Quantifying Shakespeare: a corpus linguistics approach to differences between the Quartos and Folios

This study leverages Corpus Linguistics to quantify the differences between Shakespeare's Quarto and Folio versions. Previous analyses have focused primarily on qualitative differences, and those quantitative analyses that do exist have centered largely on word choice, vocabulary frequency, deleted or added passages and other semantic topics. However, this research employs a quantitative approach to explore orthographic and phonological variations in the greater context of Early Modern English by explicitly categorizing, measuring and mapping the differences via statistical techniques, such as the Levenshtein and Edit Distance algorithms. To achieve this, this project utilizes several Corpus Linguistics methodologies and tools—both freely available and bespoke. By constructing a statistical map of these variations, a comprehensive analysis will, hopefully, shed new light on the diachronic orthographic/phonological changes and editorial decisions between the texts. Although corpus-based approaches have been applied to EModE and Shakespeare's works, this project uniquely employs Corpus Linguistics to systematically compare the Quartos and Folios quantitatively for this purpose, thereby perhaps offering new insight on diachronic changes in Shakespearean and EModE studies.