Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Mapping the links between gender, status and genre in Shakespeare’s plays
AU - Murphy, S.
AU - Archer, D.
AU - Demmen, J.
PY - 2020/8/31
Y1 - 2020/8/31
N2 - The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language project has produced a resource allowing users to explore Shakespeare’s plays in a variety of (semi-automatic) ways, via a web-based corpus query processor interface hosted by Lancaster University. It enables users, for example, to interrogate a corpus of Shakespeare’s plays using queries restricted by dramatic genre, gender and/or social status of characters, and to target and explore the language of the plays not only at the word level but also at the grammatical and semantic levels (by querying part of speech or semantic categories). Using keyword techniques, we examine how female and male language varies in general, by social status (high or low) and by genre (comedy, history and tragedy). Among our findings, we note differences in the use of pronouns and references to male authority (female overuse of ‘I’ and ‘husband’ and male overuse of ‘we’ and ‘king’). We also observe that high-status males in comedies (as opposed to histories and tragedies) are characterised by polite requests (‘please you’) and sharp-minded ‘wit’. Despite many similarities between female and male usage of gendered forms of language (‘woman’), male characters alone use terms such as ‘womanish’ in a disparaging way. © The Author(s) 2020.
AB - The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language project has produced a resource allowing users to explore Shakespeare’s plays in a variety of (semi-automatic) ways, via a web-based corpus query processor interface hosted by Lancaster University. It enables users, for example, to interrogate a corpus of Shakespeare’s plays using queries restricted by dramatic genre, gender and/or social status of characters, and to target and explore the language of the plays not only at the word level but also at the grammatical and semantic levels (by querying part of speech or semantic categories). Using keyword techniques, we examine how female and male language varies in general, by social status (high or low) and by genre (comedy, history and tragedy). Among our findings, we note differences in the use of pronouns and references to male authority (female overuse of ‘I’ and ‘husband’ and male overuse of ‘we’ and ‘king’). We also observe that high-status males in comedies (as opposed to histories and tragedies) are characterised by polite requests (‘please you’) and sharp-minded ‘wit’. Despite many similarities between female and male usage of gendered forms of language (‘woman’), male characters alone use terms such as ‘womanish’ in a disparaging way. © The Author(s) 2020.
KW - Early Modern English
KW - gender
KW - genre
KW - plays
KW - rank
KW - Shakespeare
KW - status
KW - Web-based corpus query processor interface
U2 - 10.1177/0963947020949438
DO - 10.1177/0963947020949438
M3 - Journal article
VL - 29
SP - 223
EP - 245
JO - Language and Literature
JF - Language and Literature
SN - 0963-9470
IS - 3
ER -