"The Letter was not nice but full of charge":
         Toward an Electronic Facsimile of Shakespeare
 
 
             Speaking Notes for a paper delivered by
 
                        Kenneth B. Steele
            Centre for Computing in the Humanities
                      University of Toronto
 
 
              at the Combined 16th Annual Association
         for Literary and Linguistic Computing Conference
               and 9th International Conference on
             Computers and the Humanities (ALLC/ICCH):
                        "The Dynamic Text."
 
              University of Toronto, June 5-10, 1989.
 
 
             [A laptop computer and overhead projection
              palette were utilized for the examples.]
 
 
                          _______________
 
 
 
     William Shakespeare's dramatic career began four centuries
ago, and his associates John Heminge and Henrie Condell tell
us that, from the beginning, the texts of his works were
abused by what they term "diuerse stolne, and surreptitious
copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of
iniurious impostors, that expos'd them."  In their preface "To
the great Variety of Readers" in the 1623 First Folio, they
assert that finally their volume presents these pirated plays,
"cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in
their numbers, as he conceived the[m]."  Of course, all the
early quartos made very similar claims to editorial integrity: for
example, the 1603 first quarto of Hamlet purports to present
the play "As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse
seruants in the Cittie of London."  This assertion sounds
distinctly like the publicity for a very recent edition, which
declares: "After eight years' work by the world's finest
Shakespeare scholars, here are the plays as they were acted by
Shakespeare's company."
 
     The inescapable reality is that the entirety of the
Shakespearean corpus comes to us through the mediation of
scribes, editors, compositors, and proofreaders, and that, with
every edition, from Renaissance quartos to modern diskettes,
layer upon layer of interpretation has accumulated and obscured
the texture of the author beneath the glossy paste-wax finish
of emendation.  Each edition claims to "correct" ostensible
"corruptions" and "compositorial errors," in the process
retreating still further from the original authorial manuscripts.
Most damaging of all is the time-honoured editorial preference
for a single, "definitive" text, rather than a respect for what
Randall McLeod calls the "infinitive" text.  This attitude results
in rationalization of variants as "indifferent" and conflation of
sometimes strikingly different plays into one.
 
     The Quarto and Folio texts of _King Lear_, for example,
disagree in 400 complete lines, and thousands of variant words.
Recent scholarship by Steven Urkowitz and Gary Taylor, among
many others, has demonstrated the consistent and deliberate
alteration of character, theme, and plot between the texts.
When these distinct texts are conflated, it should hardly be
surprising that many elements become contradictory, or that
characters become inconsistent.  Shakespeare may be
responsible for the folio _King Lear_, or he may not, but
certainly he never imagined the monstrous conflation which has
dominated editions for several centuries.
 
     _King Lear_ is not a special case, although its seminal
importance to the twentieth century has made it the most
celebrated example of textual instability (or what we at this
conference are calling a "dynamic text").  Seventeen of
Shakespeare's 38 plays survive in 2 variant forms, and 2 more,
_Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_, survive in 3.  Conflation
and the editorial impulse to create a single "definitive" text is
an accommodation of a naturally human but rather lazy
preference for the uncomplicated rather than the uncomfortable
or inconvenient.  I propose that Friar Lawrence's words to
Friar John in _Romeo and Juliet_ have found new relevance in
the twentieth century as a warning to Shakespeare scholars:
 
               The Letter was not nice but full of charge,
               Of deare import, and the neglecting it,
               May do much danger[.]
                                           (_RJ_ Q2 5.2.18)
 
Every letter, ligature, or punctuation mark in the original
texts, although occasionally annoying or puzzling, is indeed
"full of charge" -- and in more than one sense, when one is
talking about an electronic Shakespeare textbase.
 
 
                        _______________
 
 
     Twenty-five years ago this month, shortly after I was
born, Trevor H. Howard-Hill performed his first test concording
of Shakespeare's _Measure for Measure_ at the Oxford
University Computing Laboratory.[1]  The English Electric KDF-
9 computer he used took paper-tape input, and possessed a core
memory of what we would call 187 K.  By the end of the
decade, though, Howard-Hill had overseen the keypunching and
quintuple proofreading of the entire First Folio, several
important quartos, and a number of apocryphal plays, in the
course of producing the Oxford Old-Spelling Shakespeare
Concordances.  To this day, those files remain the bulk of the
computer-readable transcripts of Shakespeare's quarto and folio
texts.
 
