Prodigal heirs and their uncles: Inheritance networks in four 17th century comedies (conference talk)
Jakob Ladegaard, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan
This paper studies social networks in four Early Modern comedies that share important plot features. They all revolve around an inheritance conflict between an uncle and his nephew and heir, a young prodigal. The plays in question are Thomas Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (c. 1605), Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (c. 1625), Richard Brome’s A Mad Couple Well Matched (c. 1639) and Aphra Behn’s The City Heiress (1682). This study compares the ways in which these comedies use shared plot features to represent inheritance as a social and cultural practice that involves potential conflicts between generations, the sexes, and between economy and morality. Comparing these plays might thus ultimately give an insight into the development of attitudes towards inheritance over the 17th century. In order to compare the social structures of the plays, we use social network analysis with additional user-generated metadata such as social rank, gender, and sex. Similarly, we perform a semantic analysis using the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Language to approximate changes in the semantic fields surrounding inheritance.
A paper based on this project is scheduled for presentation at Shakespeare Association of America’s annual conference (Washington DC, April 17-20, 2019)
