Issues and problems surrounding plays in each genre

The language in plays in different dramatic genres is known to vary, from evidence in existing studies. Hope states that:

it is clear that certain registers o f language are associated with certain genres (Renaissance pastoral attracts a relatively formal, archaic register, for example). Certain types o f plot, and certain types o f character, will entail certain types of vocabulary item - and there may even be syntactic expectations. (2010:171)

My (2007) research into key lexical bundles in Shakespeare's plays shows further evidence o f variation in the kinds o f formulaic language used relatively frequently by characters in different genres. For example, tragedies contain relatively more bundles which are part o f w/z-questions, and relatively fewer bundles which contribute to informational elaboration than the other two genres. I argue that this contributes to a dramatic atmosphere o f suspense in tragedies (Demmen 2007:45-47). It is therefore important for the NDC to balance Shakespeare's First Folio with similar proportions of dialogue from comedy, history and tragedy plays, to avoid potentially skewing the results with language which is more typical o f one genre than another. As noted with regard to Shakespeare's plays (in 4.2.3 above), the classification o f the dramatic genres to which some contemporaneous plays belong is debatable. For this reason, although I consider the varieties o f plays in each genre, I do not formally categorise them into sub-genres (e.g. romantic, city, pastoral and domestic comedies).

Other contemporaneous comedy plays were the most difficult to balance with those in Shakespeare's First Folio, since Shakespeare's comedy covers a number of different traditions, but does not extend to all that were popular around the same time.

"City" comedies were popularised by dramatists such as Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker (see e.g. McRae 2003:2), and feature London settings or London characters removed to other places. However, as Crystal and Crystal (2005:153) point out,

Shakespeare did not really write city comedies, the nearest qualifier being The Merry Wives o f Windsor (see also Orlin 2003:159-161 and Twyning 2002:355).

Shakespeare's comedies are set mainly outside London, and often in pastoral or rural settings. It was difficult to know whether or not a great quantity o f city comedy would materially affect my results, since the distinction between city and non-city characters and settings is not clear-cut. Orlin (2003:160) argues that characters o f high status and material wealth who are typically found in city comedies also feature in Shakespeare's plays, and Crystal and Crystal (2005:103) claim that Shakespeare's "country" or

"rustic" characters "use styles of English not far removed from those o f upper-class speakers". It therefore seemed prudent not to over-weight the NDC with city

comedies, but also not to exclude them entirely, as they were so popular in the period under investigation in the study. The most prototypical city comedy in the NDC is Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, though the character types in his play Volpone (which is also included) potentially qualify it as such, despite its Venetian setting.

Pastoral comedies in the NDC include Fletcher's play The Faithful

Shepherdess, and Lyly's Gallathea and Alexander and Campaspe (Alexander and Campaspe is compared by other scholars with Shakespeare's As You Like It, e.g.

Dillon 2003:9; Shapiro 2002:318). Lyly's plays are limited to two in the NDC, because as Leggatt (1999:6, 12) notes, Lyly uses a particularly "extravagant" style and

"mannered prose" known as "Euphuism". It was important not to over-represent any particular dramatist's language style in the NDC, again to avoid potentially skewing the results. Furthermore, Lyly is one o f a number of playwrights who wrote for children's acting companies, i.e. those comprising boy choristers aged between about ten and twenty years (see e.g. Cerasano 2002:209-210; Munro 2005; Shapiro 2002).

According to Shapiro (2002:315), Shakespeare wrote only for adult actors. This raised

the question o f whether the age o f the actors for whom a play was written would influence the language style o f the dialogue and, consequently, whether to exclude plays for children's companies from the NDC. The discussions o f Cerasano (2002) and Knutson (2002) suggest that drama written for children's companies was not censored in terms o f content or style, nor was the dialogue tailored for younger speakers.

Cerasano argues that:

[...] boys performed all o f the characters in the plays, including female parts. Like adult players, boys utilized a range of

performance styles suitable to the roles they performed, and were capable o f dealing with sophisticated rhetorical locutions.

