January 23, 2017

WSU professor uses big data to research Shakespearean texts

By Emily Mullins

 

  • Fran Connor, assistant professor of English at WSU, has spent the past six years on an editing team for the “New Oxford Shakespeare.”

  • The new edition, released in three parts in 2016, contains new findings about Shakespeare's collaboration with other authors.

  • The edition also includes a digital component, allowing for more research and exploration among readers.

Six years of researching, studying and editing William Shakespeare's vast body of work comes to a close for a team of editors as the Oxford University Press releases the 2016 edition of the “New Oxford Shakespeare.”

Fran Connor, assistant professor of English at Wichita State University, has been a part of the editing team since 2010, focusing on Shakespeare's poetry and the history of his work.

“A textual editor needs to know a lot about how books were made,” says Connor, who wrote his dissertation on the mechanics of printing. “A lot of times we need to reverse engineer the books to figure out if an error occurred because the compositor put the wrong piece of type in the wrong place and mistakenly set it or because a page in the manuscript was possibly misplaced.”

One of the most notable changes to the new edition is the attribution of collaboration with Christopher Marlowe on the “Henry VI” plays. Marlowe was a well-known colleague and rival of Shakespeare's, and many literary scholars disagree that they worked together.

A lot of people have a hard time accepting that he would collaborate with someone or work for hire because we sort of put his work on a pedestal. But really, he was laborer, a working writer. He needed to write for his company to earn income, so he did the job. He was a great artist, but like great artists, he had to pay the bills.
Francis Connor

Editors of this edition used online databases, often called big data, to filter Shakespeare's writing for attributions. Their method looks for rare phrases that are unique to a single author and broader stylistic similarities.

The attribution has raised a considerable amount of international press from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the BBC, among others.

“It's heartening to see that something like Shakespeare can still get headlines,” says Connor. “It speaks to his influence how every generation can find their own reason to keep him going.”

The new edition will have three individual components: the Modern Critical Edition, the Critical Reference Edition and a companion volume that discusses attributions. Another addition to the updated texts is a digital component. Connor describes it as a hybrid edition, allowing an online text to search specific words, allowing for more curiosity in the broader reading.

“The argument we're making is that Shakespeare has been sustained for hundreds of years, not because he was a genius who wrote brilliant things, but because every generation has found a use for him – whether they agree or disagree with him,” says Connor.