A contrastive structural analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet versus Sumarokov’s Gamleta corpus-based approach

Resumo

This article presents a new and novel investigation of the internal structural organisation of the two contrastive plays, that is, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1685) and Sumarokov’s Gamlet (1787). The main aim is to compare the structures of the plays through the identification of the dimensions of structural variation linked to the cross-textual representation of the complexity of the relationships among all characters, with a particular emphasis on how the main characters Hamlet, Claudius, Polonius, Gertrude and Ophelia interact with each other as well as with all secondary characters. To this end, corpus-based techniques -in other words, computational quantification tools will be applied to the textual research. The study will also be based on the systematic qualitative analysis and comparison of the empirical data. On the whole, the key findings will show considerable distinctions between the structures of the plays per acts associated with their organisation of the social network of the characters that have mutual connections with each other.