University of Helsinki
Contents:
- Introduction
- Distant reading Shakespeare: Our First Case, the First Folio
- Our First Case, the First Folio (page 2)
- Our First Case, the First Folio (page 3)
- Grammatical context
- Case study: Rape of Lucrece
- Observations on the Shakespearean actor network
- Conclusion & References
Case study: Rape of Lucrece
We also wanted to take a more close-reading approach to the data to augment and contrast with the distant-reading approach. I focused on examining the reuses of a single work, the poem Rape of Lucrece. This part of the project was wholly qualitative and the purpose of the computational methods was just to create a collection of reuses that could be examined with traditional methods.
The Rape of Lucrece is Shakespeare’s version of a classical story that’s also been tackled by several other authors (Newman 1994). I chose to focus on this work for a couple of reasons: Firstly, it’s a popular, but longer poem so I assumed it would be quite widely reused. Secondly, I was interested in the subject matter, and exploring how the storyline of the poem was received through time. Would I found out any shifts in people’s opinions towards women or rape?
Does the choice of an edition matter?
I used two editions of the poem as my data set, the 1594 first edition as well as another edition from 1616 . Originally I meant to use three, but unfortunately, instead of the 1655 edition I meant to use, my dataset was based on J. Quarles’s The banishment of Tarquin that is included in the same book (Hooks 2017). I only noticed this embarrassingly late while re-checking why one of my editions got so few reuses. For the two primary sources, there were 1076 and 1098 reuse cases respectively – after cleaning, these came down to 952 and 989. The differences are probably due to optical character recognition not picking up the text perfectly. From looking through the reuses, it doesn’t seem like the only difference is that ‘the better edition’ has some datapoints that are missing from the other – the differences between editions are a bit more complex than that. Although the vast majority of datapoints still overlap, I think for researching the reuses of a single work using more than one edition might be a good route to making sure one finds as many of the reuses as possible.
Cleaning the data
Trimming the unwanted bits
My first step in cleaning the data was to get rid of all the parts that are not part of the text of the poem, such as dedications, introductions, and the ‘Argument’ i.e. summary. At first I worked based on the cluster information in the dataset, but soon noticed that in this case, many of the individual clusters had both data I wanted to toss and some that I wanted to keep. An easier way was to find the starting point of the text of the poem and get rid of everything before that.
Handling duplicate datapoints
Because I used two editions of the same poem, I had a lot of duplicates or near-duplicates in my list of reuses. I got rid of the exact duplicates but kept the near-duplicates. They usually referred to the same passage in the secondary text but had slightly different start and/or end points.
| Source | Reuse | |
|---|---|---|
| Edition #1 | me,\nThou seem’st not what thou art, a God, a King;\nFor kings like Gods should gouerne euery thing | te.\nT’ou seem’s not what th:,o art, a God, a King,\nFr. Kings like Gods fbould govern every Thing |
| Edition #2 | me,\nThou seem’st not what thou *art,* a *God,* a *King,*\nFor *Kings* like *Gods* should gouerne euery thing.\n\nHo | te.\nT’ou seem’s not what th:,o art, a God, a King,\nFr. Kings like Gods fbould govern every Thing.\n\nHa |
| Two reuses referring to the same passage in the secondary text. The endpoints of the reuse are slightly different. The primary sources differ quite a bit but are easily recognizable as the same passage. | ||
Keeping the near-duplicates in my dataset allowed me to pay attention to the overlap and difference between primary source editions, but the duplicate passages were still easy enough to recognize without having to look them up twice.
Removing long reuses
After arranging the reuse data by length of passages, I noticed that some of the reuses actually reprinted the whole poem. I filtered out any reuses that were over 1000 characters long, assuming that reprints that contained no commentary would be represented in the data by long & uninterrupted passages. The limit of 1000 characters was wholly arbitrary and I was certain it would be too low, but 80 % of my data points (1125 out of 1410) were under this limit.
I didn’t look closely at what gets left out because of the length restriction, but just by glancing at the titles of the books that get left out, it seems probable they contain reprints:
| title | author | publication_year |
|---|---|---|
| lucrece | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1594 |
| the rape of lucrece | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1616 |
| poems on several occasions | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1760 |
| the plays | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1771 |
| shakespeare’s poems | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1771 |
| shakespeare’s poems | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1771 |
| poems written by shakespear | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1774 |
| poems written by shakespear[. | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1774 |
| poems written by shakespear | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1774 |
| poems | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1775 |
| the plays and poems of william shakespeare | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1795 |
| the poetical works | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1797 |
| the poems of william shakspeare: viz | Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) | 1798 |
The first two books are the editions I based my reuse dataset on, cross-referencing each other, and the majority of the rest are Shakespeare poetry collections.
