Shakespeare and early modern proverbial culture

This project will establish a multidisciplinary network of international scholars to reassess the forms, functions, and dissemination of early modern English proverbs. Proverbs saturated the everyday speech of early modern England and are recorded in many forms of writing – including letters, sermons, plays, and literary texts. The most influential creative writer of the period, William Shakespeare, used an estimated 4,600 proverbs in his works (Dent 1981), employing several as titles (e.g. All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure). While many of these sayings are now obscure or obsolete, others have survived into the digital age, reminding us that proverbs are both historically contingent and a transhistorical cultural-linguistic phenomenon. Proverbs thus offer fertile ways of thinking about questions of shared history and cross-cultural understanding, as well as issues central to early modern studies – including the relationship between classical and popular culture; rhetoric and pedagogy; authorship, style, and creativity; and adaptation, appropriation, and afterlives. But, despite the importance of proverbs to the language and literature of the period, the topic has attracted surprisingly little critical attention. As a timely corrective, this project pursues the following main objectives: To create new frameworks for studying proverbs in early modern texts that incorporate different disciplinary approaches, and to instigate a fresh investigation into the formal and functional characteristics of early modern proverbs To investigate the distribution and function of early modern proverbs across different media and social boundaries, and consider how proverbs construct cultural norms and social relationships To enhance public understanding of proverbs by demonstrating both their transhistorical reach and their ability to capture culturally specific world-views To evaluate relevant tools and techniques for identifying and classifying early modern proverbs, including digital methods and artificial intelligence To foster dialogue and knowledge exchange between academic and non-academic partners To produce world-leading publications exploring the use of proverbs by Shakespeare and his contemporaries To bring together an international network of leading experts from different disciplines to explore these questions collaboratively We will coordinate three interdisciplinary workshops, an international conference, and linked public engagement events (objectives 1-3, 7). The workshops will focus on three key areas – methods (objective 1), materials (objective 2), and communities (objective 3) – and will inform the project team’s development of research tasks and case studies. The research will be disseminated via an essay collection, blogs, and online resources that will inform scholarly practice (objective 6) and engage non-academic audiences (objective 3). It will also feed into work with our project partners to generate innovative teaching methodologies and performance practices (objective 5). Alongside these events, the team will also produce a proof-of-concept analysis that will assess the viability of various computational methods to systematically identify proverbs in a curated electronic corpus of early modern texts (objective 4). The project thus has the potential to reshape how scholars, editors, and students engage with proverbs in early modern literature and culture; it will also transform public understanding of the use of proverbs, both historically and in the present.