     In the early 1970's, Howard-Hill claimed it was still "too
difficult, time-consuming, and expensive for all but the most
determined scholar to work with the computer."[2]  Downloaded
to a modern microcomputer, though, the 55 original texts of
the 38 plays now occupy 10.2 megabytes of disk space, and
even with their WordCruncher indexes, can fit on a 20-
megabyte hard disk.  For those who steadfastly prefer an
edited text, the Riverside Shakespeare and the Oxford Complete
Works are now available commercially on diskette for a few
hundred dollars, and Oxford is considering the release of its
recent old-spelling edition as well.  In many ways, it is now
too difficult, time-consuming, and expensive for all but the
most determined scholar to work _without_ the computer.
 
     Early last year, the Centre for Computing in the
Humanities began the Shakespeare Text Archive project, to
make Howard-Hill's mainframe files part of an accessible and
convenient textual tool for students and faculty at the
University of Toronto.  Although still incomplete, the textbase
was formatted for use with ETC's WordCruncher software, and
made available through the CCH's network.  The process of
verification, encoding, and keypunching continues even now,
but the archive currently contains the First Folio, all of the
so-called "good" quartos, and most of the "bad" quartos.
Hopefully, once the Shakespearean texts are complete, the
means will be found to add a collection of Shakespearean
sources and perhaps even a modern edition or variorum
annotation for cross-reference.  Ultimately, the archive could
be converted into a form of hypertext, perhaps linked with
optical facsimiles of the texts in question.  This form of
"electronic variorum" might finally approximate a genuinely
"infinitive text," and distributed on CD-ROM could be easily
accessible to all Shakespeareans.
 
     Using text retrieval software such as WordCruncher or
even TACT, the textbase is currently not so much useful for
computerized stylistic, authorship, or collational analysis, as it
is a remarkable tool to accelerate and refine more traditional
approaches, such as close reading, imagery analysis, or source
study.   First of all, the text becomes what I liken to a
"doodle pad": through casual browsing, random experiment, and
plain dumb luck, the user often stumbles across something
which sparks his imagination.  _Reading_ Shakespeare via
WordCruncher is another form of stimulus to the critical
imagination: a diachronic corpus suddenly becomes synchronic,
multiple plays interpenetrate on a single word, and one is
reading vertically, by cross-section, rather than horizontally,
from beginning to end.
 
     Working with the original texts can be complex and
confusing, or "inconvenient" as some would say: the archive
contains more information than many users may think they
want.  For literary rather than textual purposes, the user must
account for a bewildering array of duplicate texts, variant
spellings, typographical eccentricities, textual cruxes, and
apparent compositorial "errors" familiar to anyone who has
tried to read Shakespeare in facsimile.  Nonetheless, with a
little practice, the archive can yield better results than an
electronic edition and with considerably greater textual fidelity.
 
     Another purpose of research with the Shakespeare Text
Archive is lexical: the Oxford English Dictionary reports the
Renaissance definition of any given word, but does not easily
reveal Shakespeare's personal sense of its connotations and
denotations.  Examining each occurrence of the word in its
Shakespearean context can reveal Shakespeare's intellectual and
emotional attitude toward it: for example, Shakespeare seems to
consider "dogs" fawning, subservient, low-life creatures, but
"hounds" loyal, noble hunting animals.
 
     It is also possible to search for words in conjunction with
the codes for title pages, stage directions, speech prefixes,
prologues, etc.  (There are 60,769 Cocoa-type codes in the
texts).  One quickly finds that, of 6276 stage directions, and
554 beds, only 6 beds occur within the original stage
directions, in _2 Henry 6_, _Romeo and Juliet_ (Q1 only),
_Othello_, and _Cymbeline_.
 
 
[Example: eyen, eyne, eine]
 
An examination of the fifteen occurrences of the
obsolescent plural "eyen" (in its various spellings) reveals
that in all cases but one (_Pericles_), the word is used
primarily for purposes of rhyme (and eight times to rhyme
with "mine").  Furthermore, it seems clear from
Shakespeare's use of the word in _A Midsummer Night's
Dream_ and _As You Like It_ that he considered it
preposterous: appropriate only in circumstances such as
Bottom's performance as Pyramus, or Phebe's love poem to
Rosalind.
 
