W.s.k-poetry.docx

Exploring Shakespeare's Sonnets William Shakespeare is world famous. We know quite a lot about him but there is still much that remains a mystery. We don’t know his date of birth. We don’t know the date of his marriage. We even have very little idea of what he looked like. So what DO we know about William Shakespeare, the man? When and where was Shakespeare born? William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratfordupon-Avon, a market town in a farming area of the Midlands. About 1000 people lived there. Shakespeare was baptised on 26th April 1564, but we don’t know his exact date of birth. What was Shakespeare’s family like? William was born to prosperous parents. His mother, Mary, was the daughter of a local farmer. His father, John, was a glove-maker and wool trader with a large family house. When William was four years old, his father was elected Bailiff of Stratford – effectively the mayor. But his early life wasn’t easy. Although William was the third of eight children, he grew up as the oldest. His two older sisters both died very young. And William was lucky to survive. When he was just a baby, in 1564, plague killed about 200 people in Stratford – 1 in 5 of the population. Fortunately, William survived.

Shakespeare's Sonnets have been studied by literary critics for centuries after their publication. However, only recently studies made on the basis of computational analyses and quantitative evaluations have started to appear and they are not many. In our exploration of the Sonnets we have used the output of SPARSAR which allows a full-fledged linguistic analysis which is structured at three macro levels, a Phonetic Relational Level where phonetic and phonological features are highlighted; a Poetic Relational Level that accounts for a poetic devices, i.e. rhyming and metrical structure; and a Syntactic-Semantic Relational Level that shows semantic and pragmatic relations in the poem. In a previous paper we discussed how colours may be used appropriately to account for the overall underlying mood and attitude expressed in the poem, whether directed to sadness or to happiness. This has been done following traditional approaches which assume that the underlying feeling of a poem is strictly related to the sounds conveyed by the words besides/beyond their meaning. In that study we used part of Shakespeare's Sonnets. We have now extended the analysis to the whole collection of 154 sonnets, gathering further evidence of the colour-sound-mood relation. We have also extended the semantic-pragmatic analysis to verify hypotheses put forward by other quantitative computationally-based analysis and compare that with our own. In this case, the aim is trying to discover what features of a poem characterize most popular sonnets.