“If”, “and” and “but”: Understanding Shakespeare with Three Words with Michael Witmore

Date and Time

• Thursday, Apr 23, 2026  6pm - 7pm

Location

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Details

In 1623, two of Shakespeare’s friends published 36 of his plays in a volume that has come to be known as the “First Folio.” Published posthumously, this remarkable book presents Shakespeare’s plays as a collection for the ages, dividing the theatrical works up into three groups: Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. For anyone interested in computational approaches to literature and text corpora, this single act of classification is a gift. John Heminges and Henry Condell, the men who decided on the groupings, were domain experts: they were fellow actors who knew Shakespeare well. If we take these groupings as an historic ground truth, we find that it is almost trivially easy to reproduce the Folio genre groupings using only a small set of features. In this talk, Michael Witmore will briefly describe how three common words, “if” “and” and “but,” can be used to identify two of the three types of plays, shedding light on the constraints that led Shakespeare to repeat certain patterns in his comedies and histories. The talk will open out onto larger questions about what counts as knowledge in the humanities.” Registration required.