Shakespeare's Errant Texts: Textual Form and Linguistic Style in Shakespearean 'Bad' Quartos and Co-authored Plays

by Lene B. Petersen

Overview

If more than half of Shakespeare's texts survive in more than one version, and an increasing number of his texts appear to have been co-authored with other playwrights, how do we define what constitutes a ‘Shakespearean text'? Recent studies have proposed answers to this crucial question by investigating ‘memorial reconstruction' and co-authorship, yet significantly they have not yet considered properly the many formal and stylistic synergies, interchanges and reciprocities between oral/memorial and authorial composition, and the extent to which these factors are traceable in the surviving playtexts of the period. It is precisely these synergies that this book investigates, making this site of interaction between actorly and authorial input its primary focus. Petersen proposes new quantitative methodologies for approaching form and style in Shakespearean texts. The book's main case studies are Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Titus Andronicus – plays drawn from the middle of Shakespeare's working career.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521765220
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/24/2010
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lene B. Petersen's work centres on Shakespearean textual studies, corpus linguistics/authorship and attribution studies and Renaissance theatre history. She has also written on traditional folk ballads and their transmission.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations and figures ix

Preface xi

Abbreviations xv

Prologue xvi

Part I Oral-Memorial Transmission and the Formation of Shakespeare's Texts 1

1 The Elizabethan dramatic industry and industrious Shakespeare 3

2 Decomposing the text: oral transmission and the theory of the Zielform 35

Conceptual analogues and theoretical underpinnings 38

External conditions: interaction between literary and oral tradition 43

Further external comparisons: career-in-tradition and recordings in print 45

Internal conditions: lessons to be learnt about predictable textual reformation and selective structural mechanisms? 54

3 The popular play and the popular ballad: evidence of 'quarto mechanics' in the multiple texts of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet 63

The realization of narrative potential: local Zielforms in QI Hamlet and Der Bestrafte Brudermord; QI Romeo and Juliet and Romio and Julietta 67

Verbal flux: economy, structure and logic in the self-correcting play 72

Conclusion to Part I 139

Part II Recomposing the Author: Some Tools for Positioning the Role of the Playwright in Dramatic Transmission 145

4 Introduction to quantitative textual analysis: Computational Stylistics, Cognition and the missing author 147

Which words to count? A neuro-linguistic perspective 148

Merging applied and theoretical linguistics: some further explanations 156

Being Critical of methodology 161

Setting up the experiment 163

The tests: recapitulation and documentation 169

Tagged playtexts, frequent functional elements; using principal components and discriminant analysis as a method for whole text attribution 175

Stylometry and textual multiplicity I: Contextual stylistics and the case of Titus Andronicus 193

Contextual stylistics: the case of Titus Andronicus 199

Is textual 'suspecrness' a stylistically significant factor? 209

Stylometry and textual multiplicity II: testing the grading between authorship and 'orality' in the scenes of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet 218

Conclusion to Part II: evaluating the experiment 236

Epilogue 238

Appendix I Scenic units in Qr Hamler/Der Bestrafte Brudermord and Romeo and Juliet/Romio and Julietta 243

Appendix II 'Meet it is I set it downe': verbal evidence of quarto mechanics in the short versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet 246

Appendix III Table of results for discriminant analysis on 257 plays, using 50 prindipal components 264

Appendix IV Examples of principal components scree plots for three-text Hamlet and three-text Romeo and Juliet by Scenes 275

Bibliography 277

Index 306

Editorial Reviews

'The question of the provenance of [Shakespeare's] foreshortened variant texts has puzzled scholars and editors for centuries and Lene B. Petersen's engaging and compelling new book offers a novel way of thinking about them … this is a fascinating and provocative book.' Around the Globe

From the Publisher