Keywords that characterise Shakespeare’s (anti)heroes and villains

Abstract

This paper undertakes a keyword analysis of seven Shakespearean characters: Titus, Tamora, Aaron, Lear, Edmund, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The paper discusses how, once contextualised, these keywords provide useful insights into their feelings/thoughts towards others, events, motivations to act, etc. In terms of findings, only Aaron denotes his "villainy" directly. Tamora, in contrast, draws upon a keyword that is denotatively positive; in context, though, "sweet" reveals her womanly wiles. "Weep", for Lear, and "legitimate" and "base", for Edmund, problematize their status as (one-dimensional) villains. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth draw upon grammatical keywords, "if" and "would" in ways that signal something about their (deteriorating) emotional and social positions as much as their villainous intentions.

Depictions of deception: A corpus-based analysis of five Shakespearean characters

“…We have restricted the analysis to keywords with a minimum frequency of five, on the understanding that it is difficult to say, with any kind of confidence, how a word is used in a character’s speech when it occurs less frequently than this (it is difficult to make claims about style or ‘aboutness’, for example). Whilst we acknowledge that low-frequency words may be semantically related and therefore contribute to a style, this relatively liberal cut-off point allows us to identify keywords that – because of combining a significance and effect size with a minimum frequency filter – are both quantitatively and qualitatively robust (see also Archer and Findlay, in press).…”

“…The ESC: Folio is distinct from other Shakespeare corpora in that it is not only marked up with grammatical and semantic annotation but individual characters have also been manually annotated with information about their gender and social rank, allowing much more sophisticated analyses to take place. In addition, the play-texts have undergone spelling regularisation in order to aid computer-assisted analysis, although there are options to view alternative spellings within the interface (see Archer and Findlay, in press). The ESC: Folio along with the ESC: Comparative Plays (Demmen, 2020) and ESC: EEBO-TCP Segment (Murphy, 2019) can all be accessed via CQPweb.…”

Mapping the links between gender, status and genre in Shakespeare’s plays

“…In addition, the meaning or main sense(s) of some words may have changed from the late 16th/early 17th century to the present day, resulting in inaccurate tagging. It is for such reasons that the ESC corpora have undergone spelling normalisation (see Section 2.2), with a view to improving tagging accuracy (see also Archer and Findlay, in press).…”