Rhythmus und soziale Interaktion bei Calderón de la Barca

Abstract

Franco Moretti's article "Network theory, plot analysis" proposes creating possible relationships between the networks of plays and their respective stylistic characteristics. Although the selected text corpus may be too small to discern any kind of consistency between stylistic features and networks, the rhythmic peculiarities of the mentioned plays have been analyzed out of pure curiosity. Using the Pandas library, it is straightforward to isolate all octosyllables based on our database and calculate the frequency of different rhythmic patterns. The most frequent rhythms are surprisingly consistent, suggesting a potential stylistic trait of Calderón's work. However, this article focuses on phenomena of rarity rather than frequency. It explores the occurrence of adjacent accented syllables in octosyllables, revealing nuanced differences among the analyzed plays. Interestingly, comedic genres tend to exhibit a higher incidence of adjacent accented syllables compared to tragic ones. This tendency may be related to the frequent exclamations in comedic plots. While this initial exploration sheds light on the potential of quantitative network analysis combined with stylistic analysis, further research is needed to fully understand the dynamics of social networks within dramatic texts.