New Thinking: Shakespeare's Language
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2019
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language uses corpus linguistics, a statistical method that collates data on how frequently words are used and how often particular words appear alongside each other, to investigate Shakespeare's work. And the results are startling. John Gallagher talks to Professor Jonathan Culpeper and Professor Alison Findlay, both from Lancaster University, about how the project works, and the light it's shedding both on how Shakespeare worked as a writer, and on the development of the English language in Shakespeare's day. http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/shakespearelang/ Dr John Gallagher is a Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Leeds
This podcast was made with the assistance of the AHRC - the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which funds research at universities and museums, galleries and archives across the UK into the arts and humanities. The AHRC works in partnership with BBC Radio 3 on the New Generation Thinkers scheme to make academic research available to a wider audience.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.7 | Hello, you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:36.1 | I'm John Gallowher, and this edition is part of our series New Thinking, looking at new research in UK universities. |
| 0:43.0 | If I ask you, what's your favourite bit of Shakespeare? You're unlikely to answer the verbs. But what if what we need to understand the man, his work and his world is to get under the bonnet of the plays and sonnets and ask how |
| 0:55.4 | Shakespeare's language really works. I'm here to talk about the encyclopedia of Shakespeare's |
| 1:00.7 | language, a research project that's taking a new approach to the words we thought we knew so well. |
| 1:06.5 | Jonathan Culpepper is Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. Bless thee, bully doctor. |
| 1:11.5 | And Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama. |
| 1:14.5 | What cheer, gentle professor. |
| 1:17.0 | Before we go any further, I have to start with this. |
| 1:20.5 | What is your favourite Shakespearean word and why? |
| 1:24.8 | Well, my favourite Shakespearean word, |
| 1:26.6 | or the word that I've found most interesting in doingan word, or the word that I found most interesting in doing |
| 1:29.3 | the project, is the word happy. Shakespeare's often thought of as a playwright who is celebrated |
| 1:37.0 | as a man of good company, as you were suggesting, somebody who's very much thinking about the positives in human life. |
| 1:46.0 | But the word happy found out when doing the project occurs mainly as something imposed |
| 1:51.8 | on other people with words like be happy, command to be happy. |
| 1:57.0 | So Romeo is told that, you know, you haven't killed Tibald, so therefore be happy. |
| 2:01.6 | You've been banished. |
| 2:02.7 | So be happy that you've been banished and haven't been killed instead. |
... |
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