The Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language Volume 5 brings scholarship on Shakespeare's language fully into the 21st-century. It is one of five volumes offering the first comprehensive account of Shakespeare's language to use computational methods derived from corpus linguistics – methods of choice for today's lexicographer. Volume 5 focuses on patterns of words in play genres (tragedy, history, comedy); socially defined character groups (e.g. male/female; noble/professional/servant; English/Welsh/Irish); and themes that are statistically characteristic of Shakespeare as a whole.

The encyclopedia uses a semantic tagger to allocate words and expressions to semantic categories such as 'warfare', 'love' and 'life'. Analysis of the resulting empirical data shows the semantic categories that characterize play genres, social groups and themes. For example, love comedies that are characterised by the most obviously love-related semantic category, 'intimate relationship'. Love tragedies, by contrast, are characterised by categories far removed from love: 'warfare', 'death', and so on. Closer inspection of the results reveals many points of interest. For example, the appearance of the semantic category 'plants' as highly characteristic of comedies may seem puzzling. In fact, it encodes a metaphorical connection with love, as it reflects underlying metaphorical patterns such a 'sex is agriculture' (cf. crop, reap) or 'food is love' (cf. feed, honey).

Dawn Archer is Professor of Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Alison Findlay Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama and Director of the Shakespeare Programme in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, UK.

Sean Murphy is a linguist interested in historical English drama. He was a Senior Research Associate on the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language.