(2002:209).

Also, according to Leggatt (1999:8, 70-71, 136), some plays were performed by both adult companies and children's companies. It seems, therefore, that the dialogue was not materially different, though some types o f characters might have been less

convincingly portrayed by children, as suggested by Cerasano (2002:210) and Foakes (2003:28). On this basis, I do not exclude plays written for children's companies.

Romantic comedy is well represented in Shakespeare's First Folio and balanced in the NDC, for example by Heywood's The Fair Maid o f the West Part I and the anonymous play Mucedorus. Mucedorus is possibly a contentious choice for inclusion, because it is in the so-called "apocrypha" o f plays which have attracted claims of Shakespearean authorship or collaboration (according to Crystal and Crystal 2005:105; see further Hope 1994; Tucker Brooke 1908 and Wells et al. 1987). As indicated in 4.2.1, it is necessary to minimise the risk that any o f the contents o f the NDC might have been written by Shakespeare, in whole or in substantial part, because this would blur potential style distinctions between the dialogue in the two corpora. As far as possible, I include plays in the NDC for which the authorship is verifiable, but the evidence in a few cases is somewhat tenuous. To date, there is insufficient

evidence for Mucedorus to be widely accepted as authored by Shakespeare, but it is possible that this may change if new evidence comes to light in authorship attribution research. I include tragi-comedy in the NDC (Massinger's The Bondman), domestic comedy (Heywood's How a Man May Chuse), and comedy o f humours (Chapman's An Humerous Dayes Myrth). Not all the other comedy plays fit neatly into particular sub­

categories, and are included mainly on the basis of dates, to balance the amount o f pre- 1600 and post-1600 comedy with that in the SDC. The NDC comedies are listed in 4.3.3 (Table 6).

Shakespeare's history plays are all set in England, which constitutes the main criterion for those in the history section o f the NDC. However, there were insufficient digitised English history play-texts within the target dates, so a few with non-English settings are also included. Some of these allude to England's relationship with other countries at the time, and feature English characters, for example Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, Armin's The Valiant Welshman and Peele's The Battle o f Alcazar.

Marlowe's tragic history play Tamburlaine Part I is set far away from England in the old Ottoman Empire, but it is a popular and well-known play from within the target dates, and so is included. In deciding whether or not to include non-English history plays, I looked at samples to see whether the dialogue o f English and non-English characters seems different in ways which would obviously influence my results (for example, through large quantities of dialect or the portrayal o f foreign accents). There was very little evidence o f this, and certainly no more than is in some plays with English settings that include non-English characters (e.g. the French princess

Katherine in Shakespeare's Henry V). Accordingly, the inclusion o f some non-English history plays was acceptable, as well as necessary to meet the dating and genre

criteria.

The issue o f the locations in the history plays brings me to the general question o f whether locations in EModE plays (of any genre) influence the language used in characters' dialogue. Sullivan (2003:182-188) discusses views about the relevance or importance o f geographical locations in Shakespeare's comedy plays, pointing out that the amount o f detail given about them is sometimes quite minimal and occasionally inaccurate. This lends support to the idea that the locations themselves are less

material than the creation o f an alternative social space, away from England, in which different possible behaviours and courses of action become available to the characters.

From this, it is more likely that the geographical setting would influence topical or localised language, rather than general style features in a character's dialogue. The corpus linguistic software settings are adjusted to minimise the occurrence o f topical or localised results in my data, as explained in 3.4, making geographically-related language relatively unlikely to arise. Moreover, it would actually have been

impossible to create a parallel corpus of plays with precisely similar locations to those in Shakespeare's plays, within the over-riding constraints of date and genre.

The evidence for the authorship o f two of the history plays mentioned above is problematic, which I note in the interests of clarity and further explication o f the inherent difficulties o f studying historical texts. The author o f The Valiant Welshman is tentatively accepted as being Robert Armin, based on the words "Written by R.A.

