Shakespeare’s language: Styles and meanings via the computer

Abstract

s language and the digital revolution We celebrate Shakespeare because of what he created in language. It is strange then that a trip to any library will find shelves groaning with the vast quantity of literary criticism, but relatively few volumes on his language. This is not to say that there is no scholarship of significance on Shakespeare's language. Aside from some major, and indeed recent, works on grammar (e.g., Blake 2002), lexis (Crystal and Crystal 2002), and phonology (e.g., Crystal 2016), as well as collections of note (e.g., Salmon and Burgess 1987; Adamson 2001) and a steady flow of articles, there is a considerable quantity of insightful linguistic commentary in the form of footnotes in edited editions. The problem with the latter is that it does not amount to a coherent research programme. Moreover, it can also be very difficult to retrieve a specific insight tucked away in a footnote. A more general problem with scholarship relating to Shakespeare's language is its split personality, encompassing as it does both linguistic and literary approaches. Consider some of the topics mentioned in the chapter titles of the recent volume, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language (edited by Lynne Magnusson with David Schalkwyk, 2020): 'Shakespeare's creativity', 'performative power', 'figures of speech', 'rhetoric', 'literary experience', 'writing for actors' and 'popular culture'. Whilst all of these are relevant to Shakespeare's language, they would not be recognized by many linguists as having much to do with language. Conversely, some linguists, especially historical linguists, seem to deny that Shakespeare's language is a literary artefact. Instead, their focus is on the role of Shakespeare's language in the context of the study of the history of English. In other words, Shakespeare's language becomes a language dataset that can cast light on general linguistic issues pertaining to the English language. The work of Salmon (e.g., 1987a [1965], 1987b [1967]) is a landmark here. Of course, tensions between linguistic and literary approaches are all too familiar to the stylistics scholar. Modern literary stylistics is often traced back to the 1958 Indiana Style Conference, where Roman Jakobson concluded his intervention with a statement that was to become the unofficial manifesto of future stylisticians: […] a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms.