Shakespearean Characters Research Articles

Deconstruction and the Acting Performance for the Shakespearean Character in the Iraqi Theatre

  صنف الباحثون التفكيك بالاستراتيجية التي تختص في قراءة النصوص الفلسفية والادبية والفنية والنقدية وفق ثنائية (الهدم والبناء)، وهي فضاء تطبيقي اجرائي تدعو الى البحث بطبقات المعنى وعدم أنغلاقه، وتؤسس الى انقلابات في مستويات النص، حيث يتحول المركز الى هامش والهامش الى مركز، ومن هنا سعى الباحثان الى دراسة إستراتيجية التفكيك وأشتغالاتها في الحقل المسرحي، إذ يعد التفكيك احد اهم التيارات المعاصرة التي تدخل بشكل فعال في قراءة العرض المسرحي، وأنصب مسار البحث حول اجراءات الهدم والبناء لدى الممثل المسرحي العراقي بأزاء الشخصية الشكسبيرية، وقد حدد الباحثان الشخصية الشكسبيرية لما فيها من لغة شعرية عالية، وبناء درامي محكم، وشخصيات تمتاز بشكل فني فخم، ولغرض الوصول إلى هدف البحث عمل الباحثان على تقسيم البحث الى الإطار المنهجي وتضمن مشكلة البحث التي حددت بالتساؤل الاتي: تفكيك اداء الممثل للشخصية الشكسبيرية ، وتضمن كذلك هدف البحث و حدوده، وتحديد ابرز المصطلحات، فيما تناول الإطار النظري ثلاثة مباحث، المبحث الأول حدد: القراءة التفكيكية فيما عُني المبحث الثاني بدراسة الشخصية الشكسبيرية من النص الى العرض، وخصص المبحث الثالث للبحث في تمثلات التفكيك في اداء الممثل، ومؤشرات الإطار النظري. واختار الباحث مسرحية خيانة عينة للبحث. وتضمن البحث النتائج والاستنتاجات والتي أذكر منها الاستنتاج الاتي: ساهمت اجراءات التفكيك بفعل (الهدم والبناء) لدى الممثل العراقي في فتح افاق جديدة وكسر للمعايير والقواعد التي امتازت بها الشخصية الشكسبيرية حيث ساهمت في بناء قدرات ادائية وتعبيرية جديدة لدى الممثل، وقائمة المصادر والمراجع. &nbsp

Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance by Jelena Marelj

Reviewed by: Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance by Jelena Marelj Amy Cook SHAKESPEAREAN CHARACTER: LANGUAGE IN PERFORMANCE. By Jelena Marelj. Arden Shakespeare Studies in Language and Digital Methodologies series. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019; pp. 264. Jelena Marelj’s smart and insightful book argues that Shakespeare’s characters come into being and gain their extraordinary sense of depth and richness from the specifics of their language. Marelj intervenes in the long tradition of character criticism by “approaching character from the field of linguistic pragmatics to examine how our impression of characters’ ontological reality is produced” (4–5). She challenges her readers to see that this impression, at least in the case of Shakespeare’s characters, is not that of “interiority,” or the sense of having an “a-historical and essential” inner being, but is rather of “anteriority,” or the sense that the character “pre-dates its fictional life as a dramatic speaker.” The keyword here is speaker, since Marelj’s analytical method is rooted in pragmatics, the branch of linguistics that foregrounds context, turn-taking, prosody—in essence the performance of language (an obvious fit for the study of Shakespeare and of theatre in general). This engagement with pragmatics allows us to see how Shakespeare builds characters from words, words, words in the right place and time. Marelj’s analysis of her chosen characters is rich and nuanced. She draws from pragmatics philosopher H. P. Grice the idea of “conversational implicatures,” or the implied meanings created by the use of language in a particular performance context, to illuminate the “excess meanings” produced by, for example, Falstaff’s many puns and insults (25). Falstaff’s speech early in 1 Henry IV, which begins by asking Hal the time of day and ends by requesting that his young friend, when a king, not hang a thief, is, Marelj shows, a complex series of puns on knights, booty, the moon, government, and stealing, leading to the implication that Falstaff, as noble knight and thief, is not that different from the thieving government of Henry of Bolingbroke. Falstaff’s point is not made directly, but arises in the performance of the text. Marelj also uses what Grice called “maxims,” or universal and unspoken rules for conversations, such as the need to “avoid ambiguity,” “be brief,” and “make your contributions as informative as is required” to measure certain dramatic choices (27). Identifying where characters flout these rules provides her with particular passages of analytical [End Page 383] interest. While her readings are firmly grounded in pragmatics, the value of this complex theoretical armature is not always evident. When performed by talented Shakespearean actors, for example, these meanings are clear even if the audience does not know what maxim has been broken. Perhaps this particular theoretical knife was necessary for Marelj to cut open these characters’ language, but as a reader, I found myself at once impressed by her insights into Shakespeare’s characters and un-persuaded to read Grice. The characters that anchor her chapters are the ones that readily lodge themselves into readers’ and spectators’ minds: the larger than life, the confusing, the paradoxical. Her first chapter on Falstaff argues that his “roundness” as a character in 1 Henry IV comes from his “linguistic performances in a theatrical context” (26). When Falstaff and Hal take turns playing the king, their funny, metatheatrical performance of kingship works to highlight, according to Marelj, the ways in which the king himself is only “playing” at kingship. Falstaff, as she puts it, “shows the king to be a counterfeit in counterfeiting the king” (49). Hal, once he becomes King Henry in Henry V, uses the lessons in language he received in 1 Henry IV to establish his right to the throne through manipulative oratory. Falstaff’s student receives greater attention in chapter 3, in which Marelj describes how both the episodic scene structure and the language that constantly shifts its perspective on the king and his history turn Henry V’s Henry into a strangely anamorphic character. For example, she points out that the juxtaposition of the scene with the noble traitors alongside the scene announcing Falstaff’s death frames Henry’s actions as similarly traitorous—or in...

"The Bard and ‘the Other’: A Post-colonial Re-reading of Sir Thomas More, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest"

The purpose of this article is to shed light on the representation of ‘the Other’ in three Shakespearean dramas: Sir Thomas More, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest. The article describes several Shakespearean characters through the prism of post-colonialism and, therefore, the paper is structured as the postcolonial re-reading of the aforementioned dramatic texts. William Shakespeare portrayed the sad fate of immigrants in Sir Thomas More, but the Bard also tackled the refugee issue which remains relevant for the contemporary period. Additionally, Shakespeare dramatized the position of the Jewish community in Venice through the portrayal of Shylock. The re-reading of The Tempest focuses on the process of colonisation and the Manichaean division within the conquered world. In conclusion, the article portrays experiences of those dramatic individuals stigmatised and subjugated by the colonial forces, thus allowing the readers to better understand the binary division within colonial systems.

Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language by Paula Blank

Reviewed by: Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language by Paula Blank Eric Thibodeaux-Thompson Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language. By Paula Blank. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 213. $80.00, cloth. Paula Blank’s work is timely, and she is dearly missed by many colleagues, friends, and family members. In fact, after Professor Blank’s passing in 2016, so many people were moved by her work that the author’s manuscript was shaped into this 2018 publication. In the spirit of “Spanglish,” Paula Blank coined the term “Shakesplish” to account for the way we may occasionally experience Shakespeare’s language as a hybrid English. As modern English readers, speakers, and listeners, at first we invariably understand some, but not all, of Shakespeare’s Early Modern English. Blank informs us that there can be great value in what we don’t understand, or as she puts it, “We might discover that ‘Shakesplish’ may be composed of errors in comprehension, but that such errors enable, rather than hinder, some of the pleasures we take in Shakespeare’s language today” (xii). Blank’s book is arranged in chapters according to how we often perceive Shakespeare’s language—as “Beautiful,” “Sexy,” “Funny,” and “Smart” and book-ended with “Shakespeare in Modern English” at the beginning and “Shakespeare as Modern English” at the end. Blank’s book is full of exhaustive, pains-taking, and impressive examinations of what words and expressions meant in Shakespeare’s time compared to the words and expressions that are closest to those in today’s world. Yet amid Blank’s formidable research on two areas of conflict—Early Modern English words compared to our Modern English words and what characters are saying compared to what we think they’re saying—are acknowledgments that traditional scholars and practitioners can all get behind. In her first chapter regarding “Shakespeare in Modern English,” Blank writes, “Speaking Shakespeare leads us to the sources of our own power because we find a language which expresses the depth of our experience more fully, more richly, more completely than our own words can” (11–12). The author makes clear in her second chapter, “Beautiful,” that as we appreciate the occasional difference between what Shakespeare’s characters are saying and what we think they’re saying, we get a deeper understanding of how we experience Shakespeare’s language. Shakesplish is what we think Hamlet is considering, why we think Falstaff is funny, and how we admire Henry V to some extent. Shakesplish involves what we bring to Shakespeare as much as what Shakespeare brings to us. Rather than being preoccupied with what’s “right” [End Page 268] and “wrong” in someone’s understanding of a scene, the author encourages us to embrace what seems to be happening in a scene or within a Shakespearean character, as well. Of course, we need to be accurate about what’s taking place in a scene, but by not dismissing all of the interpretive errors, we can better prepare our productions of Shakespeare. Blank explains: “My focus, here, will be on English that has become strange over time. Shakespeare’s ‘alienation effects,’ moreover, sometimes draw us closer to the plays, rather than distancing us from them, even when we aren’t entirely sure we get what his characters are saying. As Nehamas writes, ‘The art we love is art we don’t yet fully understand. . . . Beauty always remains a bit of a mystery . . . more like something calling me without showing exactly what it is calling me to.’ Shakespeare’s unusual language can produce, in an important turn of phrase by scholar Ruth Morse, ‘alienation effects which do not alienate.’ It somehow invites us in” (33). In chapter 3, “Sexy,” Blank reminds us that the word “sexy” didn’t come into use until the end of the nineteenth century (93). Nevertheless, modern audiences enjoy any hint of sex in the plays, which often takes the form of characters expressing their desire for sex more than the act itself (93). With “Funny,” Blank’s fourth chapter, the reader will again, no doubt, smile and nod in agreement with the author’s assertion that we sometimes react before we...

«Усмирение своенравной» А.Н. Островского: проблемы рецепции и принципы перевода шекспировской комедии

Albeit being an experienced translator of foreign drama, A.N. Ostrovsky translated only one Shakespeare’s piece — The Taming of the Shrew. His first attempt at its translation resulted in an abridged prose version entitled The Taming of the Spiteful Wife, which served as an embryo of the later prosimetric translation. While the interest in Shakespearean allusions in Ostrovsky’s plays may be traced back to the works of contemporary critics, it was not until mid-20th century that a comprehensive study of the play’s translation was written by a Shakespearean scholar M. Morozov further revisited and revised by Iu.D. Levin, V.I. Malikov, and N.K. Il’ina. Bearing on these studies, the author of this article demonstrates how the language of Ostrovsky’s translation is related to the basic language principles of the playwright and shows his reliance upon the editorial practice of the 18th–19th centuries. The article highlights the translator’s strategies in using verse and prose, blank verse and rhyme as a means to interpret Shakespearean characters, the genre and the style of the play. It also examines the synthesis of “domesticating” and “estranging” tendencies in the translated play

The poor insane Ophelia: reconsidering Ophelia syndrome.

The association between memory loss and Hodgkin's lymphoma has been given the eponym of Ophelia syndrome, in memory of Shakespeare's character in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Nevertheless, there are differences between the disease and the character. To review the origins and uses of the eponym through an original article by pathologist Ian Carr, its relation to the character Ophelia, and the related autoantibodies. Historical narrative review. Besides an eloquent description in the original article, Carr presaged the presence of autoantibodies, before they had been thoroughly researched. Since then, five different autoantibodies (mGluR5, Hu, NMDAR, SOX, PCA2) have been associated with Hodgkin's disease. It is interesting to note the divergent outcomes of Shakespeare's character and the patient in the original description by Carr, the latter recovering to lead a normal life, and the former deceased. Although there is little relationship between the fictional character and the syndrome, both imply the unintentional trigger of self-harm (suicide in one case, autoimmunity in the other), thus remaining associated.

Bardolph’s rosacea: skin disorders that define personality in Shakespeare’s plays

Several popular Shakespearean characters are dramatically portrayed on stage with striking physical appearances caused by medical and dermatologic disorders. Shakespeare’s colorful portrayal of their maladies not only helps to entertain audiences but also serves to define the characters’ personalities and behavior. Shakespeare himself emphasizes this point in his play Richard III, in which the notorious English king states that his evil nature is a direct result of his hideous spinal deformity. This contribution discusses four other famous Shakespearean characters: Bardolph, who appears to be suffering from rosacea; the Witches of Macbeth, who have beards; Juliet, who has green sickness (chlorosis); and Falstaff, who is morbidly obese. In all of these cases, their skin disorders and medical maladies serve to highlight their underlying nature.

De la vengeance pathologique : étude sur Titus Andronicus, de Shakespeare

ObjectivesThis article aims to account for the pathological dimension of certain forms of revenge. MethodologyFrom Titus Andronicus, Roman tragedy of W. Shakespeare, it's to highlight the determinants that precede the act of revenge as such, the pathological dimension of violence and revenge at Titus, and the “psychotic” signature of these acts, their unlimited nature, without brake, with the persecutives notes that one perceives in the Titus report to others as in his report to the words. Beforehand, we considered useful to make a brief summary of the literature devoted to this theme of revenge. ResultsWe’ll see how the impulsive reactions, in “mirror”, murderous and cruel of Titus, which grew still more from beginning to the end of the play, can teach us about a revenge described as “paranoïd”. DiscussionThe discussion is — among other things — the report perversion/psychosis, especially because of the cruelty of the acts committed. We’ll see that the approach from the only perspective of revenge, or only from the perspective of the “perversion” of certain acts, cannot account sufficiently the complexity of this Shakespearean character. The paranoid logic of this literary “case” seems to us more a way forward. ConclusionTitus Andronicus is a tragedy of violence and revenge. It's the first tragedy of Shakespeare, with his interests and imperfections, often criticized, little read, little staging, little commented, but interesting and teaching us about a topic revenge little studied too in the field of psychiatry, psychopathology and psychoanalysis.

The Repulsive Other in Tim Crouch’sI, Malvolio(2010)

AbstractDonald Trump famously used Hillary Clinton’s ‘toilet business’ or Marco Rubio’s ‘sweating like a pig’ as talking points in his campaign for the U. S. presidency. He thereby managed to use disgust’s intrinsic link to fear as a catalyst to negatively influence people’s opinion of his opponents. It was a tactic he also successfully used to rally his supporters against groups of people like ‘lying’ journalists or ‘rapist’ Mexicans. The mechanism of dehumanising the Other via association with disgust can be regarded as a dangerous tool of political rhetoric. In times like ours, where political discourse is commonly drenched in emotional hyperbole, it is paramount that we come to understand our emotions and learn how easily they may be hijacked for political purposes; this is especially true for such a seemingly ‘intuitive’ emotion as disgust. In his playI, Malvoliodramatist Tim Crouch gives voice to a Shakespearean character who has become a victim of discrimination via disgust. Crouch turns the perspectives around and allows the audience to see the story from the deplored’s point of view. This paper uses Crouch’s play for an exemplary analysis of the underlying structures of repulsion, and its relation to fear, and investigates the aesthetic possibilities of redemption.

