Supporting the corpus-based study of Shakespeare’s language: Enhancing a corpus of the First Folio

This article explores challenges in the corpus linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s language, and Early Modern English more generally, with particular focus on elaborating possible solutions and the benefits they bring. An account of work that took place within the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project (2016–2019) is given, which discusses the development of the project’s data resources, specifically, the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus. Topics covered include the composition of the corpus and its subcomponents; the structure of the XML markup; the design of the extensive character metadata; and the word-level corpus annotation, including spelling regularisation, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatisation and semantic tagging. The challenges that arise from each of these undertakings are not exclusive to a corpus-based treatment of Shakespeare’s plays but it is in the context of Shakespeare’s language that they are so severe as to seem almost insurmountable. The solutions developed for the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus – often combining automated manipulation with manual interventions, and always principled – offer a way through.

Book Review: Paul Collins, (2009). The Book of William. How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World. Bloomsbury

If you want to write a novel with a lot of action in it, you will need to use a lot of verbs. By the same token, if you change your style and focus on an effective description of a memorable event or a marvelous place, you will have to switch to a plethora of adjectives. In our case, in 2009 Paul Collins used his erudite expertise and his quite impressive vocabulary to create a vivid history of Shakespeare’s First Folio that came out in 1623. It is a masterpiece in the true sense and in its own class that ripened through the centuries. Not only did it survive the patina of time; it is now showing its uniqueness for all to see.

Former Owners of Manuscripts from the Günzburg Family Collection: Identification Attempt

This article is devoted to the analysis of owners’ stamps and inscriptions on manuscripts from the Günzburg family collection stored in the Russian State Library (RSL). The author did not set out to provide exhaustive information about the previous owners, part of whom still remains unidentified. The purpose of the article is to highlight the blocks of manuscripts that were previously part of other private libraries and later were acquired by the Günzburgs, as well as to focus on the most famous former owners of books. Information about them can be discovered in the owner’s inscriptions or, less often, stamps, which are usually found on the fly-leaf or the first folio of the manuscript. Sometimes, however, you can find out who owned a particular book by studying the catalogues of private libraries that were sold out after the death of their owners. This method let to discover among the previous owners of the Günzburg manuscripts such names as Nathan Nahman Koronel, scholar and book publisher, and Fischl Hirsch, bibliophile and bookseller. Based on information from the owners’ inscriptions, we learned that a number of manuscripts from the Günzburg collection were owned by such scholars as Seligmann Baer, Elyakim Carmoly and Shlomo Dubno. Some manuscripts of the collection bear inscriptions of Parisian bookseller Menahem Lifshits with the date and information to whom this particular manuscript belonged earlier. Almost all of them originated from various private libraries on the territory of modern Italy and pertained to more or less known now Italian rabbis or bibliophiles. It is worth noting that the surnames of Italian Jewish families, such as Segre, Finzi, Foa and Travis, are more often found in the owners’ inscriptions on the manuscripts from the Günzburg library than Jewish names from other regions. Among the famous owners of Italian origin is Abraham Yosef Shlomo Graziano, who was Rabbi, scholar and poet and was known for his rather wide view of the Jewish religious laws — Halakha. Separately, it should be noted a few female names and their ownership inscriptions found among the owners of the manuscripts. The article presents the original spelling of some of the names of the owners of manuscripts.

Commemorative Print: Serialized Monuments during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Debates

This essay concerns Victorian debates about how best to commemorate Shakespeare at the tercentenary of his birth in 1864. Victorian enthusiasm for Shakespeare was all but ubiquitous, but it evolved in unpredictable ways. The National Shakespeare Committee’s proposal for a Shakespeare statue, for instance, ended in controversy and failure. By contrast, alternative forms of commemoration enjoyed notable success, such as Howard Staunton’s serialized facsimile of the First Folio (1864–66). Both the controversy and its potential resolution in Staunton’s Folio are revealed in essays published in the Reader, a short-lived literary weekly. Staunton’s facsimile came to be regarded by the Reader and commentators in other periodicals as the most apposite of tercentenary monuments. It remade the First Folio for middle-class Victorian readers, trading on the prestige of the First Folio and remaking a high-end book version of Shakespeare in the image of ‘shilling monthly’ serial literature. Taken together, the Tercentenary monument controversies and the Staunton Folio show the Victorian relationship to Shakespeare to be less settled than we have previously appreciated.

