- Title
- Authorship, Computers, and Comparative Style
- Creator
- Craig, Hugh
- Relation
- The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language p. 168-188
- Relation
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781316443668
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- The beginning of Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act 2, scene 1 is one of the most recognisable passages in the canon. ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee’ (Mac. 2.1.33–34). The words may be familiar but they still have some secrets. The beginning of Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act 2, scene 1 is one of the most recognisable passages in the canon. ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee’ (Mac. 2.1.33–34). The words may be familiar but they still have some secrets. On first inspection, what stands out in the first of these lines is the word ‘dagger’ itself, and the main verb ‘see’, and then after that the pronoun ‘I’. The words which make up the rest of the line – ‘is’, ‘this’, ‘a’, ‘which’, ‘before’, and ‘me’ – have a grammatical function but are near-invisible. They have a meaning, and are duly processed, but barely impinge on the consciousness of a listener or reader. Yet one of them, the relative pronoun ‘which’, is by some lights an important element in Shakespeare’s style. Shakespeare’s characters use it more often than the norm for the dialogue of his day. It is one of a bundle of similar words – words with a grammatical function rather than a meaning in the usual sense – which together can be used to make a quantitative model of Shakespeare’s style, a skeletal representation of his characteristic language use at the level of syntax and construction.
- Subject
- literature; Shakespeare; dialogue; language
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1475795
- Identifier
- uon:49654
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781316443668
- Language
- eng
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