OPHELIA AND LAERTES AS V. BRUSOV’S LYRICAL HEROES

The paper deals with V. Brusov’s poems inspired by «Hamlet», a tragedy by W. Shakespeare. V. Brusov’s lyrical heroes impersonate Shakespearean characters. V. Brusov and A. Bely controversy over literature issues is also considered, since it can clear up V. Brusov’s perception of the great tragedy, in particular, the reasons why he chose not worthy characters of the tragedy as his lyrical alter ego.

The Smoke of War: From Tamburlaine to Henry V

ABSTRACTEarly in Tamburlaine Part 1, Marlowe’s protagonist promises that his army’s bullets, “[e]nrolde in flames and fiery smouldering mistes”, will occupy the heavens. Uniting the technological with the supernatural, Tamburlaine is characterized as a warrior who commands the “compasse of the killing bullet”, with the smoky emissions generated by his ordnance complementing his martial ambitions. As Tamburlaine and Bajazeth compete for discursive and material control of the fictional – and theatrical – air, deploying smoke, flying bullets, and airborne contagion, Marlowe’s drama introduces an association between pollution and achievement that Shakespeare would subsequently interrogate in Henry IV and Henry V. While Shakespearean characters such as Hotspur continue to celebrate the fumes of “smoky war” (1 Henry IV), Shakespeare also registers the performative risks of generating environmental pollution: an approach that culminates in Henry V when Henry’s threats conflate bullets with rotting bodies and render the air itself a poisoned weapon that “choke[s]” the atmosphere. Analysing both parts of Tamburlaine, Henry VI Part One, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V, this article explores the theatrical associations between staging battle and the weaponised use of airborne pollutants, reflecting on the implications for contemporary dramatic representations of the martial and aerial environment.

The clown and the king: undergraduate actor training and wellbeing

This paper explores the use of clown-state as a strategy for increasing wellbeing within the rehearsal process of King Lear with final year (undergraduate) acting students. In this context, actors-in-training experience the body’s capacity for resilience through experimentation with the grotesque and ambivalence in order to create Shakespearean characters. It is posited that the navigation of these experiences constitutes ‘rehearsing for resilience’ to increase individual and group wellbeing.

Фикциональность драматургии Хайнера Мюллера: формы и функции

Using the broad material of Heiner Müller’s drama (1929-1995), the question of how to destroy the classical forms of dramatic conventions in German drama of the 60-80s is discussed in the article. The author dwells on the repeatedly criticized and revised discussion that unfolds around the concept, appeared at the end of the 20th century of post-drama H. T. Lehman theater. The author of the article adheres to the point of view that the importance of post-drama as an experimental site of the latest theater can hardly be overestimated. The general laws of constructing a figurative system, a chronotope and a composition of Müller plays are analyzed. The researcher comes to conclusions about how deliberate fantasy and fictionality contribute to the implementation of the author’s attitude towards journalism and ideology. Particular attention is paid to intertextuality, provocativeness, collage. H. Muller’s experiments are aimed at updating the political drama and forcing directors and spectators to clearly define their own political position. The playwright’s mindset to combine recognizable fragments - either they are Shakespearean characters or historical situations - into an unpredictably paradoxical entire that allows the viewer to form an analytically balanced position on topical issues is examined in detail. The novelty of the study is to systematize and build a hierarchy of the main dramatic experiments used by the researched author.

What does a Shakespearean character say when he or she says "I"? Exploring notions of 'self' in Shakespeare's drama

What does a Shakespearean character say when he or she says "I"? Exploring notions of 'self' in Shakespeare's drama

Leskov’s rewriting of Lady Macbeth and the processes of adaptation and appropriation

This article tries to provide a thorough analysis of Nikolai Leskov’s rewriting of Lady Macbeth, the Shakespearean character, in the novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, from the perspective of Translation and Adaptation Studies. The focus will be placed on the ideology of the author who, with full knowledge, rewrites a previous work to adapt it to a specific context. Apart from Leskov’s work, attention will be also paid to two of its subsequent adaptations: Dmitri Shostakovich’s homonymous opera and William Oldroyd’s filmic version, Lady Macbeth. Finally, the importance of these processes for the development of target literary systems will be discussed and emphasized.

