“The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of ‘Green Sleeves’”: Digital Approaches Shakespeare’s Language of Genre
Jonathan Hope, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK
Michael Witmore, Wisconsin-Madison University, USA[1]
Permalink for this paragraph 0 Abstract
Permalink for this paragraph 6 In this essay, we explore the underlying linguistic matrix of Shakespeare’s dramatic genres using multivariate statistics and a text tagging device known as Docuscope, a hand-curated corpus of several million English words (and strings of words) that have been sorted into grammatical, semantic and rhetorical categories. Taking Heminges and Condell’s designations of the Folio plays as comedies, histories and tragedies as our starting point, we offer a portrait of Shakespearean genre at the level of the sentence, showing how an identification of frequently iterated combinations of words (either in their presence or absence) can allow us to appreciate the integrity and fluidity of Shakespeare’s genres in new ways. Calling this approach “iterative criticism,” we situate our critical practice in the context of both Shakespearean criticism and more general protocols of reading in the humanities, concluding with a genre map of Shakespeare’s plays in the context of 318 other early modern plays.
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[...] for general comment and critique prior to final editorial evaluation. Please visit the essay here and make your views known. The abstract and title are as [...]
[...] criticism of Early Modern Drama and its Genres in the current Shakespeare Quarterly (available HERE for open review through MediaCommons). Their closing “provocation” includes a pretty [...]
I like the “iterative” idea in this essay, since drama is itself an iterative art. I think the authors are appropriately enthusiastic about their methods while retaining a sense of humanistic purpose (evinced, for example, in the idea that the point is to return to the text as readers refreshed by our digital excurses). An impressive achievement.
[...] that are, in a sense, built into the physical system of writing? I think people who are doing iterative criticism need to have an intelligent answer to this question and analysis of its underlying analogy. My [...]
[...] Hope and I participated in. We received some terrific feedback, mostly from Shakespeareans, on the article that was posted to Media Commons–feedback that helped us rewrite the essay for the print [...]
[...] In this case, we learn that Docuscope is sensitive to human editorial intervention in texts. So sensitive, in fact, that it produced an almost complete clustering of Shakespeare’s plays in the larger group of 320 that we profiled in the online draft of our “Hundredth Psalm” article. [...]
[...] Witmore’s similar clustering studies using Docuscope. See also this draft version of Witmore and Hope’s forthcoming piece in Shakespeare [...]