Case Studies & Testimonials

HyperHamlet©: making a corpus out of the Literature Online corpus

http://www.hyperhamlet.unibas.ch

Professors Annelies Häcki Buhofer and Balz Engler of Basel University (Switzerland), together with a team of researchers headed by Dr. Regula Hohl Trillini, are using Literature Online as a central research tool for an innovative project.

HyperHamlet© is an online text corpus in the shape of a hypertext of Shakespeare’s play, in which every line provides clickable access to text passages in which it is quoted. The site at present records about 2,200 references and the team are aiming to edit five times as many until 2009. The electronic format enables a multi-dimensional approach to intertextuality. Verbal, visual, musical and multi-media responses to Hamlet from every imaginable cultural area are coded and searchable for a number of parameters. The parameters have been chosen to make the emerging corpus potentially useful to linguists and historians as well as scholars in literary and cultural studies. There are no quantitative restrictions, and all texts – written, oral, web-published or other – are welcome on board. The project uses Shakespeare’s most canonical play as the base of a pilot study into corpus-based intertextuality research, but also as a resource of systematically edited material for other researchers. Both searches and suggestions for new entries can be made from the public domain.

The main objectives are to offer an important resource to the scholarly community documenting the presence of a classic in culture, and to provide a model corpus structure for recording the continued presence of any literary text and thus to exemplify the usefulness of corpus work in literary research. We aim also to promote the use of electronic databases among literary scholars, considering the huge benefits which linguists and, of course, the “hard sciences” draw from work with such research and communication tools.

The corpus format

At present (autumn 2006), the following categories of information about the quoting texts are searchable for users: title, author/artist, year of first publication, bibliographical information, text of the reference, comment.

By mid-2007, information on genre, author’s nationality and life dates will also be searchable. In addition, advanced searches will put the following, possibly more unexpected, categories at the disposal of users:

• “Function” codes the place which the quoted passage is given in the quoting text. Is a Hamlet phrase, for example, used as a title (very popular with detective fiction!), as an epigraph or is a character in a book quoting the play?
• “Marking for quotation” indicates the signals in the quoting text which indicate that an extraneous element is being used. Is the Hamlet phrase put in quotation marks, introduced by a tag such as “As we know” or is not marked at all?
• “Marking for derivation” indicates an awareness of the origin of a quoted phrase by a mention of Shakespeare, Hamlet or the character who speaks the line. Particularly interesting are instances where the quotation is considered an anonymous proverb: “As the saying goes”. These illustrate the extent to which Shakespeare has indeed contributed to the English language by enriching a stock of idioms which are no longer even connected with his name.
• “Reference type” categorizes the exactness of quoting: is the Hamlet phrase rendered exactly, modified syntactically (“to have been or not to have been”) or playfully (“2B or not 2B”)?

The corpus contents and Literature Online

The HyperHamlet© corpus of quotations and allusions is both an “opportunist” and a representative corpus. The first – linguistic – term means that any kind of intertextual reference to Hamlet which researchers or outside contributors turn up is welcome. There are no limits on period, genre or language: the site records references from Russian short stories, 17th-century tracts, computer games, Sex and the City, Keats’ letters, Derrida’s essays, Garfield cartoons, French Romantic poetry and Star Trek, to name but a few. However, none of these genres and authors are systematically covered.

For the more circumscribed field of “Literature in English from the beginnings to 1918”, the data will be representative in the sense that the text of Hamlet is to be run, line by line, phrase by phrase, through Literature Online. Whatever references are recoverable by this method will by edited, stored and made accessible on HyperHamlet©.

This planned core corpus would be simply unimaginable without the rich array of primary texts and the search facilities of Literature Online, which represent not only a perfect example of “research innovation”, as another case study puts it, but which enable and almost enforce research innovation in its users. Features that are essential to the HyperHamlet© include enabling the user to:

• access a single huge database, which makes searches quick and inclusive enough to aim at a representative corpus
• search words which are not adjacent but NEAR each other, which enables us to find modified quotations, possibly the most interesting part of the creative response to Hamlet.
• include obscure, out-of-print and rare texts in a scholarly edition and thus avoid a bias towards “famous quotations”
• reach exhaustive information about not-so-famous authors with a few clicks for a speedier editing process
• retrieve a wide range of material that covers the first three centuries of Hamlet reception, which is essential to establishing historical patterns and shifts. Once Literature Online includes all variant and archaic spellings automatically, even more exhaustive findings in the many older texts which Literature Online contains will add still more historical depth and density to the HyperHamlet© corpus

The corpus format of HyperHamlet© posits intertextuality as a field for collaboration between linguists and literary scholars. Texts usually analysed by literary scholars now come under linguistic scrutiny, and non-literary and non-fictional texts enter into considerations of Shakespeare reception.

