Louise or Ferdinand? Exploring the protagonists of Love and Intrigue using social network analysis

Love and Intrigue is an outstanding work by the German dramatist Friedrich Schiller. This work was initially titled Louise Millerin, which was changed to Love and Intrigue before its premiere. The title Louise Millerin indicates the importance of the female character Louise in the drama. However, is Louise the real protagonist of the drama? Existing research provided no definitive answer to this question. Scholars have not agreed on who the protagonist is in the drama and how to quantify the prominence of the character. To address these issues, this study adopts Social Network Analysis (SNA) to visualize the character network, quantify the centrality of the characters, and perform cluster analysis of the characters in Love and Intrigue. The results indicate that Ferdinand displays the highest prominence and has higher stability regarding centrality than Louise. We explore possible reasons behind the findings. First, the highlighting of the male character Ferdinand may reflect male dominance in the eighteenth-century Germany. Second, Schiller incorporated his personal experiences and emotional preferences into the writing of the drama, leading to his favor of Ferdinand. Third, Schiller may have also been influenced by the style of previous German playwrights. By applying SNA to literary research, this study presents a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the characters in Love and Intrigue and contributes to the research on Schiller’s works.