Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama
Beyond Authorship

This book uses computational methods and statistical analysis to challenge traditional assumptions about the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Hugh Craig (Author), Brett Greatley-Hirsch (Author)

9781107191013, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 August 2017

298 pages
23.5 x 17.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.61 kg

'The project offers a number of useful provocations to scholars of early modern drama and theater … reflecting a commitment to methodological transparency that should serve as an example for practitioners of digital humanities across disciplines and time periods.' Mattie Burkert, Renaissance Quarterly

Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch extend the computational analysis introduced in Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (edited by Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney; Cambridge, 2009) beyond problems of authorship attribution to address broader issues of literary history. Using new methods to answer long-standing questions and challenge traditional assumptions about the underlying patterns and contrasts in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama sheds light on, for example, different linguistic usages between plays written in verse and prose, company styles and different character types. As a shift from a canonical survey to a corpus-based literary history founded on a statistical analysis of language, this book represents a fundamentally new approach to the study of English Renaissance literature and proposes a new model and rationale for future computational scholarship in early modern literary studies.

1. Methods
2. Prose and verse: sometimes 'transparent', sometimes meeting with 'a jolt'
3. Sisters under the skin: character and style
4. Stage properties: bed, blood, and beyond
5. 'Novelty carries it away': cultural drift
6. Authorship, company style, and horror vacui
7. Restoration plays and 'the giant race, before the flood'.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D], Computational linguistics [CFX]