Образ Старика в елизаветинской драме: от персонажа римской трагедии к христианскому Старцу

<p>Трансформация амплуа старого человека в елизаветинской драме рубежа XVI–XVII вв. указывает на возрастание религиозной семантики и аллегоризма. Тема важна и потому, что роли старцев мог играть на сцене актер по имени Уильям Шекспир.</p><p>Старик в «Испанской трагедии» Т. Кида еще восходит к сенекианской модели Senex (фигуры «ошибки» в узнавании), но наделяется и новыми чертами родительской любви и достоинства скорби. Доминантой характера Старика в «Фаусте» К. Марло уже является сила веры, он выступает в функции назидания-предостережения незадолго до финала. Сам образ заимствован Марло из Народной книги и имеет реальные прототипы. Старики У. Шекспира — третья модель, в ряде черт наследующая Киду и Марло, но обладающая собственным смыслом и выразительностью.</p><p>У шекспировского Old Man выявляются два главных новозаветных архетипа: 1) благочестивый старец Иосиф Плотник (образец трудолюбия, отеческой любви, заботы, верности и веры), к нему восходят Адам в комедии «Как вам это понравится» и Старик в «Короле Лире» и 2) праведный старец Симеон, к которому восходит Старик в «Макбете». Этот персонаж Шекспира очень близок к древнехристианскому пониманию старчества как воплощения аскетической, водительской и пророческой традиций.</p><p>Текст доклада автора на Первой Всероссийской научной конференции «Кристофер Марло и его творчество в русской и мировой культуре: междисциплинарный взгляд», которая прошла в Москве 22–23 июня 2018 г.</p>

An embodied stylistics approach to acting interpreters’ exploration of Shakespeare’s verse drama. A case-study analysis

Abstract – This chapter explores the nature of poetry as a dramatic use of language, showing the relevance of Experientialist theories in Cognitive Linguistics to the empirical experience of acting Shakespeare’s verse out. The assumption is that an overt and collectively-shared embodiment of meanings, accomplished through the use of creative writing and drama techniques, can enhance the interpreters’ awareness of the formal and metaphorical characteristics of this poetic text. This also entails the interpreters’ rediscovery of the ‘embodied’ nature of their own ‘schemata’ (or background experience) at the source of their emotional and conceptual responses to the poetic language of Shakespearean characters. Interpreters are therefore defined as acting interpreters when they act poetry out in a real space, appropriate it into their own schematic identities as they embody and authenticate its meanings, and then analyze its effects on themselves and on the other acting interpreters inter-acting with them. Embodied Stylistics is therefore meant not as the analysis of the text as such but, instead, as the analysis of the acting interpreters’ responses to the poetic patterns of the text. This theoretical argument becomes actualized in the experience of ‘poetic meaning embodiment’ reported by the case-study subjects as ‘acting interpreters’ (some of them acclaimed British actors and stage directors) and an embodied-stylistic analysis will be carried out precisely on the ethnographic data collected during their creative-writing and poetic-drama workshops.

Introduction: Computation and Digital Text Analysis at Melville's Marginalia Online

