DZone

The Challenge

"A plague o’ both your houses! They have made worms’ meat of me! " said Mercutio in Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet" – in which tragedy results from the characters’ inability to communicate effectively. It is worsened by the fact that Romeo and Juliet each come from the feuding "two households": Romeo a Montague and Juliet, a Capulet.

For this blog article, we decided to take a look at the interaction between the characters in the play by analyzing the script – an epub file – to see just who talks to who. Are the Montagues and Capulets really divided families? Do they really not communicate? To make the results easier to read, we decided to visualize the network as a graph, with each node in the graph representing a character in the play and showing an image of the particular character.

Source: DZone