Frequency Analysis

New ways to deconstruct digitally, depriving De Vere Doubters of dispositive data

In the same way that they welcomed digital stylometry, Doubters were keenly interested in the arrival large, organised corpora of digital texts. They presented new research tools and new ways to count things and calculate probabilities. Counting function words, the words writers use unconsciously could be used as a recipe for analysing style, for example, but once again large data turned out not to be helpful in promoting one writer’s claim to the corpus of another.

Counting the usage of individual words and searching for tell tale expressions, however, became much easier once a single search could extract. This also went wrong when Roger Stritmatter wrote a whole book attempting to connect De Vere and Shakespeare by counting unusual or rare expressions. Miscounting in fact.

EEBO V3 is the latest collection of Early English Books on line. V3 differs from previous version in that you can count parts of speech as well as identify function words. You can judge the usefulness of this for yourself on the site maintained by Lancaster University and see just how quickly you can separate one poet from another.

If you want to work with Oxford, a resources section contains a De Vere corpus we created which can be uploaded to use in comparison with their Bankside corpora, all of which have been hand keyed and inspected by the team at Lancaster University. Our De Vere corpus, while not exactly hand-keyed, has the 20 poems claimed as canonical by the De Vere Society and his 45,000 word letter repository which you can browse on this site. It too has every word tagged with metadata.

The nature of stylistic enquiry has change completely changed. We used EEBO V3 to extract ‘haggard hawks’ but the new version lets you search for ‘haggard’ as both noun and adjective and pair it with other birds or other nouns and categorise you search, in the case of Shakespeare to plays, genres, even individual characters or characters grouped by by their age or social status. So you can now analyse the difference between arisotcrats, the middle class and the groundling to see the variations Shakespeare used in the vocabularies and different parts of speech.

This is a new field of study and so unlikely to assist Doubters with anything other than final enlightenment.

Alliteration

If you’ve read Oxford’s poetry you will have been struck by his use of clangourous alliterative lists of nouns and adjectives.

My life, through ling’ring long, is lodg’d in lair of loathsome ways;

Now this really doesn’t sound like Shakespeare at all, except when he is mocking over-reaching artistic pretensions. There are more instances, however, of Shakespeare alliterating multiple words than you might at first think. The two tables split the plays from his early poetical work—the long poems, sonnets, Passionate and A Lover’s Complaint.

The tables can be sorted so you can compare the alliteration in Macbeth to the alliteration in Venus and Adonis or Lucrece.