(Image: Angus Greig)
IT PROMISED to be a . “My dream is to understand how Shakespeare moves the brain,” literature professor and psychologist told when they first met. Could Thierry, a neuroscientist, help?
Thierry was initially nervous about braving the sound and fury of Shakespeare scholarship. “It’s a minefield,” he says. But the pair persevered, and joined a small cadre of researchers using quantitative techniques to examine the playwright’s talents – be it his vocabulary, subtle wordplay or astute understanding of audience psychology.
Properly controlled statistical analyses have already busted long-standing myths about the Bard. For centuries, scholars had argued that he was fishing from a particularly large word pool compared with his peers. But when at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, took into account factors such as the number of plays each writer had produced, he found that Shakespeare’s vocabulary is no larger than that of his contemporaries Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson (). His overall mix of terms is also no more complex than that of his contemporaries, and his rate of coining new words is unremarkable (see diagram).
Cudgel thy brains
So what is the essence of Shakespeare’s peculiar genius? “If I was being a romantic, I would say that one reason for his greatness is that he perfectly captured the way people expect others to speak,” says Craig. Or, as the man himself wrote: ““.
It was an idea that…
