Social Identity in Shakespeare’s Plays: A Quantitative Study

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project has produced a resource allowing users to explore Shakespeare’s plays in a variety of (semi-automatic) ways, via a web-based corpus query processor interface hosted by Lancaster University. It enables users, for example, to interrogate a corpus of Shakespeare’s plays using queries restricted by dramatic genre, gender and/or social status of characters, and to target and explore the language of the plays not only at the word level but also at the grammatical and semantic levels (by querying part of speech or semantic categories). Using keyword techniques, we examine how female and male language varies in general, by social status (high or low) and by genre (comedy, history and tragedy). Among our findings, we note differences in the use of pronouns and references to male authority (female overuse of ‘I’ and ‘husband’ and male overuse of ‘we’ and ‘king’). We also observe that high-status mal...

English Text Construction, 2013

2013

This dissertation attempts to clarify some aspects of the operation of speech acts as they relate to power, authority, status, and rank in Shakespeare's plays. At its core, it consists of three arguments. The first is that the ultimate index of power is the ability to have one's words felt. That power then may translatein terms that are neither simple nor fixedinto authority, rank, and status. The second is that such assertions or deployments of power (unless authorized by broad cultural consensus) are almost always met with resistance, and that consequently the assertions most likely to succeed are those that are least visible. The third point brings the first two together. If speech acts are often a means of asserting and exercising power, then paradoxically those speech acts that are least overt will be those most likely to succeed in that assertion: speech acts that are indirect, off-record, ambiguous, or perlocutionary. Bearing these arguments in mind, I will consider the operation and either the frustration or fruition of social ambition in Shakespeare's plays, particularly his comedies. The plays bear out the pattern that speakers who make subtle, incremental assertions of status, by means of exploiting expectations of speech acts and genres, can then consolidate those incremental assertions into more enduring changes in status. iii Acknowledgments The process of writing this dissertation has not been brief, and any project as long-lived as this must acquire some debts. Acknowledging those debts, while it will give me some pleasure, will not acquit what I owe. The first and most obvious debt is to my very dedicated thesis committee. Lynne Magnusson's work first persuaded me that there was still something new to be said about Shakespeare, even in the early twenty-first century, and her faith that I could find that something kept me working through many obstacles. Jill Levenson has supported and encouraged my work since my undergraduate days, and her encyclopaedic knowledge and keen eye for detail were an incentive to raise my gameand supported my efforts to do so. Christopher Warley's forthright commentary saved me from one major error, and countless smaller follies. I have benefitted enormously from the institutional support offered by the University of Toronto, especially its English department. At different times, and in different capacities, both Alexander Leggatt and Elizabeth Harvey served as role models and sounding boards. David Galbraith, my first English professor and finally my departmental examiner, never failed to alternate judiciously between enthusiastic encouragement and sly, pointed criticism; there was no middle ground. I owe him a lifetime of Vietnamese lunches. The colleagues in my cohort were an unusually cohesive and collegial team; they form the core of a larger group of early modern scholars (plus a few ringers) whose work has challenged and inspired meand whose solidarity has buoyed me up. Within and beyond the University of Toronto, that group includes Susan

Language and Literature 29(3): 203-222, 2020

Shakespeare's clearest use of dialect for sociolinguistic reasons can be found in the play Henry V, where we meet the Welshman Captain Fluellen, the Scotsman Captain Jamy, and the Irishman Captain Macmorris. But what might contemporary audiences have made of these Celtic characters? What popular understandings of Celtic identities did Shakespeare's characters trigger? Recent technological developments, largely in the domain of corpus linguistics, have enabled us to construct robust but nuanced answers to such questions. In this paper, we use CQPweb, a corpus analysis tool developed by Andrew Hardie at Lancaster University, to explore Celtic identity terms in a corpus developed by the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language Project. This corpus contains some 380 million words spanning the 80-year period 1560-1639, and allows us to tap into the attitudes and stereotypes that would have become entrenched in the years leading up to Henry V's appearance in 1599. We will show how the words tending to co-occur with the words Scots/Scottish, Irish and Welsh reveal contemporary understandings of these identities. Results flowing from the analyses of collocates include the fact that the Irish were considered wild and savage, but also that the word Irish had one particular positive use-when modifying the word rug. In discussing our findings, we will take note of critical discussions, both present-day and early modern, on 'nationhood' in relation to these characters and identities. We will also conduct, partly for contrastive purposes, a brief analysis of the English identity.

