Mapping the links between gender, status and genre in Shakespeare’s plays

Abstract

The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Encyclopaedia 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 males in comedies (as opposed to histories and tragedies) are characterised by polite requests (‘please you’) and sharp-minded ‘wit’. Despite many similarities between female and male usage of gendered forms of language (‘woman’), male characters alone use terms such as ‘womanish’ in a disparaging way.

Changes in the length of speeches in the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries: A mixed models approach

“…In this article we explore the question of variation in speech lengths in plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Our study joins a small but growing body of work aiming to reveal hitherto hidden patterns in the plays with quantitative methods, such as the association of certain stage properties with certain genres, or the fact that styles in prose and verse diverge in plays which mix the two forms, but do not differ between all-verse and all-prose plays [1], the differences between the language of male and female dramatic characters [2], the distinctiveness of the language of tragedy [3], and an excess of instances of the determiner 'the' in the play Macbeth [4]. This is a separate endeavour to quantitative work in attributing plays or parts of plays to authors where their authorship is disputed, but it draws on the same foundation, the availability of literary works in digital forms and computer-assisted analysis, and on the same principles of careful validation and openness to testing by others.…”

Revolution of Shakespearean Plays' Genre Research: Exploring New Avenues through Machine Learning and Shapley Value Analysis

“…In academia, Shakespeare's dramatic works enjoy a vast foundation of research, with a particular focus on the language and genres of his plays [4] . Regarding language, Shakespeare's linguistic innovations manifest in various forms, such as word class conversion, blending of archaic and neologistic words, word coinages, metaphors, idioms, puns, parallelism, and the popularization of blank verse, all of which contribute to the eloquence exhibited by the characters in his works.…”