After this step, there is still a number of reprints left in my dataset. I was maybe hoping to keep reprints that also contain commentary, but the benefits of this length-restriction step are debatable.
Close examination of the data
The next part of the project included looking up the reuses in their context manually, using The Gale website for ECCO and ProQuest for EEBO. A full list of the secondary source titles, with short descriptions of what the reuses in them are like can be viewed here.
Reuse types
The reuses in my dataset varied greatly in length. Based on lenght and function, they can be divided in five categories:
- full or partial reprints
- individual quotes
- collections of quotes from the same text, for example listing printing errors
- reuses that discuss the poem on a technical level
- reuses that discuss the content of the poem
For examining literary criticism, categories 4 and 5 would be most interesting to focus on. Unfortunately, they are quite rare in the reuse dataset. Majority of the reuses consist of short individual quotes that are maybe only a couple lines long. In the 17th century, these types of reuses can most commonly be found in quote books, which typically compile quotes from various authors under topics such as ‘On Beauty’, ‘On Time’, ‘Modesty of women’, and so on. Two quotes are very common:
Though men can cover crimes with their sterne looks,
Poore womens faces are their owne fault books.
and
Princes are as the glasse, the schoole the booke,
where subiects eies, do reade, do learne, do look
These quotes appear especially frequently in the early quote books (for example, Bel-vedére or the garden of the muses (1600), England’s Parnassus (1600), The Philosopher’s Banquet (1633), The Academy of Complements (1640)) . They seem to get a life of their own as aphorisms separate from the rest of the poem, and I assume there must’ve been some copying between quote books going on as well.
Moving to 18th century, the quote books disappear and individual quotes in the database tend to be used more in footnotes, title pages, in the beginning of novel chapters, etc. This is an interesting reflection on the evolution of literature – for example, as novels get more popular, some new ways to use quotes are born, but Shakespeare is still popular as a source. At the same time, collections of Shakespeare’s writing start getting published and reprinted regularly.
An interesting subcategory of the very short reuses are pastische quotes that have been altered by for example changing names. There are only a couple of these in the dataset – In Thomas Hall’s An Apologie for the Ministry, and its maintenance (1660) the popular prince quote gets referenced in an altered form: “Pastors are the glasse, the schoole, the book, Where peoples eyes do learn, do read, do look”.
John Wheeldon’s A poetical epistle inscribed to Mr. John Browne, Fellow of the Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain (…) (1769) pastisches the poem at two points, changing the context to art world:
In pencil’d pensiveness and colour’d sorrow,
He lends them looks, and they his genius borrow.
(Original): “To pencill’d pensiveness and colour’d sorrow;
She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow.”
The painter was no god to lend her those;
And therefore Woollet [original: Lucrece] swears he did her wrong,
To give her so much grief and not a tongue.
These kinds of creative reuse suggest that the writers were both familiar with Shakespeare and assumed their audience to know his works enough to get the references.
In terms of content,the 17th and 18th century writers seem more interested in discussing the poem on a technical level than talking about what happens in it. Especially Lucrece’s lament on opportunity and time gets quoted several times as an example of Shakespeare’s technical skill (for example, Hill & Bond: The Plain Dealer, 1730). Most partial reprints also reproduce this part of the poem. However, the poem does get criticized as well: “His genius does not seem as suited to the narrative as dramatic part of poetry” (The Muses Library, 1737). “Much inferiour [to Venus and Adonis] (…) Lucrece is too talkative and of too wanton a fancy for one in her condition” (Shakespeare 1710: The works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the Seventh. ).
The single work in the dataset that studies Lucrece as a character at length is Female excellency, or, the ladies glory (…) (R.B. 1688, reprinted in 1728), which recounts the story in prose. It praises Lucrece for her chastity and honour, but critizises her suicide: ““I cannot commend this last and great act of her life, since the Christian Law allows none to be their own Executioners, and the principle of self preservation seems to be implanted in us by nature as well as in all other living creatures; However she may serve as an example of extraordinary Chastity, which she has been reckoned to be in all ages since, and to discover great Magnanimity of Soul, who rather than live with shame and disgrace, chose not to live at all, and though her mind were absolutely innocent, yet put an end to her days with her own hands for the forcible defilement of her body.”
Summary
Looking at the reuse data, The Rape of Lucrece is relatively popular ever since its publishing. From studying the list of reuses, the biggest observation that can be made is the wide scale of reuse contexts, styles and lengths. The Rape of Lucrece gets quoted in sermons as well as pulp literature; it is reprinted, checked for errors, critiqued, altered and parodied. Even though the ways of quoting change throughout time, the reuses appear quite steady with no obvious time gaps at all. I don’t consider The Rape of Lucrece to be a well-known or popular Shakespeare work in our time, so it would also be interesting to know how it has been used after this time period.