Early English Research Articles

The Lost Plays of Ralph Sheldon (1623–1684)

Abstract This article traces the fate of an important group of early English plays in fifty-six volumes, collected by the Warwickshire antiquary Ralph Sheldon (1623-1684) and sold at a Christie’s country house sale at his home nearly a hundred years later. The sale itself in 1781 was an early example of the booksellers ‘ring’ and involved some of the major collectors of early English drama, notably David Garrick, Edmond Malone, and the Earl of Charlemont. The earlier portion of the Sheldon plays, recorded by Anthony Wood in a manuscript list, may have survived as part of the Malone bequest to the Bodleian Library. The Restoration Plays remained largely intact, in some thirty volumes, until the ill-fated sale of Lord Charlemont’s library by his descendants at Sotheby’s in 1865, discussed by Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman in The Library, VII, 23 (March 2022).

Sustainable Early English Language Education: Exploring the Content Knowledge of Six Chinese Early Childhood Education Teachers Who Teach English as a Foreign Language

Sustainable Early English Language Education: Exploring the Content Knowledge of Six Chinese Early Childhood Education Teachers Who Teach English as a Foreign Language

Medieval Pasts and Eugenicist Futures: Grant Allen, Masculinity and Early English History

ABSTRACT Grant Allen was a Victorian scholar and novelist who published widely on science, literature and history. Embedded within these publications is a fascination with early England, particularly early English masculinity. Allen saw in England's origins a blueprint for the kind of white, hegemonic masculinity he wished to see reproduced not only in contemporary English society and culture but also in the eugenic makeup of the English people as well. By reaching to early English history to legitimise his own visions of imperial white masculinity, Allen weaves a fantasy of medieval male virility into the fabric of his Victorian present. This essay discusses Allen's interest in the social apparatus of gender, contemporary eugenicist discourse and the interpretive potential of an imagined medieval past and argues that Allen uses early English history to justify ongoing colonial projects and to frame white men as the rightful heirs to global power.

Review of Valente & Xerri (2023): Innovative Practices in Early English Language Education

Review of Valente & Xerri (2023): Innovative Practices in Early English Language Education

The First Folio and the transatlantic trade in early drama c.1900–1929

Abstract In early twentieth-century America, ownership of all four Shakespeare folios was a benchmark for rare-book collectors, showcasing a dedication to assembling an exceptional library. The First Folio (1623) typically commanded the highest prices. Dealers sought to capitalize on the popularity of Shakespeare’s works by labelling a wide range of material as ‘Shakespeareana’, and the 1920s saw a boom in the market for early English plays. For some American collectors, notably Henry Folger, one copy of an edition was not enough, but others, including Henry Huntington, released duplicates back into the market, helping to keep interest high and facilitating the use of books as investments in the 1920s. This article examines the transatlantic trade in early English drama from c.1900 to 1929, to situate sales of First Folios in their economic and cultural context and to explore why large numbers of sixteenth-century English plays are now held in a handful of American libraries.

The Diachronic Development of Agency Prepositions in Old and Middle English

This article traces the development of agency prepositions in Old and Middle English passives, documenting the most important stages of the process and presenting them against a larger background of linguistic changes after the Norman Conquest. The study is based on large, syntactically annotated corpora of Early English, and takes into account all the main agency prepositions, that is, þurh ‘through,’ fram ‘from,’ mid ‘with,’ bi ‘by,’ and of, analyzing their token and type frequency, textual distribution, diachronic trends, collocational preferences, and use in lexically fixed formulas. The results are interpreted within the Construction Grammar framework, with the agency prepositional phrase treated as an emerging construction undergoing a slow and particularly difficult constructionalization process hindered by the restriction of the long passive to the written mode.

Teaching and assessing literacy using a balanced approach: Effects of can-do self-assessment on early EFL learners

Teaching and assessing literacy using a balanced approach: Effects of can-do self-assessment on early EFL learners Following the January and July 2023 issues, Emiko Izumi from the School of Education & Graduate School of Education at Kwansei Gakuin University discusses the content and results of her collaborative research on the teaching and assessment of reading and writing for early English as foreign language (EFL) learners in Japan. Reading and writing lessons should be conducted in small, incremental steps. Especially for Japanese learners of English, it is very difficult to learn the alphabet (upper- and lower-case letters) and to connect letters and sounds. The English language has a different phonological system and graphemes from Japanese, so it is important for learners to recognise phonemes and develop phonological awareness. With this being said, we recommend a balanced approach that introduces bottom-up strategies, such as phonics instruction that teaches the rules for linking sounds and letters, and a top-down approach, such as understanding content from songs, stories, and picture books with a focus on meaning.

German Loans in Early English

The paper outlines the contribution of German to the word stock of English in the three periods of Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English, or, in other words, from the early Middle Ages up to 1700, and relates these words to major cultural events, such as the Christianisation of England, the Norman Invasion, the Reformation and to the beginnings of science and technology during the Renaissance. Methodologically, the term German will be used in the sense of High German and its antecedents rather than Low German or Low Dutch. As a consequence of this approach, the impact of German on the English language during these periods is rather small in terms of numbers, but interesting and varied as far as domains of borrowing, transmission routes of words, linguistic strategies (i.e. importation v. substitution), and mode of transmission (i.e. written v. spoken) are concerned.

