The Comedy of Errors

• Similarly, associating the word “bad” with success and talking of a “bad success” would be decidedly odd today.
• Corpus linguistics is a branch of linguistics which uses computers to explore the use of words in huge collections of language.
• It can spot nuances that might be overlooked by linguists working manually, or large patterns that a lifetime of studying may not reveal.
• And numbers, counts of words and keeping track of where the words are occurring, are key.

Changing meanings

• People have created Shakespeare dictionaries before, but this is the first to use the full armoury of corpus techniques and the first to be comparative.
• But this is no general term of abuse, let alone banter, as you might see it used today.
• In this way we can see that the meaning of “success” was “outcome” and that outcome, given its collocates, could be good or bad.

Highly frequent words

• Highly frequent words, so often excluded by historical dictionaries and reference works, are often short words that seem insignificant.
• It turns out that a frequent sense of the humble preposition “by” is religious: to reinforce the sincerity of a statement by invoking the divine (for example, “by God”).
• Frequent words such as “alas” or “ah” are revealed to be heavily used by Shakespeare’s female characters, showing that they do the emotional work of lamentation in the plays, especially his histories.

Infrequent words

• What of the infrequent?
• Words that occur only once in Shakespeare – so-called hapax legomena – are nuggets of interest.
• The single case of “bone-ache” in Troilus and Cressida evokes the horrifying torture that syphilis, which it applies to, would have been.
• Another group of interesting infrequent words concerns words that seem to have their earliest occurrence in Shakespeare.