New Project Will Determine If a Rose By Any Name Was Still a Rose

Shakespeare’s literary achievements will be celebrated all year as the world marks the 400th anniversary of his death, but while there has been a plethora of critical analyses of his work, by comparison, very little attention has been focused on the words themselves. That’s precisely the goal of the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project, which will use the corpus approach to gain new insights into the way Shakespeare used words, character profiles, phrases, semantic themes and more. Specifically, it will reveal the meaning and context of Shakespeare’s language as it was understood by the Elizabethans, and it will do this by analyzing millions of words written by him and his contemporaries.

The project will trace the way Shakespeare used language and establish in detail not just what made his language unique, but also the meaning it had to his contemporaries. For example, attitudes regarding death and love, the context of being Welsh, what it meant to be a harlot, and the implication of eating fish rather than beef. The project will be the first comprehensive study of Shakespeare’s language using corpus-based methods. Computers will ascertain language patterns, in both Shakespeare’s work and a corpus (321 million words) of work completed by his contemporaries, not just playwrights, but writers of all genres.

The Encyclopedia is expected to reveal, among other things, social constructions and contemporary attitudes of the time, making it relevant to disciplines beyond literature and language. To that end, one of the project’s goals is to improve the public’s understanding of Shakespeare’s language.

Corpus linguistics studies language as it’s expressed in samples (corpora) of “real world” text, and the staff at Lancaster University have been leading these efforts for more than 40 years.

“2016 is awash with Shakespeare as we celebrate him on the 400th anniversary of his death”, project leader Professor Culpeper, with Lancaster University, says in Heritage Daily. “Supported by hundreds of years of scholarly enterprise, Shakespeare is now a global phenomenon. One of the areas we know very little about is what the Elizabethans themselves would have made of Shakespeare’s language. When they heard a word in one of Shakespeare’s plays, what did it mean to them?”

As the project moves forward, researchers also hope to learn what made Shakespeare’s writing unique by comparing the language he used to the language used by his contemporaries. An earlier pilot study has provided some hints, as Culpeper explained to Heritage Daily.

“Shakespeare seems to love the word ‘I’ as in the pronoun referring to one’s self. It is a little word but an important one. Modern drama is similar to an over-heard conversation – we listen to characters asking questions like ‘What do you think about X?’ and we learn about characters from their answers. But Shakespeare is much more geared to the direct presentation of the self through the word ‘I’”.

The project is being funded by the British Arts & Humanities Research Council, and published in two separate volumes. All of the resources used in its creation will be made available to students and scholars.

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