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Concordance-Making
Here I should like to pose a series of questions. Some of the answers given below have been worked out during preliminary preparations for a concordance to the poems of Ben Jonson, to be edited by Professor Parrish and myself. None of the answers, however, are necessarily final, and I should appreciate comments and suggestions.
- A concordance will have the greatest value for philologists, editors,
and canonical scholars if it is based on a definitive edition, preferably in old
spelling. The concordance can then refer to the page and line numbers of
a readily available standard work and can include editorial emendations as
well as authorial variants. If there is no definitive edition, it might be
possible to compile a concordance from an early printed text, provided that
an acceptable photoduplicate of that text has been published.[14] In that case, the
concordance-maker can
identify citations by referring to signature and line number of page or
column, in the manner of Professor Hinman's references to lines in the
Shakespeare First Folio. But reference to authorial variants in other early
texts (one thinks of Daniel's and Drayton's frequent revisions) and to
modern emendations will perhaps pose a problem.
If an acceptable photoduplicate or a definitive edition is unavailable, the concordance-maker should probably pass on to another author. To provide the general reader with references to a virtually inaccessible text is of little use, and to base a concordance on an
23inadequate edition is unwise. If there were a Jonson concordance based on the Gifford text, it would of course be helpful, but it would have to be redone now that the Herford and Simpson text is available, even as Bartlett's Shakespeare will probably have to be redone when a critical old-spelling edition appears.
- It seems to serve no useful purpose and is in some cases impossible to retain scribal abbreviations. On the other hand, to normalize i-j and u-v according to modern usage, if the base-edition has not done so, seems to require excessive intervention extending to many lines in every poem or passage of dialogue. The automatic collection of variant spellings under a single head-word will assure that such forms as IELOSIE and IOYND will be conveniently indexed under their modern equivalents.
- As has been indicated, one should include authorial variants. Both a
textual crux and the emendation adopted by the editor of the base-text
should be indexed. Variants and emendations should be labeled as such (in
Professor Parrish's Arnold, a "V" for "variant" precedes the line
number).
The concordance-maker is not the editor of a critical edition, but he should correct obvious misprints in his base-text and include variants unavailable to or perhaps overlooked by the editor. Sometimes he may have to display the courage of an editor's convictions. The Herford and Simpson text, for example, reproduces in square brackets "a letter or word wrongly inserted in the original." There is no point in indexing such a word; in our Jonson concordance, we have substituted the reading which Herford and Simpson indicate as correct.
- By all means. Stage directions are important elements in plays,
masques, pageants, and entertainments. But Ariel's making the banquet
vanish with a quaint device and Jack Cade's striking his staff on London
stone cannot be located in Bartlett's concordance, which omits all stage
directions, as do Crawford's Kyd and Marlowe. Lists of dramatis
personae in the early prints should also be included; that such lists
call Shakespeare's Lucio "a fantastique" and his Apemantus "a Churlish
Philosopher" is surely worthy of alphabetized record. Whether one should
include in the same index with
24the dialogue and the stage directions the copious marginalia which edify the reader of Jonson's masques seems rather more doubtful.
- This is one of the most difficult questions confronting the
concordance-maker. Every concordance leaves out all or most of the
instances of many common words such as prepositions, articles, pronouns,
and auxiliary verbs. In general, computer-prepared concordances will have
to follow suit: common words make up more than half of the individual
words of any text; a decision to index all of them may push some
computers beyond their capacity, will in any case materially increase the
running time of a very busy and very expensive machine, and will swell the
printed version of, say, a Shakespeare or Jonson or Bible concordance to
grotesque proportions. According to John W. Ellison, 131 common words
"account for approximately 59% of the text of the Bible," and the large
Nelson Bible Concordance would have been "two and a half times its
present size" if these words had been indexed (Preface).