GENT" in the earliest known quarto. The Battle o f Alcazar is considered to have been written by George Peele based on an attribution o f several quoted lines from the play in another contemporaneous publication, but no author's name appears on the title page o f the earliest extant version, and it was not entered in the Stationers' Register.

Since neither play seems to have been linked to Shakespeare (unlike those in the

"apocrypha", mentioned above with regard to the comedy plays), they are included in

the NDC, even though their authorship remains open to challenge. The history plays in the NDC are listed in 4.3.3 (Table 7).

In addition to having varied geographical settings, as noted above, plays by Shakespeare and his peers were not always set in a contemporaneous historical period.

For example, five o f Shakespeare's tragedies feature classical settings {Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Timon o f Athens and Titus Andronicus). These are balanced to some extent, although not totally, by Jonson's play Sejanus and Marlowe's Dido, Queen o f Carthage in the NDC. Revenge tragedy was popular in the Early Modern period, and is notably the theme o f Shakespeare's Hamlet and Titus Andronicus (with other plays such as Macbeth including revenge elements as well, as argued by Boyce 1990:534). The NDC includes several popular contemporaneous revenge tragedies, such as Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Webster's The Duchess o f Malfl and The White Devil, and Middleton's Women Beware Women. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Othello are tragedy plays with domestic, household and love elements, which are balanced in the NDC by Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness and the anonymous Arden o f Faversham. The question of authorship arises again with Arden o f Faversham, since it is argued by Kinney (2009:99) as being partly authored by Shakespeare. As with the comedy Mucedorus, mentioned above, it has not been accepted into the Shakespeare canon at the time o f writing, and is therefore included in the NDC. The NDC tragedies are listed in 4.3.3 (Table 8).

Before leaving the subject of authorship, it is worth mentioning that although the number o f Shakespeare's plays which are considered to be collaborations is minimised in the SDC (as stated in 4.2.1), collaborative plays are not excluded from the NDC if Shakespeare is not (at the time o f writing) considered to be one o f the authors. Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy and The Woman Hater (a

comedy) are included, as is Middleton and Rowley's tragedy The Changeling, as they all usefully meet the dating and genre criteria. This causes no problem in my analyses, as my comparisons are not made at the level of individual authors in the NDC.

The amount o f female dialogue in the comedy section o f the NDC is a little low compared to the SDC (as quantified later on in 4.4), because of the limited availability o f comedies o f the appropriate dates and types. However, this is

compensated for in the tragedy section, for which there was a greater choice o f plays in the target date range containing relatively large quantities o f female dialogue. Some o f Shakespeare's tragedies, such as Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, feature relatively large roles for female characters, while others such as Julius Caesar and Timon o f Athens are very much male-dominated. The mix of tragedies in the NDC is similar, with Marlowe's Dido, Queen o f Carthage, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling and Webster's The White Devil having female characters with relatively major roles and large amounts o f dialogue, and others having very little (e.g.

Marlowe's Dr Faustus and Jonson's Sejanus). To accumulate sufficient female dialogue to balance that in Shakespeare's First Folio, I did need to use a few plays which (unlike those by Shakespeare) have obviously female-oriented topics {The

Woman Hater, The Maid's Tragedy, A Woman Killed With Kindness and Women Beware Women). This potentially skews the style of language in the plays, so I bear it in mind in considering results which appear to vary according to gender in my

analyses.

This concludes my discussion o f issues surrounding the selection o f plays in the NDC to balance and represent the genres in Shakespeare's First Folio, in the wider context o f popular varieties o f EModE drama. The following further issues potentially impact on the comparability o f other plays with those by Shakespeare:

• the popularity and success o f the plays;

• plays performed in public and/or private theatres;

• the sex o f the author(s);

• whether or not some plays were written for publication and/or performance;

• dialogue containing verse and prose; and

• characters who cross-dress between genders.

In the next section, I discuss each of the above points briefly.

4.3.2.3 Further issues, problems and questions surrounding the choice of other