This week I've been reading statistics about Shakespeare's vocabulary,
including our own Anne Lake Prescott's essay, co-authored with the
Hieatt men, on dating Shakespeare's Sonnets; and Alfred Hart's
articles from the mid-1940s.

1. Most of you probably already knew that Shakespeare added a MINIMUM
of 136 words to his vocabulary with every new play, except the
coauthored ones. Of course, when the play was finished, he never used
about 40% of those new words ever again; his vocabulary, we might say,
didn't grow absolutely, although it did refresh itself, constantly.
Also, he had more license to coin words than we do. Still, Shakespeare
made more use of that license than other dramatists from the same
period.

2. Ok, now that you're done saying "Duh," here's my question. Has
anyone studied Spenser's vocabulary in a similar way: namely, to track
the coming and going of new words from poem to poem or (for the FQ)
book to book? As we all know, there is a LOT of scholarship on
Spenser's archaisms and dialect words; I think I've read most of this,
going back 100 years. There was also, circa 1900, a series of German
dissertations on Spenser's grammar, morphology, and syntax, of which I
have skimmed maybe one or two. And we know about Spenser's coinages:
according to Gans 1979, there are about 98 of them.

I'm not aware, though, of anything comparable with the statistics on
vocabulary that Hart compiled for Shakespeare. For example: how many
different words are there in his whole corpus? How many words does FQ
I-III share with IV-VI, or with Mut.? The closest thing I can think of
is Bennett's Evolution of The FQ (1942), which enumerates Spenser's
compound words, episode by episode. Please tell me I'm missing
something.

Why bother? Mostly I'm just inspired by the dating article. But I
don't really expect to be able to prise apart different episodes of
the FQ, and then group them again into layers of composition, the way
Bennett thought she could do. I am interested in different kinds of
poets. Cf. Virgil and Browning, or Virgil and Auden. Virgil had a
small vocabulary and wrote all of his poems in one meter. Lengthwise,
his epic is puny. That's one type, the minimalist; the word didn't
exist then, but that was his reputation in the Renaissance. On the
maximalist side, Browning has the largest vocabulary of any poet in
English (which, English being English, probably means the largest
vocabulary of any poet ever) and Auden boasted that he had used all of
the meters in Saintsbury's 3-volume history of English prosody; he
also took vocabulary steroids. Shakespeare was a maximalist too. His
plays are long (compared with Marlowe's) and he has a massive
vocabulary: #3 after Browning (#1) and Tennyson (#2).

Which kind of poet was Spenser?The FQ is long, but is it also dense, lexically?

What's "lexically dense"? I specifically don't mean "richly ambiguous"
or "pleasantly polysemous." I'm talking about something more basic (or
just stupid): how many different words does a poet use in a given
number of lines? A few minutes ago, I typed one of Hart's tables into
a spreadsheet and added a "density" calculation: number of distinct
words in a play or poem divided by the number of lines. (How do you
count lines of prose? Hart covered that in an earlier article.) Turns
out that "Venus and Adonis" (1.76) and "Lucrece" (1.52) have the
highest vocab density of anything Shakespeare wrote, including Hamlet
(1.03), Lear (1.04), Macbeth (1.27), and Othello (.95). To put the
numbers for "Venus" and "Lucrece" in perspective, the mean vocab
density for the whole corpus is 1.06. Dude! I'd like to see if there's
a similar difference in Spenser's corpus, between narrative, hymn,
complaint, and lyric.

-- 
Dr. David Wilson-Okamura    http://virgil.org          [log in to unmask]
English Department          Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
East Carolina University    Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet