Voyant Tools and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The course of true love never did run smooth…
Lysander, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I.i
For this project, I decided to analyze A Midsummer Night’s Dream using Voyant Tools, a text-analysis software. Using an XML Markup of the text, I looked at word frequency patterns throughout the play. I wanted to track how and when the word “love” is used, to see if it could provide any insights into the development of the plot and the play. After deleting the cast of characters (which contained several instances of the word “love”) from the text, I uploaded the entire document into Voyant Tools. I began by creating a graph of relative frequencies for the entire text. Voyant divided the play into 10 equally spaced segments; it then graphed the frequency of the word “love” relative to the number of words in each segment.
This graph has several interesting features: “love” has the highest relative frequency in segment 6 of the document, which predictably includes the climactic forest scene in Act III Scene II, in which Puck and Oberon cause a mix-up between the four lovers. The relative frequency of the word falls off in segments four and eight, when Bottom and the players replace the four main lovers onstage in comedic interludes. Interestingly, the graph almost follows the pattern of the play’s conflict — it seems to suggest that the more relative uses of the word “love,” the more conflict there is in that scene. Of course, this claim would need to be backed up by more evidence. From a distance, however, it is an intriguing hypothesis that might not be easily visible without the graph.
These broad insights provide interesting information on the play as a whole, but I also wanted to take a closer look at how individual characters use the word “love.” Because my version of the text was already marked up using XML, I was able to use XPATH expressions to isolate each character’s speeches. I did so using the “Options” button on Voyant Tools, and then entering in the following expression for each of the four main characters:
//SPEECH[contains(SPEAKER,"HELENA")]/LINE
I then uploaded the text file again, giving me a view of all of that character’s lines in the play. I performed the same process as before, searching each dataset for the word “love” and using Voyant to create a graph. The results:
Helena 
Hermia 
Lysander 
Demetrius
Although I was able to use Voyant’s color palette tool to make each graph a different color, I would have liked to overlay all the curves on the same axes. Unfortunately, the interface did not allow me to do this; I was also unable to download the data to make my own graph. However, there are still some insights that can be gained from a comparison between the curves. I want to highlight just one example here.
These are Helena’s and Hermia’s graphs (Helena in pink, Hermia in light blue):
While Demetrius and Lysander’s curves differ from each other considerably (see the gallery above), Hermia and Helena’s follow almost exactly the same pattern. A closer look at the data behind the graphs reveals a central structural feature of the play: the opposite fortunes of Hermia and Helena in terms of love. In Hermia’s case, the spike in segment 2 can be attributed to her dialogue with Lysander when they plan to run away together:
O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes.
Hermia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I.i
Immediately following that scene, Helena comes onstage and laments that Demetrius does not love her in a monologue, which accounts for the spike in her graph:
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind
Helena, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I.i
A similar pattern occurs in the spike around segment 8, when the situation is reversed — here, it is Helena that is loved by both Demetrius and Lysander, and Hermia who is shunned. The data therefore allows us to visualize the intertwined fortunes of Helena and Hermia in the play, highlighting a structural feature that might not be obvious otherwise.
Using an XML markup of the A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Voyant Tools, this project has provided insights into how the theme of love evolves during the play. The preliminary conclusions that I draw from the data should be investigated further through close reading of the text. There is also an opportunity to experiment with this tool in Shakespeare’s other comedies — how does the word “love” function in those plays? Is there a similar relationship between gender and usage patterns? If so, what does that similarity say about gender roles in the period? While these graphs provide some interesting insights, I also see them as a jumping-off point into other questions.