Renaissance Quarterly

also models how particular poetic forms (e.g., the quatrain or the couplet) furnished mechanisms for argumentation and thinking. In advocating for critical accounts that consider how "representations shift in meaning over time" (135), Harrison's essay supports Griffin's suggestion that the "early modern history play" merits consideration as a distinctive generic category. By attending to Henry V 's habit of announcing its approaches to history, Griffin complicates contemporary purchase on any past to demonstrate drama's role in forcing us to rethink the "intelligibility" of the past, whether recent or remote. Munro resituates Beaumont's play-including original and recent stagings-by showing how its most obtrusive characters are also its most modish cultural critics, fluent in conventions culled variously from theater's "current output" (145) to popular romance's "familiar poetic archaisms" (147). Lara Dodds's essay on Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam works to craft terminology out of a reading of the play's "complex temporal effects" (194). Her careful parsing of discrete kinds of temporalities available in different story lines within the play supports an account of counterfactuals that showcases how imagined, invented, and competing temporalities supply resources for communicating affective response. Her compelling argument surpasses her taxonomy (the splicing of "narrative" and "passionate" counterfactuals), but the explicit conceptual framing provides a useful guide, sometimes elusive in other contributions to the volume. Still, this intriguing collection of essays works both to begin and to extend a valuable conversation, and indeed offers provocative sketches toward "analytic models for future investigations of permutations unplumbed" (6).

Shakespeare at the Crossroads of Race, Language, and American Empire, 2022

The words and works of William Shakespeare have divided Americans along the lines of race, language, partisan politics, and social class since the founding of the American experiment – a division that continues to the present day. When Shakespeare is performed within the United States, ghosts haunt each production – the ghosts of the African slave, the indigenous American, the European colonist, and the countless immigrants who built a country with their blood, sweat, and toil and died on American soil. Whether attended to or not, the presence or absence of Black, White, or Indigenous bodies in American Shakespearean casting, the inclusion or exclusion of languages other than English in the dialogue spoken, and the new forms of signification that have emerged from Shakespeare’s plays through restagings at various (and, frequently, critical) moments in American history, place Shakespeare firmly at the crossroads of race, language, and American empire. This dissertation examines the audience reception of multilingual/multiracial adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth in the United States, from the colonial period to the present, with three intentions: (1) to increase understanding around the ways Shakespeare’s plays have been translated, adapted, or appropriated to address the topics of race, language, and American imperialism; (2) to unpack some of the practical strategies used by theatrical practitioners when staging Shakespeare’s plays to create a dialogue with American audience members around some of the most fraught subjects in our current political moment; (3) to gather and analyze audience reception data on how multilingual/multiracial Shakespearean adaptations are being received by a diverse sample of American audience members from around the United States and how those adaptations affect audience perception of Shakespeare’s plays.

This extended piece will examine the treatment of race by Shakespeare through analysis of three different characters. Aaron from Titus Andronicus and the eponymous Othello are both moors, and the character of Shylock from The Merchant of Venice is Jewish. Aaron is the primary antagonist of Titus Andronicus and Shakespeare’s earliest Moor whereas Othello, created over a decade later, can be seen to echo the anti-hero of classical tragedy. Both characters in some way subvert racial stereotypes, from Aaron’s rejection of white superiority to the honourable nature of Othello. The question of race is complicated further in Othello through Shakespeare’s creation of the villain Iago, the play’s whiteequivalent of Aaron. Much like Othello and Aaron, Shylock conforms to Jewish stereotypes, including his seemingly overwhelming desire for riches and wealth regardless of the moral cost. However, he does much to challenge such expectations. The rationale for his actions promotes sympathy for the character, and highlights the double standards present in the Elizabethan period. This paper will also consider the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays and the social conventions of the time regarding race, with the intention of discerning how the playwright’s own racial prejudices, if any, evolved during his career.

Kalbotyra, 1995

Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope, “Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays”, in Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lynne, eds, Early Modern Tragicomedy, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2007, pp. 133-153

Shakespeare Survey, Special Edition on ‘Re-Creating Shakespeare’, 2018

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