Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama

Beyond Authorship

Hugh Craig, Brett Greatley-Hirsch

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781107191013
• eBook ISBN: 9781108128964
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch extend the computational analysis introduced in Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (edited by Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney; Cambridge, 2009) beyond problems of authorship attribution to address broader issues of literary history. Using new methods to answer long-standing questions and challenge traditional assumptions about the underlying patterns and contrasts in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama sheds light on, for example, different linguistic usages between plays written in verse and prose, company styles and different character types. As a shift from a canonical survey to a corpus-based literary history founded on a statistical analysis of language, this book represents a fundamentally new approach to the study of English Renaissance literature and proposes a new model and rationale for future computational scholarship in early modern literary studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Texts
• Introduction
• 1 Methods
• 2 Prose and Verse: Sometimes 'transparent', Sometimes Meeting with 'a jolt'
• 3 Sisters under the Skin: Character and Style
• 4 Stage Properties: Bed, Blood, and Beyond
• 5 'Novelty carries it away': Cultural Drift
• 6 Authorship, Company Style, and horror vacui
• 7 Restoration Plays and 'the Giant Race, before the Flood'
• Coda
• Appendix A: Play-Texts in the Full Corpus
• Appendix B: Characters with ≥ 2,000 Words of Dialogue from 243 Plays Performed on the Commercial Stage, 1580–1642
• Appendix C: Plays First Appearing on the Commercial Stage 1590–1609, with Totals for Prop-Types and Lines Spoken
• Appendix D: Distribution of 691 Prop-Types across 160 Plays First Appearing on the Commercial Stage, 1590–1609
• Appendix E: A List of 221 Function Words
• Works Cited
• Index