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Jean Brink and Elly van Gelderen
 

Spring 2001 - TTh 3:15 - 4:30
 
 

Aim:

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Preliminary Outline

Week 1:General Introduction

Become familiar with some of the literary and historical events of the time. Become familiar with the educational system, the language of the Renaissance (use EvG's HO) and some linguistic issues in authorship debates (e.g. functional vs lexical categories; archaic features).

Reading for week 2:

 
 

Week 2:Concordance techniques; editions

Go over Wells & Taylor and Baugh & Cable. Learn to use MonoConc; become familiar with e-texts/corpora etc. Overview of Shakespeare canon and chronology: `early' (e.g. CE) and `late' (e.g. Tempest) Shakespeare (doth versus does; increase in elision; loss of yee; who/m; my versus mine).
 

Homework for week 3:

 

Week 3:Printing, books, editions

History of Printing: paper, watermarks, folio, quarto, compositor; the freedom of spelling; editions; and editing practice.
 

Homework for week 4: Read Wells & Taylor on compositors; Evaluate 3 e-text sources in terms of editing practices (a list will be provided) on the internet, or use the spelling of does to find a particular compositor on F1.
 
 
 

Week 4:Editing Shakespeare.

Discuss findings of homework. Compare some of the editions of the Merry Wives of Windsor and discuss linguistic and literary aspects. Become familiar with standard deviation and chi-square. Discuss some data regarding has and hath and their statistical significance. Look at the loss of yee.
 
 

Week 5:The Canon; early/late texts

Use MonoConc to find how often the 10 function words in Wells & Taylor are used in Titus. Add the numbers up, find the percentage of each to the total, and compare it with Wells & Taylor table 2. What could you argue about the authorship of Titus. Check the numbers of one of the function words in MWW or Hamlet using all the available e-editions. 

Read for week 4: Wells & Taylor (pp. 148-154); Biber et al (1998: 43-51; 263-264); Millward (1966). optional: Hinman; Oakes. Homework: take a Shakespearean play and, using MonoConc (or TACT), find the absolute numbers for the adjectives big, large and great. Use the `collocate' function and see if there are any patterns.
 
 

Week 6:Other techniques: compositors/spelling; collocation

Discuss the role of Compositors in authorship debates. Compare the different plays in terms of the adjectives found in the homework. Discuss `normalization'.
 

Read for week 5: Other: Irace (1994); Merriam (1989); Corns (1991). Homework: take a Shakespearean play and, using MonoConc (or TACT), find the absolute numbers for the adjectives big, large and great. Use the `collocate' function and see if there are any patterns.
 
 
 

Week 7:More on editions

What is the role of editors? Discuss the various editions and what they are based on: [Jean, this needs more ...]
 
 

Read for week 6: Merriam (1998); MacD. Jackson (1998); Farringdon (1996: 1-15). Homework: Apply Cusum to your own writing; find a versus an in xx.
 

Week 8:More techniques; debates

Discuss homework; Discuss some of the debates surrounding Marlowe, Fletcher, Shakespeare, Bacon, Peele, and others. What is the debate based on? Some other attribution techniques.
 

Read for week 7: Partridge (1964) on H8; Hope (1994).
 
 
 

Week 9:Continue with `who wrote what' from week 6.
 

Read for week 8: Brink on external evidence. Think about how you would go about finding linguistic evidence?
 
 
 

Week 10:Spenser and attribution of the View

External and Internal Evidence. Prose versus non-prose. Perhaps use Biber as another attribution method. Look at the verbal endings and the use of the second person pronoun. Other issues in the Spenser canon: Sh Calendar and who is E.K. Archaisms.
 
 

Read: Mulcaster or Ascham, tba. Optional: Hume (1617).
 
 
 

Week 11:The Revenger Tragedies

Up to the 1970s, The Revenger's Tragedie was attributed to Cyril Tourneur. Now, it is to Middleton. Discuss some of the evidence and come up with new methods, based on what we've done so far.

Reading: See SHK 10.1964 (1999) on references to: Loughrey and Taylor (??); Holdsworth (1990); Jackson (1983).
 
