Figures of rhetoric – figures of speech

Today John Lyly is the most neglected, underappreciated and misunderstood Elizabethan playwright. Lyly’s understanding of the world, and of language, came out of his own personal heritage which he honoured throughout his uneven career. He was the grandson of William Lyly (also spelled as Lily and Lilye), High Master of St Paul’s School and, with John Colet, author of the grammar school Latin text that was required at all Elizabethan schools and that survived as the fundamental Latin text well into the nineteenth century; the two men added ‘Godly Lessons for Chyldren’ which began with the central theme of all of John Lyly’s writings: ‘It is the fyrst poynte of wysedome, to know thy self.’ William Lyly was a member of the leading circle of humanists, including Erasmus and Thomas More, and his son – John’s father – was in turn a tutor in Canterbury or at the Queen’s School connected to the cathedral. John Lyly (c. 1554–1606) followed his grandfather to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he stayed an extra two years hoping for a teaching post there or for preferment under William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Instead, Burghley got him a position as secretary to his son-in-law, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

Humanism taught Lyly to love the classics. His first play, Campaspe (1583) came from Pliny and Plutarch’s Life of Alexander; it was phenomenally successful, going through three editions in a single year. His second play, Sappho and Phao, appeared two months later; it drew on Aelian and Ovid and immediately went through two editions. Lyly’s mode of writing, too – what his editor Carter A. Daniel calls ‘the ornately symmetrical prose style filled with fantastic similes and constructed in rhythmic swirls of alliteration and antithesis’ – is also classical.

Genre and date are as in Alfred Harbage and S. Schoenbaum, Annals of English Drama 975–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1964).

Groups: 1, single-author, well-attributed; 2, collaborative, well-attributed; 3, disputed authorship; 4, second version.

Did Shakespeare or some other person revise the text of King Lear? Did that person or persons have second thoughts about the work published in Quarto (Q) in 1607–8, dropping or adding scenes, changing characterizations, and reshaping the play to transform the text posthumously published in the Folio (F) of 1623? Or was Shakespeare more concerned with the plays he was writing subsequently, no longer concerned about making revisions to earlier work, leaving that to other playwrights or to changes that evolved in performances? Anxious to preserve as Shakespeare's great work what has come down to us, editors of his plays through the centuries have fabricated yet a third text, conflating all the lines in both Q and F to avoid losing anything he may have written. But others have argued that such a union of texts is a bastard version of the play that does not represent authorial intention or accomplishment at any point of time. Questions about the text of Lear that remain, then, which computational stylistics can address, are these: (1) did one person (or more, as in performances over time) revise the play, and (2) was Shakespeare involved?

In 1930, E. K. Chambers listed the relevant texts beginning with the entry for the play in the Stationers' Register.

‘For the last three centuries, Shakespearean scholars have emphatically argued that the transmission of an English early modern play-text was linear: that is, from an author to acting company to theatre audience to printer to literary audience’, Grace Ioppolo writes. But this is not so. ‘Signifi cant evidence’, she continues, ‘from dramatic manuscripts, including the handwriting of company scribes, book-keepers and censors alongside that of authors, suggests instead that this transmission is … circular and that neither authors nor theatre personnel dissociated authors from their texts. In fact authors returned to their texts, or texts were returned to their authors, at any or all stages after composition.’ Drawing on the Henslowe and Alleyn archive in detail – and on contracts, fi nancial accounts, correspondence, depositions, and commentaries – she fi nds abundant evidence that the author might revisit his play script ‘after the scribe had copied it; after a censor had licensed it; after the book-keeper had prepared the company book; after its rehearsal and performance; before one or more later revivals; and after it was printed’ (p. 99). Philip Henslowe, for instance, records that he paid 20 shillings for authorial revision on 15 May 1602: ‘harey chattel for the mendynge of the fyrste parte of carnowlle wollsey’, a work he had initially commissioned from Chettle one year earlier.

This project began in 2001 when one of the editors, Arthur Kinney, spent a period as a research visitor at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, where the other editor, Hugh Craig, works. A collaborative project was hatched. It was to combine Kinney's knowledge of Shakespeare with Craig's familiarity with numbers, and thus pioneer a Shakespearean computational stylistics. Kinney would supply the questions and Craig would furnish numerical results. In what they jointly wrote they would keep in mind an audience that had no interest in arcane statistics or in interminable tables of figures. Authorship would be the core of the enterprise. Coworkers were recruited from Kinney's Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies in Amherst, as was a programmer and research assistant from Craig's Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing in Newcastle, so it has been an American–Australian and a Center–Centre collaboration.

Computational stylistics stems from the work of John Burrows, beginning in the 1980s. He was convinced that the smallest elements of literary language (down to very common grammatical words such as and and but) had things of stylistic interest buried in them, and he sought to bring latent patterns in their use to light, through multivariate statistical procedures analysing the word-count information from large tracts of machine-readable text. The new method revealed a patterning that pervaded all levels of language and could be measured. Readers, however perceptive they may be, have only one lifetime to read in, and remember what they read selectively and imperfectly.

In almost anything we read there are phrases that seem to resonate with an authorial voice. Over longer stretches of writing all sorts of small signals confirm that we are in touch with a recognizable originating consciousness, even if we realize that this imagined source is our own conjecture, created from the indirect but familiar indications in what we read or hear. Without thinking about it too much, we perform an intuitive calculus on a new work or passage to test it for likeness to an authorial style we have previously internalized. The passages seem to us either authentic or not.

But what, say, of Hal, Hotspur, and Falstaff? They inhabit the same play, but each has a recognizable style that sets him apart from the other two. Can there be a single, identifiable Shakespearean language that unites their three very different kinds of speech? What could it be about the way they speak that would actually unite them, and separate them from characters created by other writers of the same time writing in the same genre, and even drawing on the same conventions of the wily villain, the vainglorious soldier, the braggart hero, and so on?

There are other impediments to identifying an authorial style in a systematic way. For instance, how can we be sure that some of the distinctive Shakespearean phrasings are not in fact common expressions from his own time?

One of the earliest champions of language in Shakespeare's time was Thomas Wilson. In The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) he declares that

At the time such ideas were not especially original – the works of Aristotle and Cicero in the Tudor grammar schools had made them commonplace – but Wilson's ambition and vision are nevertheless unusual.

The part of speech is specified for some of the words. These are words we have tagged in our machine-readable texts to separate homographs with distinct grammatical functions.

A–C

a about above after again against all almost along although am among amongst an and another any anything are art [verb] as at back be because been before being besides beyond both but by [adverb] by [preposition] can cannot canst could

D–F

dare did didst do does done dost doth down durst each either enough ere even ever every few for [adverb] for [conjunction] for [preposition] from

G–I

had hadst hast hath have he hence her [adjective] her [personal pronoun] here him himself his how I if in [adverb] in [preposition] is it itself

J–L

least like [adverb] like [preposition] like [verb]

M–O

many may me might mine more most much must my myself neither never no [adjective] no [negative particle] none nor not nothing now O of off oft often on [adverb] on [preposition] one only or other our ourselves out over own

P–R

past perhaps quite rather round

S–U

same shall shalt she should since so [adverb of degree] so [adverb of manner and conjunction] some something somewhat still such than that [conjunction] that [demonstrative] that [relative] the thee their them themselves then there these they thine this those thou though through thus thy thyself till to [adverb] to [infinitive] to [preposition] too under unto up [adverb] upon [preposition] us

V–Z

very was we well were wert what when where which [interrogative] which [relative] while whilst who [interrogative] who [relative] whom whose why will [verb] with within without ye yet you your yours yourself yourselves