Spring 2022: Shakespeare (un)edited

Contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. Distant reading Shakespeare: Our First Case, the First Folio
  3. Our First Case, the First Folio (page 2)
  4. Our First Case, the First Folio (page 3)
  5. Grammatical context
  6. Case study: Rape of Lucrece
  7. Observations on the Shakespearean actor network
  8. Conclusion & References

Our First Case, the First Folio (page 2)

Exploring trends in play reuse

The plot underneath counts the reuse of each First Folio plays over decades. The method used counts every different title once, so the plot does not tell you how much an individual work included Shakespearean words. (The reprints of Shakespeare and his reuse in dictionaries is not included in this.)

Now it’s your time to explore! If you hover over the plot, you can see the play name and the reuse count for every bar. Click the link below to view the plot full screen.


View full screen

Obviously, the numbers grow as the publishing industry grows over time. What is interesting, though, is to look at the relative pattern of reuse counts for each play. Hamlet seems to be popular across all decades, whereas there is a slight relative decrease in the reuse of Julius Caesar, and an increase in the reuse of Macbeth. This is in line with what is considered popular Shakespeare today. The pattern seems to stabilize over time, which reflects the canonization process. Plays that were popular back in the 18th century are still some of the most known plays. The canonization of Shakespeare started already at that time.

In order to plot plays in order of writing, the playnames were manipulated with codes representing the 4 periods of writing. From this graph we can see that the earlier and later plays have not been reused so much as plays written in periods B and C (1594-1608).

But does the publishing date matter to popularity? The plays left of the vertical line had been published before the First Folio. The yellow lines denote the first plays to be published under Shakespeare’s name, the first ones being the second prints of Richard III and Richard II in 1597. Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598 was the first play that already the first edition had Shakespeare’s name on it. (Levi, 1988). The most popular plays have been published once Shakespeare was famous enough to warrant name on the print.

 

There seems to be popular plays that have been published before the First Folio and also after it. This is further verified, when looking at the plays that have more than 500 matches (unique combinations of estc_id and playname):

The most popular plays consist of 5 tragedies, 4 comedies and only 2 histories. Majority of these plays were published before the First Folio, usually within 5 years from writing.

So what kind of reuses are in the most popular plays? The graph below shows that HamletKing  Lear and Macbeth have a remarkable amount of reuses in periodicals, whereas for letters Julius Ceasar replaces King Lear in the top three.

Looking at the proportions, we can see that there are differences in the reuses between the plays. King Lear has a remarkable proportion of reuses in periodicals.