Quantifying genre: an operational definition of tragedy and comedy based on Shakespeare's plays

Emotion and imagery in the words of Shakespeare's plays, as measured by the Dictionary of Affect in Language, were used to predict genre (tragedy or comedy). Genre distinctions, which were associated with small effect sizes, were established on the basis of 23 plays and then applied to other plays. A discriminant function which combined lower emotional Pleasantness with higher emotional Activation or arousal and more pictorial Imagery successfully (91% of the time) predicted whether a play was a tragedy or a comedy. The genre-discriminating formula provided meaningful categorizations of 23 additional plays. As hypothesized, comedies employed more Pleasant words than tragedies. Tragedies employed more Active words (p < .001). Unexpectedly, comedies rather than tragedies employed words with lower Imagery (greater Abstraction). The predicted elevation of language in tragedy was noted instead in the use of more verse, fewer common words, and fewer personal pronouns (less subjectivity).