Shakespeare statistics

I’ve always been interested in the work of Michael Witmore of the University of Wisconsin, author of (among other books), Shakespearean Metaphysics.

One of the things he does is use computerized statistical studies to group Shakespeare’s plays together according to the frequency of various grammatical structures and other properties. This generally groups together those plays that one would group together anyway. But occasionally it yields fascinating surprises. For instance:

“Shakespeare, that is, built some of his tragedies — Othello in particular – on structures that would ordinarily be employed in comedy, and in doing so heightened the emotional effect of downturn in the plays when things deteriorate. There is thus a certain, almost structural irony to Othello. Some of what you see happening on stage seems to evoke the expectations of comedy (and its happy conclusions), but what eventually transpires is the opposite. While this may sound emotionally perverse, I think it is exactly what Shakespeare was up to in Othello, and I’m not surprised that a reader as careful and informed as Snyder was able to figure this out.”

I wonder if there could be a philosophy equivalent of this. Are there certain features typical of classic works of metaphysics, ethics, Islamic phlosophy, or Neoplatonism, that might successfully be mimicked by a different genre that then undermines our expectations? Maybe not. Maybe what Shakespeare does in Othello requires the subversion of an emotional engagement that isn’t quite as present when reading philosophy texts, so that the same tricks might not work.

But I suspect that it would work. In fact, since the world is probably made of simple structures despite its great complexity of detail, there are probably a finite number of strategies for innovating in any genre, and this would be one of them: “adopt the conventions of an opposite genre, then undermine the usual results at the end.” Most likely this happens even in the animal kingdom in some fashion.

Another possible strategy: take peripheral background considerations of an existing genre and make them the center of the action. I once heard a good musicologist explain that Claude Debussy simply takes chords from existing tonal music that usually appear only briefly to point to the concluding chord, and makes them free-floating, standalone chords that are never resolved in the expected manner of Western tonal music.

Maybe there are seven or eight other basic ways to innovate, holding good for all fields.

In any case, I should have been following Witmore’s blog sooner, because his statistical approach always makes me think harder.