 
[Example:  Ears.byr, Ears2.byr, Ears3.byr]
 
Another example may demonstrate the usual investigative
sequence more clearly.  The ear is referred to 603 times
in Shakespeare's original texts.  As one reads through
these occurrences, 25 references seem strangely sexual --
specific evidence which is more convincing than vague
Freudian generalizations.  Furthermore, when one searches
for co-occurrences of the ear and poison or infection, one
finds seven places in which pouring poison in the ear is
closely associated with some form of male sexual jealousy
-- which I would argue helps to explain the symbolism of
_Hamlet_ as it may have formed in Shakespeare's mind.
 
 
[Example: Theatre.byr]
 
The user can create a list of theatrical terms
[act, appear, comedy, costume, globe, illusion,
mask, pageant, part, perform, platform, play,
revel, scaffold, scene, show, stage, theater, and
tragedy]
to conduct a preliminary study of metatheatricality across
the corpus.  My word list matches 3384 occurrences,
largely in the tragedies and good quartos, and
concentrated in the Elizabethan plays.  The histories and
the First Folio seem comparatively lean in metatheatrical
references.  _Hamlet_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_,
understandably, have by far the greatest concentration of
theatrical language, owing to the internal performances,
and their overall thematic concerns.
 
 
                           _______________
 
 
 
     The preceding illustrations have been primarily literary in
nature, focusing on lexicon and content rather than textual
minutiae, which is the fort of the Shakespeare Text Archive.
Unlike electronic _editions_ of Shakespeare, the archive aims
to be an electronic facsimile of the original quarto and folio
texts.  Obviously, it cannot yet replace more conventional
photographic facsimiles, but the coding of signatures allows
easy cross-reference to the Norton facsimile or the Allen &
Muir quarto facsimiles.  Using text retrieval software, an
electronic facsimile can provide virtually instant answers to
questions previously unthinkable.  An absolutely precise
electronic facsimile is still years away: only some form of
flawless optical process will satisfy bibliographers.  Yet despite
its minor imperfections, the Archive as it stands can eliminate
much of the drudgery of mechanical and repetitive tasks,
liberating the scholarly imagination to dream up new questions,
rather than laboriously seek to answer old ones.
 
[Example: I2.byr, I.byr]
 
For example, the word "aye / ay / aie" [12.byr] occurs a
total of 76 times in the texts.  In 41 cases, it occurs in
the expression of self-pity, "ay me / mee," in 27 cases it
means "ever" (17 times it is "for ay / aye"), 7 times it
means "yes," and in 3 other cases it is the French first
person singular verb.  The spelling "i" (the single letter),
occurs considerably more often: 31,540 times in the texts:
in 30,743 cases, it is the pronoun (in 202 cases in
contracted form), and 999 times it signifies "yes"
(remember, in only 7 cases was it spelled "ay / aye").
[I.byr]  "I" as a single letter is never the desperate "ay
me," nor is it used to mean "ever."
 
[Example: Italics]
 
Italic typeface is used 74,655 times in the corpus, and
_Troilus and Cressida_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_ seem
to have double the average at about 2000 occurrences
each.  This may be partially explained by the lengthy
italic advertisement prefixed to the quarto _Troilus and
Cressida_, and the italic Prologue which begins the folio
version.  WordCruncher is not, however, counting each
italic letter, but only the font codes at the beginning of
each italic section.  The bulk of the italic occurrences
seem to be caused by italic speech prefixes, intensified by
lengthy stichomythia, and the compositors' scrupulous
italicization of proper names in the text (and both Roman
plays seem to delight in allusions to historical figures).
 
 
[Example: Hyphenation]
 
Hyphenation occurs in only 8561 words, but because these
are largely single occurrences, it took my 12 MHz machine
two and a half hours to come to that conclusion
(fortunately I saved my results for the purposes of this
fifteen-minute talk).  The hyphenation, for the record,
seems to be heavier in the folio than the quartos, and
occurs with especial frequency in _The Merry Wives of
Windsor_ (532 times).
 
