Shakespeare's
plays reveal his psychological signature
By the Association for Psychological Science, Science DailyShakespeare is such a towering literary figure that any new insight into the man, or his work, tends to generate a jolt of excitement in academic and non-academic communities of Shakespeare aficionados.
Applying
psychological theory and text-analyzing software, researchers at the University
of Texas at Austin have discovered a unique psychological profile that
characterizes Shakespeare's established works, and this profile strongly
identifies Shakespeare as an author of the long-contested play Double
Falsehood.
The findings are published in Psychological Science,
a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
"Research in psychology has shown that some of the core
features of who a person is at their deepest level can be revealed based on how
they use language. With our new study, we show that you can actually take a lot
of this information and put it all together at once to understand an author
like Shakespeare rather deeply," says researcher Ryan Boyd of the
University of Texas at Austin.
"This research shows that it is indeed possible to start
modeling peoples' mental worlds in much more complete ways. We don't need a
time machine and a survey form to figure out what type of person Shakespeare
was -- we can determine that very accurately just based on how he wrote using
methods that are objective and easy to do," Boyd explains.
Double Falsehood was published in
1728 by Lewis Theobald, who claimed to have based the play on three original
Shakespeare manuscripts. The manuscripts have since been lost, presumably
destroyed by a library fire, and authorship of the play has been hotly
contested ever since.
Some scholars believe that Shakespeare was the true author
of Double Falsehood, while others believe that the play was
actually an original work by Theobald himself that he tried to pass off as an
adaptation.
Boyd and Pennebaker realized that using psychological theory to
inform analysis of the playwrights' respective works may shed light on the
authorship question. They examined 33 plays by Shakespeare, 12 by Theobald, and
9 by John Fletcher, a colleague (and sometime collaborator) of Shakespeare.
The
texts were stripped of extraneous information (such as publication information)
and were processed using software that evaluated the works for specific
features determined by the researchers.
For example, the researchers' software examined the playwrights'
use of function words (e.g., pronouns, articles, prepositions) and words
belonging to various content categories (e.g., emotions, family, sensory
perception, religion). They had the software identify themes present in each of
the works to generate an overarching thematic signature for each author.
They also examined the works to determine how
"categorical" the writing was. Categorical writing tends to be heavy
on nouns, articles, and prepositions, and it indicates an analytic or formal
way of thinking.
Research has shown that people who rate high on categorical
thinking tend to be emotionally distant, applying problem-solving approaches to
everyday situations. People who rate low on categorical thinking, on the other
hand, tend to live in the moment and are more focused on social matters.
By aggregating dozens of psychological features of each
playwright, Boyd and Pennebaker were able to create a psychological signature
for each individual. They were then able to look at the psychological signature
of Double Falsehood to determine who the author was most
likely to be.
Looking at the plays as whole units, the results were clear:
Every measure but one identified Shakespeare as the likely author of Double
Falsehood. Theobald was identified as the best match only when it came to
his use of content words, and even then only by one of the three statistical
approaches the researchers used.
When Boyd and Pennebaker broke the play down into acts and
analyzed the texts across acts, they found a more nuanced picture. For the
first three acts, the analyses continued to identify Shakespeare as the likely
author; for the fourth and fifth acts, the measures varied between Shakespeare
and Fletcher. Again, Theobald's influence on the text appeared to be very
minor.
"Honestly, I was surprised to see such a strong signal for
Shakespeare showing through in the results," says Boyd. "Going into
the research without any real background knowledge, I had just kind of assumed
that it was going to be a pretty cut and dry case of a fake Shakespeare play,
which would have been really interesting in and of itself."
By using measures that tapped into the author's psychological
profile, Boyd and Pennebaker were able to see that the author of Double
Falsehood was likely sociable and fairly well educated -- findings
that don't jibe with accounts of Theobald as well educated but also rigid and
abrasive.
Together, these findings clearly show that exploring the
psychological dimensions of a literary work can offer even deeper insight in
the process of textual analysis.
"I've always held huge admiration for scholars who grapple
with literature -- there is a great deal of detective work that goes into
figuring out who the authors really are 'deep down,' their motivations, their lives,
and how these factors are embedded within their work," says Boyd. "We
demonstrate with our current work that an incredible amount of this information
can be extracted automatically from language."
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Association for
Psychological Science. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
R. L. Boyd, J. W. Pennebaker. Did Shakespeare Write Double
Falsehood? Identifying Individuals by Creating Psychological Signatures With
Text Analysis. Psychological Science, 2015; DOI: 10.1177/0956797614566658
Cite This Page:
Association for Psychological Science. "Shakespeare's plays
reveal his psychological signature." Science
Daily, 9 April 2015.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150409120259.htm>.