Tag: Hugh Craig

  • Shakespeare’s mythic vocabulary – and his invisible grammar

    Universities in the UK are under pressure to demonstrate the ‘impact’ of their research. In many ways, this is fair enough: public taxes account for the vast majority of UK University income, so it is reasonable for the public to expect academics to attempt to communicate with them about their work.

    University press offices have become more pro-active in seeking out stories to present to the media as a way of raising the profile of institutions. Recently, the Strathclyde press office contacted me after they read one of my papers on Strathclyde’s internal research database: they wanted to do a press release to see if any outlets would follow-up on the story.

    The paper they’d read was a survey article I’d written for an Open University course reader. My article reported recent papers by Hugh Craig and Ward Elliott & Robert Valenza, which demolish some common myths about Shakespeare’s vocabulary (its size and originality – and see Holger Syme on this too) – and went on to argue that Shakespeare’s originality might lie in his grammar, rather than in the words he does not make up.

    Indeed they did want to pick up on the story, though I’d have preferred the article to have been a bit clearer, and not to have had a headline that was linguistic nonsense. The Huffington Post did a bit better.

    One particularly galling aspect of the stories: the articles failed to attribute the work on Shakespeare’s vocabulary to Craig or Elliott and Valenza, so it might have looked as though I was taking credit for other people’s work

    Looking back, I don’t think I explained my ideas very well either to Strathclyde’s press office, or to the Daily Telegraph when they rang – hence the rather confused reports. But I was extremely careful to attribute the work to those who had done it – even to the point of sending my original text to the journalist I talked to, and pointing him to the relevant footnote. I did not expect a news story to contain full academic references of course – but a clearly written story could easily have mentioned the originators of the work.

    A minor episode, but it also made me think that there is a fundamental problem with trying to explain complex linguistic issues in the daily press – even if you use Newcastle United’s greatest goalscorers to illustrate the statistics. They want a clear story: you want to get the nuances across. Luckily, this blog allows me to make the full text of my article available (click through twice for a pdf of my article):

    Shakespeare and the English Language

     

    Jonathan Hope, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, February 2012

  • Genre Dependence on Character Ideolects? (by Mike Stumpf, UW Undergrad)

    And yet, we know that when human beings are involved, all findings are provisional. Odd.

    Dendrogram displaying various segments from Romeo and Juliet

    To expand on Michael Witmore’s comments in his previous post, it is indeed odd how provisional our results are.  Case in point: I have been examining what John Burrows and Hugh Craig have called the “ideolects” of characters in connection with the plays in which they appear.  I stumbled upon this idea while looking at Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and asking how the language of the title characters may be steering this play towards tragedy or comedy. (This was done as for a panel I presented on with Witmore  and William Blake for a digital salon at UW-Madison.)  Witmore and Blake are themselves working on an analysis of Hamlet without the prince, and the 1 Henry plays/Merry Wives of Windsor without Falstaff: we’re all interested in this kind of “subtraction experiment.” To see my initial findings using this techniques, you can visit my blog, All Is True.