A Diachronic Analysis of Plot in Plays about the Egyptian Joseph (1500-1700)

This dataset is the complement to the chapter "A Diachronic Analysis of Plot in Plays about the Egyptian Joseph (1500-1700)" in the book TransLatin: The Transnational Impact of Latin Theatre from the Early Modern Netherlands: Qualitative and Computational Analyses, edited by Dinah Wouters and Jan Bloemendal (Brill, 2026).  It draws on a different dataset which assembles data on manuscripts, prints, and performances concerning theatre plays about the patriarch Joseph: Wouters, Dinah. ‘Joseph on Stage: Texts and Performances of the Biblical Story of Joseph the Patriarch (1500–1700)’. Zenodo, 22 August 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12793652. The visualisation presented here is a representation of the plot structures used in the corpus. I have divided the biblical Joseph story, as told in Genesis 37–50, into five main components. This division is my own creation and only one possible interpretation, but it does reflect the most common way in which the plays in the corpus divide the story into acts or separate plays. 1.    Joseph venditus: Joseph’s brothers sell him to slave traders and tell their father that he is dead.2.    Joseph servus: Joseph serves in the house of Potiphar and is falsely accused of attempted rape by Potiphar’s wife.3.    Joseph interpres: Joseph explains dreams in prison and eventually leaves prison to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams, which gains him a promotion to viceroy of Egypt.4.    Joseph recognitus: Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt during the famine and he puts them to the test before revealing his identity.5.    Joseph amans: The story of Joseph and his wife Aseneth. This is only occasionally a major part of the story, but it significantly impacts the structure of a play when it is. In order to make this impact visible, I make it into a fifth component. The Bible only mentions that they marry and have two sons, but playwrights could also draw upon the apocryphal Hellenistic novel Joseph and Asenath, which describes how the couple fall in love and how Aseneth converts to Joseph’s faith. Authors most probably would have known the story from a paraphrase in Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale.   My visualisation shows which of these components are represented in a play, vertically from top to bottom.  I discern various patterns through distinctive colours. The plays are ordered chronologically from left to right (first sheet) and according to pattern (second sheet). The third sheet shows the Jesuit plays chronologically, including plays of which only the title is extant and gives a clue as to the plot.