Exploring the prominence of Romeo and Juliet's characters using weighted centrality measures

Abstract

Why are Romeo and Juliet prominent characters in Shakespeare’s play of the samename? Contrary to what common sense might suggest, the academic literature does notprovide a unique answer to this question. Indeed, there is little agreement on who themain character is and which elements of a script contribute to establishing a character’sleading role. The objective of this article is to explore and compare the prominence ofcharacters inRomeo and Julietby using social network analysis. To this end, we calculatethe centralities of several characters inRomeo and Julietusing a method based on SocialNetwork Analysis. Comparing the scores generated by this analysis, we found thatRomeo’s centrality is more stable than Juliet’s while hers is lower and supported bythe ‘strength of the bonds’ she develops with other characters. Thus, the comparisonof different centrality rankings and clustersprovides new knowledge about the plays ofShakespeare. We show that the ‘strength’ of the relationships affects the prominence ofthe characters. This finding opens new directions for analyzing Shakespeare’s scripts anddetermining who the main character is using weighted centrality measures. Finally, wediscuss some theoretical and practical implications of the method used in this study.