EL DESARROLLO SOSTENIBLE. UN MUNDO CON DESARROLLO Y SIN DEMOCRACIA

Shakespeare was a successful playwright, so it is sensible for a parallel corpus to comprise works that were also generally popular or successful (either at the time or through subsequent revival). This is because variation in the style o f language in Shakespeare's plays and that in much less successful or less popular works might simply be attributable to a difference in the quality o f the dramatists' writing. For more detailed discussions o f the relative popularity of Shakespeare's contemporaries, see for example Leggatt (1988:167-186).

As far as possible, the NDC includes plays which were, like Shakespeare's, performed at public theatres and also at court, but not in other private settings.

According to Crystal and Crystal (2005:7, 63, 181), Shakespeare's plays were

performed at the Globe (a public theatre), and also privately at court for the monarch and other elite members o f society, especially after Shakespeare's acting company had obtained the patronage o f King James I. Dutton (2011) argues that plays which were performed at court benefited from an added air o f glamour that would have increased their appeal to paying customers at public theatres. There is no information about whether the edition of Shakespeare's plays used for the SDC or the editions o f plays on

EEBO are versions written for court or public performance (other than what can be gleaned from the prologues or other preamble, where this exists). However, according to Dutton (2011), public performances were subject to limited time constraints,

whereas private performances could go on for many hours. This makes it more likely that the Shakespearean play-texts in the SDC are the court versions, because o f their relatively long length compared to other plays (evident in the comparison o f word counts for the corpora in 4.4 below). That would also apply to other relatively long plays in the NDC (such as Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, see the word counts in Table 6 in 4.3.3 below). As I argued in 4.2.3 that dialogue in early editions was added, deleted or revised to suit different audiences (Greenblatt 1997:67; Petersen 2010:13), this raises the question o f how far it might influence language styles in the play-texts.

Dutton (2011) points out that making detailed revisions for different audiences would have added to the cost of putting the plays on, and Crystal and Crystal

(2005:39) argue that sections of plays were simply left out by the acting companies that performed them, according to the requirements of the theatres in which they were appearing. These arguments suggest that although sections o f dialogue were cut or added, particular authorial style features are much less likely to have been altered for private and public theatregoers. There is also evidence to suggest that the orientation toward different audiences is located more in the prologues than in the main body of the play. For example, the earliest extant edition of Marlowe's The Jew o f Malta includes two prologues: "The Prologue Spoken at Court" and "The Prologue to the Stage at the Cock-Pit" (a public theatre). The former is much more humble and deferential, though the text o f the play itself is the same. Because o f this, and other constraints on the selection of play-texts, I did not pursue the distinction between court or public versions further. It seems unlikely to have any bearing on the

high-frequency, non-localised language features in my results. For more discussion on the private and public performance of plays, see H. Berry (2002); Butler (2003); Cook (1997:308, 319-320); Foakes (2003).

As indicated above, private drama which was performed at venues other than court, e.g. in private homes for small, invited audiences, is excluded from the NDC.

Unlike plays performed at court and in public theatres, private drama was not subject to the regulation and approval of the Master o f the Revels, an official who had the authority to insist on alterations to the language or the plot o f a play, if he considered them unsuitable for the public good or offensive to the monarch and court members (see further Crystal and Crystal 2005:62; Dutton 1991, 2000). Since the authors o f private drama in non-court settings could avoid this censorship, the language styles in their works are potentially more liberal than those in public or court drama (which might influence my results).

The decision to exclude private drama outside o f that performed at court automatically excludes plays written by and/or acted by women, who only wrote or performed in private drama in the late 16th and early 17th centuries (see McRae 2003:7; Westfall 2002:274; see also Findlay 1999:7-8, 114). Public drama was written by men and acted by men and boys (Findlay 1999:1; see also H. Berry 2002:148 and Orgel 1996:1-9). Including only male-authored plays in the NDC maintains

consistency with Shakespeare's plays, and avoids the introduction o f another variable which potentially influences language styles in drama: authorial gender. At a time when women had very unequal status in law and in public life (as argued by, e.g., Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003:113-115), the construction o f language styles o f men and women in plays by male and female dramatists is interesting, although outside the scope o f my study. Male authorship o f the three anonymous plays

in the NDC cannot be verified, but is reasonable to assume from their performance in public theatres and/or from discussions of putative authorship (e.g. Kinney 2009;

Tucker Brooke 1908).

Dutton (2000:109) considers whether the relatively long length o f plays written by Shakespeare and Jonson, noted above, indicates that they were written with readers in mind, instead o f a theatre audience. This potential difference in orientation has led to a distinction between "literary" and "non-literary" dramatists in some circles, so I investigated whether it would be likely to influence language styles to an extent that might affect my results. According to McRae (2003:7), most playwrights in the Early Modern period did not seek publication, but rather retained the advantages o f control over their own plays, and Greenblatt (1997:67-68) claims that Ben Jonson was unusual for publishing a folio o f his own works. However, Erne (2003) argues that

Shakespeare's theatre company did seek to have plays published a year or two after they were first performed, and that excerpts from Shakespeare's plays were published in other contemporaneous books. Findlay (personal communication, 18.12.09) suggests that the goals o f Jonson and his contemporaries were similar, i.e. to attract paying theatre audiences to their plays, but that Jonson was simply a little ahead o f his contemporaries in his ambitions for publication and in the manner he distributed his work. I could find no evidence that an orientation to publication or performance would affect language styles in the plays, so Jonson's work is represented in the NDC. He is one o f the most well-known and popular o f Shakespeare's contemporaries, and his works are useful for comparison (as indicated in 4.3.2 above).

Finally, as with Shakespeare's plays, those in the NDC feature dialogue

comprised o f verse as well as prose (see Crystal and Crystal 2005:165 for a breakdown o f the verse and prose lines in each o f Shakespeare's plays; see also Crystal

2008:210-219). This inevitably has some influence on the language styles o f Shakespeare and other dramatists, but does not bias either corpus. Also, characters who cross-dress (between genders) feature in both corpora (e.g. in Shakespeare's comedies As You Like It and The Merchant o f Venice, and Heywood's comedy The Fair M aid o f the West Part I). Again, although this influences characters' language styles (see further e.g.

Findlay 1999; Rackin 2003:114), neither corpus is biased. Dialogue spoken by and to cross-dressed characters represents only a small proportion of the contents of the corpora, and is unlikely to affect the high-frequency results underlying my analyses.

In this section, I have shown what a complex task it is to construct a corpus that is similar in size and comparable in content to Shakespeare's First Folio, and I have clarified the principles I followed and the limitations faced. I now list the plays which comprise the NDC.

4.3.3 List of plays in the Non-Shakespearean Early Modern English Drama