 
 

Week 12:Influence of the `Schoolmasters'. Dictionaries of difficult words.
 

Read for week 11: Jones (1953).
 
 

Week 13:The role of `dialects' and standard.

Dante's 1303 De Vulgari Eloquentia suggested that the literary language be the standard (Machiavelli's 1515 Dialogue on Language goes against this). The Accademia is founded early on (1583) and publishes a Dizionario (1612) that establishes Italian as the language of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio. Language is linked to nationalism. Is this true in England as well (Brook chap. 9; Matthews 1937)?
 
 

Week 14:Thomas Nashe.
 

Week 15/16:Student paper presentations.
 
 

Renaissance Language

Abbott, Edwin 1872. A Shakespearean Grammar. London: MacMillan & Co.

Bambas, Rudolph 1947. "Verb forms in -s and -th in early Modern English Prose", JEGP 46: 183-87.

Barber, Charles 1981. "`You' and `Thou' in Shakespeare's Richard III", Leeds Studies in English 12: 273-289. @

-- 1993. The English Language: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge UP. revised from 1964. chapter 8, but B&C is much better.

Barber, Charles 1997. Early Modern English **

Barron, Dennis 1982. Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language. New Have: Yale University Press. ch 6, mainly American. @

Baugh, A. & Thomas Cable 1993 [....] A History of the English Language chapter 8. @

Blake, N.F. 1988. "Negation in Shakespeare". An Historic Tongue ed. by Graham Nixon & John Honey, 89-111. London: Routledge.

Blank, Paula 1996. Broken English. London: Routledge. [chapter 4 is on Northern and Spenser]

Bolton, W.F. 1992. Shakespeare's English: Language in the History Plays. Blackwell. ch 2 is good @; ch 3 on words not so @. PR 3072 B64 1992

Brook, G.L. 1976. The language of Shakespeare. Andre Deutsch. PR 3072 B 68

Brown, Roger & Albert Gilman 1989. "Politeness Theory and Shakespeare's four major tragedies", in Language in Society 18: 159-212. [like brown & levinson, very sociling] @

Carpenter, F. 1969. A Reference Guide to Edmund Spenser. reprint of 1923. PR2363 Z99C3 1969

Corns, Thomas 1990. Milton's Language. Blackwell.

Crowley, Tony. 1989. Standard English and the Politics of Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. P 368 C76 1989 [not very good; partly @].

Dobson, E.J. 1955. "Early Modern Standard English", Transactions of the Philological Society 53: 25-54.

-- 1968. English Pronunciation 1500-1700. OUP [2nd edition].

Draper, John. 1919. "The Glosses to Spenser's `Shepheardes Calendar'". JEGP 18: 556-574. PD 1 J7

Franz, W. 1909. Shakespeare-Grammatik. Heidelberg: Carl Winters. @

Gelderen, Elly van 1993. The Rise of Functional Categories. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. @

-- 1997. Verbal Agreement. Tubingen: Niemeyer. @

-- 2000a. A History of English Reflexive Pronouns. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. @

-- 2000b."The Absence of Verb-movement and the Role of C: Some negative constructions in Shakespeare", to appear in Studia Linguistica 54.3 (2000): 412-423.

Görlach, Manfred 1991. Introduction to Early Modern English. transl of the 1978 ed. CUP. @ [good chronology; use some of the grammar descriptions, e.g. p. 81 on genitive and p.84 on pronouns and verb inflection]

Holmqvist, Erik 1922. On the history of the English Present Inflections particularly -th and -s. Heidelberg: Carl Winter's.

Jespersen, Otto 1942. Modern English Grammar VI. London: Allen & Unwin Ltd.

Johnson, Francis R. 1941. "Latin versus English: the sixteenth century debate over scientific terminology". Studies in Philology 41.2: 109-135. @

Jones, R.F. 1953. The Triumph of the English Language. Stanford University Press. PE 1073 J6 c2. Excellent overview of Latin influence, antiquarian sentiments etc.