 
 
[Example: Punctuation ( , . : ; ? ! )]
 
Punctuation study, previously almost unthinkable, is
extremely quick and painless on an electronic text.  In a
conference held here at Toronto last year, a presenter
received an ovation for having diligently counted all the
commas in a Renaissance text.  Within seconds, however,
an electronic facsimile can determine that there are
138,198 commas in the original texts (which would take
over 23,000 WordCruncher screens to view), and can offer
distributions across the works.  Distributions of the
104,928 periods, 26,974 colons, 5820 semi-colons, 15,785
question marks, and 1162 exclamation marks can also be
examined, to determine, for example, that the Folio seems
light in periods, but heavy in semi-colons and colons.
 
 
     WordCruncher is not a collation program, and other
programs I've tried thus far seem too particular to handle the
variant spellings and significant alterations in the Shakespeare
texts.  It is possible, however, to index together versions of a
play with WordCruncher, and to output a comparison word
frequency file.
 
 
[Example: "type hamlet.cmp"]
 
This is rather less interactive than WordCruncher's other
functions, but it does produce some results.  Of course,
these results cannot finally be interpreted without division
along compositor stints, which are coded in the text itself
but which the current software cannot analyze.
 
Comparing the word frequencies of Q2 and F1 of
_Hamlet_, a number of patterns become immediately
evident.  The folio seems to double the number of prose
lines (perhaps because of shorter column width).  Question
marks and semi-colons double, colons quintuple, and
exclamation points all but disappear.  The compositors of
the folio _Hamlet_ overall prefer to drop silent e's,
except in finde, minde, kinde, winde, and eleven other
words which generally have doubled vowels or consonants.
Quarto 2 demonstrates a marked preference for the
spelling "o", while folio markedly prefers "o-h."  The list
could be endless, and is (as you can see.)
 
 
                         _______________
 
 
 
     Not only is the Shakespeare Text Archive textually
incomplete, but the software engine which drives it, currently
WordCruncher, is too limited to perform all the research which
the text could ultimately support.  The _ideal_ workstation, or
software package, for the Shakespeare Text Archive would have
to be capable of performing more complex multitasking
functions, such as on-screen collation of multiple texts or
comparison of alternate pairs (for example, the distributions of
"go" versus "goe" (with an "e") through compositors).  The text
retrieval software, or a module compatible with it, would have
to be able to search the textbase for rhetorical repetitions of
any kind: anaphora (the repetition of a word at the beginning
of syntactic units), epistrophe (end), epanalepsis (beginning and
end of same unit), anadiplosis (end of one unit and beginning
of next), and perhaps even alliteration and rhyme, if adequate
phonemic encoding could be included.  This ultimate
workstation would be able to facilitate the detection of
patterns in the significant differences between variant texts or
compositor stints.  The software would be flexible enough to
reorder ranges based on the chronological order of composition,
performance, typesetting, or publication.  It would allow
operations to be conducted on the entire corpus or on a single
play or plays.
 
     Ultimately, the textual study of Shakespeare will lead to a
combination of optical document and machine-readable text: a
form of hypertext which would also allow computerized
comparison of damaged type, press variants, etc.  If Herner
Schnelling's calculations in his 1987 _Literary and Linguistic
Computing_ article are correct, however, a single Folio page
would require 3,952 million bytes of storage to meet the
CCITT [3] facsimile standard.  To the average Shakespearean,
optical storage is currently something "too difficult, time-
consuming, and expensive" -- but as we all know, technological
limitations are transitory.  For today, a readily accessible
ASCII text archive is a step toward the day when we, along
with Prospero, can declare, "I'll drown my book."
 
 
 
 
 
                           N O T E S
 
 
 
1.   Howard-Hill describes the process in detail in his article,
"The Oxford Old Spelling Concordances," Studies in Bibliography
22 (1969): 143-64.  The later history of the texts is described
in an anonymous note, "Shakespeare and the Computer," ALLC
Bulletin 8:1 (1980): 72.
 
2.   "Common Shakespeare Text" 54.
 
3.   (Comite' Cosultatuf International Te'le'phonique et Te'le'-
graphique).
 
 
 
 
___________________________________________________________________
The contents of this electronic file are copyright (c)1990
Kenneth B. Steele, University of Toronto.  Quotation for scholarly
(non-commercial) purposes is permitted, but please contact the
author ( or )
to verify the material in question and advise him of your intention.
Please do NOT distribute.