Shakespeare His Contemporaries: a corpus of Early Modern Drama 1550-1650
SHC is a corpus of some 500 non-Shakespearean plays from ~1550 to ~ 1660. I am vague about the precise number because some texts may be added. As of June 1, 2015 there are 509 titles.
Each text is derived from an EEBO-TCP transcription. Most of the texts come from the TCP Phase 1 project. Proquest graciously gave permission to add some three dozen plays from TCP Phase 2 to the SHC Project. All texts in this directory are in the public domain.
Each text exists in two forms, 1) a tokenized and linguistically annotated version and 2) a standard spelling version without annotation. The standard spelling version was derived algorithmically from the annotated version.
None of the texts has been fully proofread, but all have undergone collaborative curation by undergraduates, including Nayoon Ahn, Hannah Bredar, Madeline Burg, Nicole Sheriko, Melina Yeh at Northwestern and Kate Needham and Lydia Zoells at Washington University in St Louis. They used and were instrumental in the design and refinment of the collaboration curation tool Annolex/Library Finder (http://annolex.at.northwestern.edu.)
The textual corrections proposed by the students and reviewed by me are found in an appendix to each of the plays.
Each speech in the plays is mapped to a corpus-wide unique ID. Each play includes at its end a machine-generated cast list with an entry for each speaking character and. The list tells you how often each character speaks, and is arranged in order of the number of speeches from high to low.
. I will be grateful for suggestions and corrections. Write to me at martinmueller@northwestern.edu
Martin Mueller Professor emeritus of English and Classics Northwestern University