The use of the corpus: Projects-in-progress in Basel

1. Shakespeare Studies

Shakespeare’s works have had an enormous influence on Western and, increasingly, world culture; the American critic Harold Bloom has gone as far as claiming that ‘Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us’. Yet this ‘Shakespeare effect’ has only been studied systematically in the fields of performance and criticism and in studies of Shakespearean adaptations and offshoots, whereas an investigation into the ‘recycling’ of single phrases and motifs in quotation and allusion, in contexts that are not directly associated with the interpretation of Shakespeare’s works, takes this study into the hitherto neglected field of general culture. Adaptations are a highly circumscribed genre, whereas researching single phrases, sentences or metaphors opens a wide field of (re-)writing readers/authors, genres and contexts. Extracts from Hamlet may be superficial or highly central to the purposes of the texts that use them, and they may use obscure passages as well as ‘To be or not to be’. Thus, reception history is re-sketched not only as a study of influence, imitation or emulation, but as a record of concrete verbal traces which are present in everyday as well as literary discourse.

2. Historical Linguistics / Phraseology

To study Shakespeare’s contribution to the English language is to fill a significant research gap in the linguistic field of historical phraseology. Most histories of the English language have a “Shakespeare” chapter which makes claims about Shakespeare’s ‘enriching’ the English language, but these have not been validated by a systematic study. HyperHamlet© will further document the historical process by which Shakespearean phrases entered the language and started to be used as idioms, proverbs or fixed expressions. People who use phrases like ‘to the manner born’ or ‘devoutly to be wished’ may no longer be aware of where these bits of language come from, but their way of dealing with experience is subtly affected by such phrases.

3. Intertextuality Theory: Putting it into Practice

These unobtrusive processes of familiarization are intimately related to claims by literary theorists such as that there is nothing “hors-texte” (Jacques Derrida) or that “The Author is dead” (Roland Barthes). Both concern the pervasive cultural influence of “texts”, linguistic units and stereotypes that we use even when we are not conscious of their origin. The term ‘intertextuality’ was coined by Julia Kristeva in 1967 as a revolutionary term that should help destabilize traditional notions of Great Works and Great Authors, but many scholars have since used it for quite conventional source studies projects. The HyperHamlet© project picks up part of the radical agenda of intertextuality by concentrating on the still-expanding universe of Hamlet allusions instead of on yet another comment or edition of the Great Text itself. On the other hand, it records carefully located, researched and edited material as punctiliously as any source scholar and aims at furnishing material for – among others – historical studies in linguistics, literature and Cultural Studies. Rather than contribute to the rumoured “End of Theory”, this may be described as applying theory, as making it fruitful by embodying its concepts through philological research.

4. Canon Studies

Erich Rothstein writes:

[A]n actual text, which enters history as a constrained entity, remains in history not only in its rereadings as a whole, but also, and mainly, as it is disassembled and diffused, misremembered, stolen from, and abused. A text exerts most influence by entering the intertextual, by giving up its integrity; its moments of greatest agency involve the splitting of what one might call the textual ‘self’. ¹

Hamlet is also a classic because it because it has been quoted, i.e. because it is a classic, a public property. It lives on, becomes a phenomenon because it is quoted; Shakespeare’s status has come about and been maintained not only by reading, performance and academic study, but also by quotation and re-quotation of his works in other texts. This is, in fact, one possible definition of a “classic”, as Balz Engler’s writes: “The classic is a work of literature that has left the book and is present in the discourse of a community.” ²

Both the “Shakespeare myth” and the “Hamlet phenomenon” are determined by the fact that Shakespeare and his text were not only ‘received’ (as in ‘reception’) but also re-invented and re-constructed. Hamlet became and has remained famous because it is an exceptionally rich and fascinating text – but also because it has been and still is being played, adapted, written about and quoted. The technologies of electronic data storage and publication which power databases such as Literature Online provide unprecedented possibilities of research into this pheno

 

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