Yet who is to say that even the commonest word is without poetic or dramatic significance? LIKE, THAN, AS, and SO can lead us directly to the poet's similes; I and related forms to his use of an autobiographical mask and his personifications ("I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers"); O and THOU to his apostrophes ("O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being"); ME, THEE, and HIM to striking inversions of word order ("Him the Almighty Power/ Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky"). Philological interests also press their claims. Tatlock and Kennedy index all instances of SHALL and WILL "owing to the importance of these words for the history of the future tense" (preface to the Chaucer, p. viii). The Elizabethan philologist may point out, further, that complete omission of the following common words will deprive him of an opportunity for rapid location of the special meanings indicated parenthetically: A (he), AN, AND (if), FROM (at variance with, alien to), ON (of), SHE (woman), WHETHER (which of the two). A canonical scholar may object that failure to list a dramatist's common contractions or his uses of YOU and YE will compel him to duplicate the arduous labors of Cyrus Hoy in compiling tables of linguistic preferences so as to discriminate between different authors in collaborate plays.[15]
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All true enough. But a concordance to a prolific dramatist will nevertheless have to exclude some of these words and list others only in part. Consider the ubiquitous I. In the 17,500 lines of Arnold's poetry there are more than a thousand I's, and their listing takes up almost twelve pages. In the more than 100,000 lines of Shakespeare's plays, there are probably many times that number. Will the reproduction of all these instances yield advantages proportional to the space required? The concordance-maker will have to answer many such painful questions. At least he can assure fellow scholars that omitted index-words can be retrieved from the master-tape at some later time.
I should like to plead, however, for the routine printing in all drama concordances of such common words as ALL, ANY, NEVER, NONE. These terse counters can contribute greatly to dramatic magnitude and intensity. Moreover, in drama as in life, the extent to which a person makes categorical statements is an important clue to the quality of his mind. I have the impression, for example, that Hamlet makes more all-or-nothing assertions ("Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." "We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us.") than does any other Shakespearean character. But I cannot verify my impression in Bartlett, since it entirely omits ALL and gives only a partial listing of NONE.[16] It is doubtless a weakness on my part, but I have thus far been unwilling to make up the deficiencies in the available concordances by tracking all instances of these words through thirty-six plays.
- Bartlett's Shakespeare separates drama and poetry; Crawford's Marlowe combines them. Combination seems appropriate for a moderately productive writer. Separation seems desirable when a writer is prolific in one of the genres and almost inevitable when he is prolific in both (cf. Dryden). Separation facilitates study of the verbal artistry appropriate to each genre and enables the compiler to make separate decisions about comprehensiveness (e.g., to omit I from the drama but include it in the poetry concordance).
- Crawford's Kyd and Marlowe concordances are both "designed
26to be helpful to students who wish to study" questions of authorship (Marlowe, p. vii). In the Kyd proper, Crawford includes Arden of Feversham, which he believes is Kyd's; in an appendix he indexes the first two quartos and the folio version of Hamlet in order to lighten "the labour of those who are interested in investigating the claim of Kyd to the Ur-Hamlet." In the Marlowe proper, he includes the three parts of Henry VI, Edward III, Selimus, and Locrine, which last, he believes, is certainly not Marlowe's but has borrowed heavily from his work.
These procedures are indefensible. It is not the concordancemaker's office to argue for or against a disputed attribution. "That task," as Sister Eugenia Logan rightly observes in her Coleridge concordance (p. ix), "belongs in another field of scholarship." Where an attribution has in its favor evidence approaching certainty, the concordance-maker should include the attributed work. Where the evidence is weak, he should exclude the work. Where the evidence is highly probable but not certain, he should index the work and indicate its status, perhaps by an appropriate symbol. Apparently distinguishable portions of collaborate plays should be analyzed not in separate concordances, but in a single concordance bearing the names of the collaborators.[17] Anonymous plays and plays whose authorship is in serious dispute should be left for the last, and should be grouped in concordances of convenient size according to chronology of composition, as nearly as that can be determined.
1. What kind of base-text should one use?
2. To what extent should one normalize the text?
3. What about textual variants and emendations?
4. Should stage directions be indexed?
5. How comprehensive should the index be?
6. Should a writer's dramas and poems be indexed separately?
7. To what extent should disputes about authorship determine the design of the concordance?
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