Kastovsky, Dieter 1994. Studies in Early Modern English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. @

Matthews, William. 1937. "The vulgar speech of London in the XV-XVII centuries", Notes and Queries 172: 2-5. @

Millward, Celia 1966. "Pronominal Case in Shakespearean Imperatives", Language, 42: 10-17. @[in Lass 1969 Approaches to EHL, 295-302].

Milroy, Jim in Stein et al (1994) not too helpful.

Partridge, A.C. 1969. Tudor to Augustan English. Andre Deutsch. @

-- 1964. Orthography in Shakespeare in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama. Nebraska. @

Partridge, Eric. 1961. Shakespeare's Bawdy. London: RKP. PR 2892 P 27 1961.

Rubinstein, Frankie. 1989?. A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and their Significance. MacMillan. [2nd edition].

Salmon, Vivian 1967. "Elizabethan Colloquial English in the Falstaff Plays", Leeds Studies in English 1: 37-70. [list of the different formulae, not syntactic] @

-- 1966. "Language Planning the Seventeenth century", in Memory of JR Firth, ed by C.E. Bazell et all. London: Longmans.

-- 1986. "The Spelling and Punctuation of Shakespeare's Time", in Stanley & Wells.@

-- 1988. *8 @

Spies, Heinrich 1897. Studien zur Geschichte des englischen Pronomens im XV. und XVI. Jahrhundert. Halle: Niemeyer.

Stein, Dieter and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds) 1994. Towards a Standard English 1600-1800. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Taylor, Estelle 1972. "Shakespeare's use of s endings of the verbs to do and to have in the First Folio", CLA Journal 16: 214-231. @

- 1976. "Shakespeare's use of eth and es endings of verbs in the First Folio", CLA Journal 19.4: 437-457. @

Taylor, in Taylor & Wells **

Treip, M. 1970. Milton's Pronunciation. London: Methuen.

Wagner, Georgius 1879. On Spenser's Use of Archaisms. Halis Saxonum. @

White, R.S. 1991. The Merry Wives of Windsor. chapter 4: language. [on the power of lg; Welsh; Caius' accent].

Wyld, H.C. 1907. Historical Study of the Mother Tongue. London: John Murray. @ [pp. 299-305: list of authorities]
 
 

Authorship/dating methods and studies

Bevington, David *** The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Appendix I. Harper Collins. 4th edition.

Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad & Randi Reppen 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. CUP. P 128 C68 B53 1998 [good]

Black, Matthew & Matthias Shaaber 1937 [1966]. Shakespeare's seventeenth century editors. London: OUP. PR 2976 B5 1966 [useful]

Brainerd, B. 1980. "The Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays: A statistical Study". Computers and the Humanities 14: 221-230.

Brink, J. 1994a. "Constructing the View of the Present State of Ireland". Spenser Studies 11: 203-228.

-- 1994b. "Dating Spenser's `Letter to Ralegh'". The Library 16.3: 219-224.

Brink, Jean & Elly van Gelderen. 2000. "Past and Future Approaches to Attribution and Chronology in Shakespeare". MS ASU.

Burrows, J. 1986. Computation into Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon. On Jane Austen.

Corns, Thomas 1991. "Computers in the Humanities". Literary and Linguistic Computing 6.2: 127-130. @

Elliott, Ward & Robert Valenza 1996. "And then there were none: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants", Computers and the Humanities 30: 191-245.@

Erdman, David & Fogel, Ephim 1966. Evidence for Authorship. Ithaca: Cornell UP. [very old]

Farringdon, Jill M. 1996. Analysing for Authorship: A Guide to the Cusum Technique. Cardiff: Univ of Wales Press. P 138.5 F377x 1996 [have my doubts on the technique; there is also a website devoted to the technique]

Foster, Donald 1989. Elegy by W.S. Newark: University of Delaware Press. PR 2199 F863 F67 1989 [about the authorship of a poem]

Hinman, Charlton 1940. ** @

-- 1962. The Printing and Proofreading of F1. **

Hope, Jonathan 1994. The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays. Cambridge: CUP. PR 2937 H65 1994 @

Jackson, MacD. 1998. "Indefinite Articles in Titus Andronics, Peele, and Shakespeare". Notes and Queries 243.3: 308-10. @

Ledger, Gerard & Thomas Merriam 1994. "Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the Two Noble Kinsmen". Literary and Linguistic Computing 9.3: 235-248. @

McKerrow, R. 1931. ** @

Merriam, Thomas 1989. "Taylor's Statistics in A textual Companion", NOtes abd Queries, Sept: 341-2.