Zhu Shenghao as a translator of Shakespeare

The article gives an account of life and work of Zhu Shenghao (1912–1944), primarily known for his translation of the complete works of Shakespeare, the first and one of the most influential Shakespeare editions in the Chinese language. Between 1938 and 1944, he managed to translate 31 and a half plays out of the 37 plays in the First Folio. His translation, still widely acclaimed today, grants elegance to its language and musical cadence to its prosaic style and contains poetic processing in typical scenes according to Chinese lyrical traditions. Besides, Zhu Shenghao is celebrated as a cultural hero for his effort in presenting Shakespeare’s dramatic works in a brilliant translation at a critical time when China was in urgent need of learning about the Western world. According to poly-system theory, it is fully illustrated in Zhu’s case that translation does play a significant part in shaping China’s modern cultural consciousness.

Depictions of deception: A corpus-based analysis of five Shakespearean characters

Drawing on the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus: First Folio Plus and using corpus-based methods, this article explores, quantitatively and qualitatively, Shakespeare’s depictions of five deceptive characters (Aaron, Tamora, Iago, Lady Macbeth and Falstaff). Our analysis adopts three strands: firstly, statistical keywords relating to each character are examined to determine what this tells us about their natures more generally. Secondly, the wordlists produced for each of the five characters are drawn upon to determine the extent to which they make use of linguistic features that have been correlated with, or linked to, acts of deliberate deception in real-world contexts. Thirdly, we make use of the results identified during the two aforementioned strands by using them to identify particular (sequences of) turns that are worthy of more detailed analysis. Here, we are primarily interested in (a) whether these keywords/deceptive indicators cluster or co-occur and (b) whether these interactions are the same as those identified by other scholars exploring depictions of deception in Shakespeare from a literary perspective. The findings indicate that deception-related features are indeed used collectively/in close proximity, by Shakespeare, at points where a character speaks to other characters disingenuously. They also suggest that Shakespeare’s deceptive depictions do change stylistically, from character to character, in line with those characters’ different characterisations and situations, that Shakespeare draws on atypical language features – such as self-oriented references – when it comes to some of his depictions of deception and that Shakespeare uses these various stylistic features to achieve a range of dramatic effect(s).

“On Golden Tablets”: The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Manuscript as a Self-Referential Icon

This article examines the paintings on the five surviving illuminated palm-leaf folios and the interiors of the two wooden covers of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s almost complete Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, or the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā-sūtra, from the early twelfth century (CMA, Acc. No. 1938.301). Earlier scholarship on the CMA manuscript has overlooked the importance of the first folio, which depicts centrally a female personification of the Prajñāpāramitā text itself. Focusing on the details of the image and comparing it to the other instances of the figure in the manuscript, I argue that the golden image of Prajñāpāramitā on folio 1v serves as the core self-referential icon of the manuscript, alluding to not only the content of the text itself, but also to the very manuscript the image resides in. This essay shows the ways in which South Asian palm-leaf manuscripts can be understood from the purview of materiality, already well established in the scholarship of western European medieval parchment manuscripts.

Spoken song and imagined music in Cymbeline

Believing her to be dead, Arviragus and Guiderius perform the funerary rite for Innogen in William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, but the men speak the words of the dirge listed as ‘Song’ in the first folio. Readers and spectators familiar with Shakespeare’s other late plays would expect musical solace here, yet the spoken song fails to comfort the brothers, and it may rattle the audience because it conjures the ending of Romeo and Juliet in their imaginations. The audience’s imagination is again invoked by the ‘harmony’ at the end of the play – a harmony they do not witness and thus must imagine.