Climate and Reproduction in the Early English Atlantic

Climate and Reproduction in the Early English Atlantic

Detecting directional forces in the evolution of grammar: A case study of the English perfect with intransitives across EEBO, COHA, and Google Books

Languages have diverse characteristics that have emerged through evolution. In modern English grammar, the perfect is formed with have+PP (past participle), but in earlier English, the be+PP form also existed. It is widely recognised that the auxiliary verb BE was replaced by HAVE throughout evolution, except for some special cases. However, whether this evolution was caused by natural selection or random drift is still unclear. Here we examined directional forces in the evolution of the English perfect with intransitive by combining three large-scale data sources: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and Google Books. We found that most intransitive verbs exhibited an apparent transition from be+PP to have+PP, most of which were classified as ‘selection’ by a deep neural network-based model. These results suggest that the English perfect could have evolved through natural selection rather than random drift, and provide insights into the cultural evolution of grammar.

Teeth of the hydra: the policies and practices of English language teaching in Japan

ABSTRACT The English language can be compared to the hydra from ancient mythology as it is an unstoppable force throughout the world. Using this comparison, this study examines the history of English in Japan, English linguistic imperialism, and its impact on contemporary Japan. Five myths of English language teaching are used as a framework, referred to as the teeth of the hydra, are considered: English should be taught monolingually; The ideal teacher of English is a native speaker; The earlier English is taught, the better the results; The more English is taught, the better the results; Standards of English will decline if languages other than English are used in the classroom. Upon investigating relevant literature, it was found that although some progress being made, some myths not only endure in higher education but are actively promoted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. These enduring myths prevent Japan from improving English language standards within the country. Japan has long resisted accepting English as an official second language, considering it a threat to the Japanese language and culture. Japan could overcome its concern about the English language by creating a distinct Japanese English dialect and improving English language teaching standards.

Reception Reader: Exploring Text Reuse in Early Modern British Publications

The Reception Reader is a web tool for studying text reuse in the Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) data. Users can: 1) explore a visual overview of the reception of a work, or its incoming connections, across time based on shared text segments, 2) interactively survey the details of connected documents, and 3) examine the context of reused text for "close reading". We show examples of how the tool streamlines research and exploration tasks, and discuss the utility and limitations of the user interface along with its current data sources.

Mark Faulkner. A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and Literature between Old and Middle English

Mark Faulkner’s book is a milestone in the study of early English, and essential reading for any scholar engaged with England’s literary and linguistic landscapes in the High Middle Ages. As he notes, scholarly treatments of the evolving language and writing of the period between securely ‘Old’ and safely ‘Middle’ English have suffered from a traditional perception of rupture, loss, and absence in the record, resulting from the (literal and figurative) marginalization of English during an efflorescence of Latin and French literature. This apparent literary scarcity following the Norman Conquest has led scholars to offer ideological readings of English writings and their relative absence alike, as assertions or failures of English identity embodied in a newly subaltern language; the earliest Middle English works have been described as fundamentally isolated and deracinated. Faulkner’s substantial achievement, quietly and painstakingly traced through a seriously impressive weight of written evidence and close analysis, is to show that both of these perceptions are incorrect.

The Construction of Muslim Women Characters in Early English Drama

Abstract This article examines the portrayal of Islam and Muslim women in Renaissance England by considering the historical framework and the changes in the attitudes towards Islam at that time. It contends that Renaissance drama has presented Islam as the Other and the Muslim world as antithetical to Christendom. This article examines two specific Muslim women characters in two early English plays, Queen Tota in Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West Parts I and II, and the Turkish queen in George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar. The work relies on the ideas of several critics, historians and theorists in its analysis of these dramatic works. The two texts are read from a New Historicist perspective. Historical, socio-political and economic factors prevalent during the time are brought back to life and the plays will be explored in light of these.

Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730

Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730

Szülői attitűdök vizsgálata a korai idegennyelv-tanulásra és az óvodai játékos idegen nyelvi foglalkozásra vonatkozóan

Nowadays it is inevitable to speak foreign languages especially English as it is a lingua franca in Europe and all over the world. Whether it is a good idea to start learning English at an early age, has been under a constant debate. Previous research indicates that playful learning is the most important for a preschoolaged child in every field. Research has shown that several factors may lead to succesful language learning such as age, methods as well as the quality and quantity of the L2 input. There is an increasing evidence on the importance of the first years of life from the perspective of effective language learning. This study advances our understanding of parents’ attitude, expectations and opinion concerning Early English. We carried out our research in an institution in Debrecen in 2020. Using a sample of 65 children (N=65), we collected data from two sources: questionnaires filled in by parents whose children take part in English activities in the kindergarten and questionnaires filled in by parents whose children don’t take part in them. As predicted, the parents believe the point of Early English activities is to provide them a positive experience during the activities, enjoy them and feel free to say at least words int he target languae. Contrary to our expectations, parents involved in our research do not find it necessary to use ICT tools in English activities in preschools. Our study confirmed that there is a need for English activities in Hungarian preschools. The findings address a controversial belief among parents in terms of the ideal age to start learning a second language. The findings support the prediction that playfulness and intercultural competence are important for parents. We conclude that ECEC professionals need to find balance between using ICT tools and traditional props and tools in the second language activities.