-- 1996. "Tamburlaine stalks in Henry VI". Computers and the Humanities 30: 267-280.

-- 1998. "Influence alone? More on the authorship of Titus Andronicus", Notes and Queries 243.3: 304-8. @

Metz, Harold 1985. "Disputed Shakespearean Texts and Stylometric Analysis". Text 2: 149-71.

Morton, A.Q. 19??. Literary Detection. Scribner's.

Morton, A. & S. Michaelson 1990. The Qsum plot **

Mosteller, Frederick & David Wallace 1964. Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist. London: Addison-Wesley. @ JK155 M6

Nerbonne, John 1998. Linguistic Databases. CSLI. [not helpful]

Quirk, Randolph 1971. "Shakespeare and the English Language", A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed by Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum, 67-82. CUP. [thou; do] @

Schneider, Edgar. 1992. "Who(m)? Constraints on the Loss of Case Marking of wh-pronouns in the English of Shakespeare and other poets of the Early Modern English Period". History of Englishes, 437-452. Matti Rissanen et al. (eds.). Mouton.

Schoenbaum, S. 1966. Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. PR 658 A9S3

Spevack, ... 1973. A Shakespeare Concordance

Thomas, Jenny & Mick Short 1996. Using Corpora for Language Research. London: Longman. P 128 C68 U85 1996. [Not helpful]

Wells, Stanley & Gary Taylor 1986. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion.

Woods, Anthony, Paul Fletcher, & Arthur Hughes 1986 [1996]. Statistics in Language Studies. CUP.

Wraight, A.D. 1996. Shakespeare New Evidence. London: Adam Hart. PR 2937 W7x 1996
 
 

Editing practices

Black, Matthew & Matthias Shaaber 1937. Shakespeare's seventeenth century editors, 1632-1685. New York: MLA [reprint in 1966, Kraus].

Evans, G Blakemore 1971. "Shakespeare's Text: Approaches and Problems", in K. Muir & S. Schoenbaum (eds), A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, 222-238. @

Irace, Kathleen 1994. Reforming the `Bad' Quartos. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

Marcus, Leah ** Unediting the Renaissance. Routledge.
 
 
 

Editions

Kökeritz, H. ed. 1954. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies: A Facsimile Edition. New haven: Yale University Press.

Concordance programs

Lancashire, Ian 1996. Using Tact with electronic texts. MLA

Barlow, Michael. 1997. MonoConc for Windows. Athelstan.
 
 

Websites

 
 

For viewing facsimiles:

http://www.library.upenn.edu/etext/index.html

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/facs?lookup

http://web.uvic.ca/shakespeare
 

marlowe as shakespeare:

www.dwnet.com/marlowe/01home.html
 
 

Techniques to be used

Hope 1994: investigate use of dummy do; thou/thee; RC; ...

Taylor: use of s/th

FCs: Mosteller; Wells & Taylor; Brink & van Gelderen

Biber: word patterns

Cusum (Farringdon 1996) and Mosteller: sentence length

Can I do anything with modals/to

Grammaticalization of locational for into a C?

words: Foster 1989
 
 

`Cheat Sheet' for MonoConc

EvG

To start:

To search for a word:

4.Go to Concordance on the Menu bar. Select search.

5.Type in what you'd like to search for, e.g. himself

6.The answer you will get is 0 matches

7.Try him and the answer you will get is 140 matches.

Frequency of all words:

8.Go to Frequency on the Menu bar. Select corpus frequency.

