Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship

EAN: 9781107191013
Published: 03/08/2017
Language: English

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'.