Shakespeare’s Pauses, Authorship, and Early Chronology

This paper explores the implications of Ants Oras’s Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: An Experiment in Prosody (Oras 1960) for the chronology and authorship of plays in early modern England. Oras’s brief monograph has been noticed by a relatively few scholars, mainly those interested in changes to Shakespeare’s pentameter line. Recent developments in the field, however, have rendered his data newly attractive. Compiled by hand, Oras’s figures on the punctuated pauses in pentameter verse offer computational approaches a wealth of information by which writers’ stylistic profiles and changes can be measured. Oras’s data for a large number of playwrights and poets, as well as his methodology generally, may prove instrumental in constructing a portrait of the aesthetic environment for writers of pentameter verse during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. In particular, pause percentages may lend context to our attributions of texts of uncertain authorship. A hypothetical chronology is offered for Shakespeare’s earliest writing, including his contributions to Arden of Faversham, 1 Henry VI, and Edward III

Change and Exchange: Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

The introductory essay outlines the way in which Change and Exchange places literature, and, in a wider sense, imaginative practice, at the centre of early modern economic knowledge. Probing the affinity between economic and metaphorical experience in terms of the transactional processes of change and exchange, it sets up the parameters within which the essays in the volume collectively forge a language to grasp early modern economic phenomena and their epistemic dimensions. It prepares the reader for the stimulating combination of materials that the book presents: the range of generic contexts engendered by emergent economic practices, structures of feeling and modes of knowing made available by new economic relations, and economies of transformation in discursive domains that are distinct from ‘economics’ as we understand it but cognate in their intuition of change and exchange as shaping agents