9.You now obtain a list of the most frequent words. In the case of 1H4, the most frequent word is S and this is part of the text marking, so you'd have to ignore that word.

Search for words such as go, going, goes, etc.

10.Go to Concordance on the Menu bar. Select search.

11.Then use `wildcards': go* will get you all the words that start with go. That might be too many entries, e.g. you will get many instances of good (and you may need to delete some (through Ctr D). Other wildcards are: ? = 1 character; % = 0 or 1; %? = 1 or 2; etc.

Sort entries:

12.Do a Search and then go to sort on the Menu bar.

13.Choose between right or left sort.
 

EXERCISES

A.How would you search for the do and doe (they are spelling variants)?

B.How might you find out about the role of contraction in Shakepeare?

C.Find the numbers of thou/thee in Spenser's letters to Raleigh. Should the result worry you? How about ye/you?

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Characteristics of Renaissance English: Standardization against creativity

EvG, with some examples from Franz (1909), Brook (1976), Bolton (1992), and Baugh & Cable.
 

Spelling and Standardization

massive increase in printed books

Attempts to `improve' English by Latin, Gk, It. loanwords: Dictionaries of hard words.

Spelling reform and standardization

new words
 

Shakespeare's language
 

Sound (we'll listen to a tape by Kokeritz)

see and sea were different; greater rhymed with better (Sonnet 119); many variant oo pronunciations.

are rhymed with compare (Mac IV i 90) and with star.

GVS had taken place mostly.

Vowels weakened as evidenced in the many contractions (I'll)

still lost of variety (been: bin, been(e), yben etc, see Bolton p. 11)

assimilation : deputy > debuty, and ; and metathesis construe > conster

Before a vowel, a possessive pronoun was different than before a consonant: my table; mine object.
 
 

How do we know?

variant spellings (e.g. hansomely Tit II,3,268)

contemporary grammars (e.g. Hart 1569; Gil 1619) and plays (e.g. in LLL, Armado does not pronounce the b in doubt/debt or the l in half or the gh in neighbour.

rhyme (but very difficult)
 

Punctuation

Used mainly for emphasis: Julius Ceasar, grew fat ... (Ant II,6,64).
 

Grammar

Word Order: relatively free; pronoun object can occur before the verb.

Suject-Verb Agreement: Seems `wrong' on many occasions:

Both death and I am one. (As you like it, I, 3, 99)

Jack, how agrees the devil and thee about thy soul ... (I Henry IV, I, ii, 115)

The use of do in questions and negative sentences is increasing, but not obligatory.

Negatives: Multiple Negation AYL: I cannot goe no further.

Auxiliaries are less frequent. Modals can be used as main verbs (Ham: They can well on horseback). Have and be are both used for the perfect. Shall is used for the future (R3: no soule shall pittie me)

past participles are used as simple pasts: R2 When time is broke. For differences between Q and F, see Bolton (1992: 434).

Nouns: Plural -s becomes generalized

Pronouns: loss of ye/e, thou, thee. See Brook (1976: 73-5) and Bolton (1992: 36-8). E.g.: Merchant of Venice III, ii, 321,

all debts are cleared between you and I.

Adjectives: Loss of the comparative, superlative in some forms (use of then: Better a witty foole, then a foolish wit TN I,5,36.

Adverbs: occur without -ly on occasion. E.g., Ant, 'Tis Noble spoken.

Relatives: that, who/m, and zero occur, but not in the same way as in ModE: Temp, The Mistris which I serue.

Who is less frequent: Tempest III, 3,92 Young Ferdinand (whom they suppose is droun'd) ... See Brook 79-81.

Complementizers: when as/when that... (Franz 546-7)
 
 

17th and 18th Centuries

Civil War and Restoration: crisis

Search for stability: `correctness' and standardization: Shakespeare's F2 is corrected

The Failure to establish an Academy: Dryden's, Defoe's and Swift's (1712) attempts.

Dr. Johnson and prescriptivism
 

Linguistic Changes

The introduction of the progressive (Baugh & Cable, p. 287)