspoon (eds.). The Historical Thesaurus of
English, version 4.2. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. (2015) http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/; Froehlich,
Heather. Social Identity in Shakespeare’s Plays: A Quantitative Study. 2017
34
As literary critics such as Phyllis Rackin (2000, 44) claim, “plays with overtly repressive and misogynist themes
[…] are held up as historically accurate expressions of beliefs generally held in Shakespeare’s time.” The majority
of writing from Early Modern England is by men and social history suggests that men were more involved in
matters of court. However, a lack of courteous titles for women does not necessarily claim that women could not be
the head of state or exert powerful influence over Early Modern London. For example, prior to her marriage to
Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn had an enormous influence at court; her daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, ruled the country
from 1558 to 1603.
35
Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the
Corpus of Early English Correspondence. (1996): 58.
36
Signior is included as a spelling variation according to the OED. (see ‘Signor, N.’ OED Online. Oxford English
Dictionary. Web. 9 Jan. 2015.)
37
Findlay, Alison. Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary. (2010): 271.
38
Anthony, L. AntConc (Version 3.3.5) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University.
http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/ (2013).
39
Where previous discussions of vocative title [A-Z] included omitting examples of title [first person pronoun I]
here they have been retained, which skews the data somewhat: vocative title I functions far more as a politeness
marker than a character-naming mechanism. This can conflate two functions of the vocatives.
40
Lijffijt, Jefrey, Terttu Nevalainen, Tanja Säily, Panagiotis Papapetrou, Kai Puolamäki, and Heikki Mannila.
“Significance Testing of Word Frequencies in Corpora”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. (Advanced access, 8
December 2014): 4; Lijffijt, Jefrey, Terttu Nevalainen, Tanja Säily, Panagiotis Papapetrou, Kai Puolamäki, and
Heikki Mannila. “Significance Testing of Word Frequencies in Corpora”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
(Advanced access, 8 December 2014): 2.

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL STATUS IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
28
41
Kilgarriff, Adam. “Language Is Never, Ever, Ever, Random”. Corpus Linguistics & Linguistic Theory (November
2005): 263–76. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt.2005.1.2.263. pp. 272-273. See also Gries, S. Th. “Null-hypothesis
significance testing of word frequencies: a follow-up on Kilgarriff”. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1, no.
2 (November 2005): 277–94; Evert, S. “The Statistics of Word Cooccurrences: Word Pairs and Collocations”.
Dissertation, Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, University of Stuttgart (2005); and Dunning, T. Accurate
methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence. Computational Linguistics (1993). Vol.19: 61–74.
42
Lijffijt, Jefrey, Terttu Nevalainen, Tanja Säily, Panagiotis Papapetrou, Kai Puolamäki, and Heikki Mannila.
“Significance Testing of Word Frequencies in Corpora”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. (Advanced access, 8
December 2014: 1; George K. Zipf. The Psychobiology of Language. Houghton-Mifflin (1935); George K. Zipf.
Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley (1949).
43
Lijffijt, Jefrey, Terttu Nevalainen, Tanja Säily, Panagiotis Papapetrou, Kai Puolamäki, and Heikki Mannila.
“Significance Testing of Word Frequencies in Corpora”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. (Advanced access, 8
December 2014: 4).
44
Authorship for Shakespearean plays is complicated – but generally scholars follow the 1623 first folio (see Jowett,
John. Shakespeare and Text. (2007); Smith, Emma. Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book
(2016) and Smith, Emma. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio (2016)) for generic
classification. The present project follows this practice.
45
George K. Zipf. The Psychobiology of Language. Houghton-Mifflin (1935); George K. Zipf. Human Behavior
and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley (1949).
46
Forster, Chris. “Vellum in War Time: Playing with MJP data”. Chris Forster. Web.
http://cforster.com/2011/11/playing-with-mods/ 2011.
47
ImageMagick is freely available from http://www.imagemagick.org/. I am deeply indebted to Chris Forster for his
proof-of-concept using magazine pages (2011, http://cforster.com/2011/11/playing-with-mods/); more technical
detail is available in the following blog posts, Froehlich 2015a and b: http://hfroehli.ch/2015/02/24/how-to-address-
many-concordance-plots-at-once-2/ and http://hfroehli.ch/2015/02/26/a-cautionary-tale/)
48
Forster, Chris. “Vellum in War Time: Playing with MJP data”. Chris Forster. Web.
http://cforster.com/2011/11/playing-with-mods/ 2011.
49
This is not a composite image but an averaged image. ImageMagick has an option for creating images using the
command ‘composite’, which requires specifying opacity, much like in Adobe Photoshop’s layer function. In theory
these are both commands which produce aggregated views of many images together. The ‘composite’ command
requires setting thresholds, whereas the ‘average’ command operates on many images at a default 2% opacity.
50
The Folio classification for genre is a widely accepted convention in the field.
51
The tragedy subcorpus covers the same number of plays covered by the comedy subcorpus, so this cannot be an
effect of size. Although they are not equal in wordcount, the visualization is normalized for size, so that each play –
regardless of length – is visualized across the same space.
52
Following Bamber, Linda. Comic Women, Tragic Men: Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare. (1982): 48.
53
cf Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. “Sociolinguistics and Language History: The Helsinki
Corpus of Early English Correspondence.” Hermes, Journal of Linguistics 13 (1994): 135–14; Nevalainen, Terttu,

JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ANALYTICS
29
and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1996. Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of
Early English Correspondence (1996).
54
Please see Ichikawa, Mariko. The Shakepearean Stage Space. Cambridge UP: Cambridge, England. (2013) and
Gurr, Andrew and Mariko Ichiwaka. Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres. Oxford Shakespeare Topics: Oxford,
England. (2000) for discussions of staging in Shakespeare’s plays – including the crucial interventions of entrances
and exits, especially for roles played by more than one person.