Introduction:Computation and Digital Text Analysis at Melville's Marginalia Online Christopher Ohge and Steven Olsen-Smith In an erased marginal comment on Shakespeare's character Parolles, the dissembling rogue in All's Well That Ends Well, Herman Melville invoked the most unexceptionable of mathematical formulas to reflect darkly on the abiding nature of human depravity: As 2 & 2 made 4 in Noah's time, as now,so man [?figures] ever. Here we have acharacter very common in the Rail RoadCar of the [?most mighty] nineteenth century.1 (Shakespeare's Dramatic Works 2.406) Roughly forecasting the subject of Melville's tenth book, The Confidence-Man, the recovered annotation also reveals a seemingly incidental but nonetheless significant penchant on Melville's part for quantification. Quantities appear frequently in Moby-Dick and in other writings by Melville, whose fascination with numbers was demonstrated recently in the pages of this journal by Zachary Turpin. Numbers are not scarce in the author's marginalia either. "There are 75 folio volumes in that," Melville observed of Jaques's words in As You Like It (2: 284.26–27). In light of this predisposition to unite the quantifiable with the profound, the Melville's Marginalia Online (MMO) staff offer in the following essays digital text analyses of Melville's marginalia in his surviving copies of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Methodologically unprecedented, and conducted in an integrative spirit, the essays combine distant with close reading, exploring hitherto unknown or under-appreciated evidence of Melville's engagement with these three major predecessors. Quantitative and qualitative digital scholarship have led to a mixture of promising results and disillusionment, with increasingly vocal proponents and detractors. Opposing conceptions of the field are apparent in Timothy Brennan's recent article, "The Digital Humanities Bust," and the [End Page 1] vigorous defense it provoked from many digital scholars (for examples, see responses by Mandell and by Bond et al.). While the fairness and accuracy of Brennan's characterizations of digital practitioners' various activities is open to question, he makes a valid point that quantitative studies could more explicitly demonstrate the significance of their findings. High-profile studies to date have mainly addressed broad swaths of social literary output defined by regions and decades––for instance, the thousands of British novels published over a given century. Digitized archives now make such approaches possible and offer an exciting and potentially transformative development in literary studies. On the other hand, the stubborn disconnect between quantity and literary meaning can hamper such approaches, presenting conceptual shortcomings even for macro-analyses performed on data of a comparatively much smaller scale. As Brennan puts it bluntly, "The significance of the appearance of the word "whale" (say, 1,700 times) is precisely this: the appearance of the word 'whale' 1,700 times." But whereas no act of counting can substitute for critically interpreting a literary work, the usefulness and significance of word frequencies––both on their own and in relation to each other––are heightened in the study of marginalia. Indeed, the approaches demonstrated in the following essays indicate that an author's record of marginalia and lifetime of reading constitute a valuable big data set in its own right, albeit a fairly small one in the context of research computing. When the author is Melville, moreover, with a substantial record of marking his books and incorporating a range of sources in his own writing, the data can reward analysis in hitherto unprecedented ways. Only a machine can quickly compute word counts of selected content Melville marked in the plays of Shakespeare's Dramatic Works, or in each book of The Odyssey, or in Paradise Lost. Only a machine can stack a series of graphs showing lexical variety in Melville's markings or instantaneously classify by positive and negative sentiments enormous amounts of words that appear most frequently in passages he marked in multiple texts. Melville himself was devoted to the art of rhetoric and explicitly lauded both the "short, quick probings" and encyclopedic forays of great writers ("Hawthorne and His Mosses" 244). By using machine-derived word counts and visualizations to explore the thematic aspects of Melville's reading, the following essays demonstrate new means for...

Literally:How to Speak like an Absolute Knave

A family of Shakespearean characters I call “the perverse literalists” takes the figurative language of their interlocutors in the most literal sense. While they make us laugh, these characters' perversely literal interpretations also highlight the physical and experiential grounds of common figures of speech and prod their interlocutors and the reader into a deeper understanding of the conditions of embodiment. his inventive use of the literal is a trope in its own right, one that has already been useful to cognitive linguists, phenomenologists, and new materialists. Metaphors we consider dead are, as others have suggested, merely sleeping, and the act of waking them up can be not merely funny but profoundly insightful. We should reexamine the widespread aversion to the misuse ofliterallyand think instead about what it can tell us about the physicality of such abstract experiences as love and luck, causality and cognition.

Shakespeare’s Cultural Diversity

Abstract 400 hundred years of Shakespeare's presence in world-wide theatres, schools, literature, film, and even languages must give us pause. It is worth reflecting on what there is in the texts that have come down to us that answers this great and obviously most diversified horizon of reception. The paper will try to present Shakespearean plots, characters and themes and examine them for their potential to become appropriated into the very centres of multiple cultural polysystems.