Review: Jahn A. Geck, ed. "Records of Early English Drama: Cambridgeshire"

Review: Jahn A. Geck, ed. "Records of Early English Drama: Cambridgeshire"

From Manual to Digital: Women's Hands and the Work of Eighteenth-Century Studies

Digital resources like the HathiTrust Digital Library, Early English Books Online, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online are increasingly central to humanities scholarship, a trend that has only accelerated as academic jobs disappear, institutional budgets tighten, and an ongoing global pandemic limits travel and access to archives. These electronic resources are not simply a panacea in precarious times, however; they are the product of a global information economy that depends on uncredited, invisible, and underpaid labor. The academic humanities are complicit in exploiting and erasing these technology workers, as a growing body of investigative research has shown. This essay contributes a new case study of an offshore outsourcing project commissioned by and for eighteenth-century scholars: the digitization of The London Stage, 1660–1800 by China Data Systems Corporation in 1970. That electronic transcription, which continues to underpin the present-day London Stage Database, was performed by women keypunchers whose labor was systematically feminized, racialized, and devalued in advertisements and corporate media. Drawing connections to the rhetoric around projects like Google Books and the Text Creation Partnership today, I highlight the recurrent figure of the hand and its vexed role in policing the boundaries between agential and alienated labor. Turning to the period that gave rise to contemporary understandings of intellectual property, I conclude by examining a receipt recording three copyright sales between Susanna Centlivre and Edmund Curll. In this ephemeral manuscript, I find a story richly suggestive of how we might reimagine scholarly labor and knowledge work in our moment of technocapitalism.

Lives in Book History: Changing Contours of Research over Forty Years

One of the accomplishments of Robin Myers's long career as a book historian (which includes being archivist of the Stationers’ Company) is a series of London conferences, of which she has been one of the organizers since its inception in 1979. These conferences, taking “book history” in its broadest sense, have covered many topics; and the fortieth one, in 2018, provided a backward glance by focusing on the development of the field over those four decades. The present handsomely produced volume prints eight papers from that conference, along with Myers's concise and charming history of the whole series and a record of all the papers and the thirty accompanying book publications. Although two conferences have taken place since 2018, Myers calls the theme of that one “valedictory” and feels that it forms “a natural closure.” The most recent conference (2021), she believes, may be the last, “certainly the end of the first series of conferences.” Whether or not more conferences are held, this volume stands as a fitting monument to a unique phenomenon in the history of book history.The authors of the eight papers are distinguished historians representing a wide range of specialties: Maureen Bell (personnel of the early English book trade), Peter W. M. Blayney (sixteenth-century English printing), Christopher de Hamel (illuminated manuscripts), Mirjam Foot (bookbindings), Antony Griffiths (prints), Lotte Hellinga (fifteenth-century printed books), David McKitterick (library and publishing history), and Mark Rose (copyright). They were asked to reflect on their own scholarly lives as well as on how their fields have changed over the years; and the essays (all well written and often amusing) vary in the proportions of these two ingredients. Perhaps the most evocative autobiographically are de Hamel's, beginning with his teenage enchantment with medieval manuscripts in a Dunedin Public Library display, and Blayney's, which conveys the process of discovering the joy of patient and thorough investigation; and perhaps the one with the broadest sweep of reference is McKitterick's, whose several themes include the need for national book histories to be international (since many books circulating within a country came from elsewhere). Most of the writers do not limit themselves to forty years in their survey of scholarship but often go back to at least 1900, and the book is thus a convenient guide to basic work in these areas. Other guides exist, but what makes this volume unusual is the biographical element. A passion for the subject, and for research into it, is evident in each essay, and the interdependence of personal stories and scholarly progress is repeatedly demonstrated. The result is an inspiring advertisement for the pleasures of book-history research. With this appealing volume, Robin Myers has reason to feel that her ninety-sixth birthday has been well celebrated.

Religion as ‘Prime Institution’ of International Society

Religion features in early English School work, disappears, and reappears in more recent literature. Arguably, it has not yet found a solid place in this theoretical framework, even though the English School is known to provide angles on the evolution of international society other approaches lack. Religion can unite and divide; leading to a strengthening or a weakening of identity and legitimacy. Faith endures and it can exist independently of states, it can constitute them and it can provide new forms of states and societies. Employing previous English School ideas from early and contemporary English School scholars as points of departure, religion is introduced as a ‘prime institution’. Based on the English School’s understanding of primary institutions constituting international society, this concept of a ‘prime institution’ provides an additional layer to international society. Such a prime institution helps grasp the multifacetedness of religion in the context of international society; identify patterns of religion’s (in-) significance for primary institutions; and examine the difference between religious and religion-averse states within the international society. This prime institution is illustrated with a so-called ‘quilt model’, which depicts the multiple layers of international society.