The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading ofShakespeare

Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore(Strathclyde University and Carnegie Mellon University)

jonathan.r.hope@strath.ac.uk mwitmore@andrew.cmu.edu

Hope, Jonathan, and Michael Witmore. “The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare”. Early ModernLiterary Studies 9.3 / Special Issue 12 (January, 2004): 6.1-36<URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/09-3/hopewhit.htm>.

Wond’rous machine, to thee the warbling lute,Tho’ used to conquest, must be forced to yield,With thee unable to dispute

(Nicholas Brady, set by Henry Purcell, Ode For St Cecilia’s Day 1692)

Ways of Reading

1. Those of us who have been trained in the western literary tradition are used to reading literary texts inparticular ways (linearly, at least initially), and for particular things (somewhat vaguely, butrecognisably termed ‘themes’ or ‘repeated ideas’ or perhaps ‘abouts’ - as in ‘Othello is aboutjealousy’). Our training teaches us to search for words or verbal patterns which are relatively rareinstead of virtually omnipresent--such rarity or distinction being a likely indicator of what the text isreally ‘about.’ Thus we can recognise repeated references to ‘hands’ in Macbeth (though in fact thewords ‘hand’ and ‘hands’ appear only 35 times in a 2,108 line play) and then link these repetitions towhat the play is ‘about’: guilt and action.

2. Judging by the amount of literary criticism published, it seems clear that this is an effective, or at leastvery productive, technique of reading. It is said, for example, that there are more doctoral dissertationsabout Hamlet than there are names in the Warsaw telephone book. Thus the pre-occupation withmethodology in what Dilthey called the Geisteswissenschaften : the relative infrequency of the salientitems we select in order to understand or interpret a text means that other readings (built on othergroupings of salient items) will always be possible, and that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to saythat one reading is preferable to another given the quantity of empirical evidence. For some critics, thisfreedom from quantitative falsification in literary studies has its own value, ensuring an ongoingflexibility in interpretation and the continuing relevance of particularly ‘suggestive’ texts that arecapable of supporting many different readings.

3. We may read texts in this way because we are cognitively biased towards the unique in our experience. Absent a cognitive theory of reading, it is reasonable to assume that we begin filtering potentiallysignificant elements of a text as we begin to have ideas about what they mean. Such filtering, whetherhardwired or prescribed by convention, allows us to pass over certain items so that we can concentrate

on what seems salient. There is the old saying that, when looking at a wood, we instantly notice thethree oaks, randomly dispersed, but we tend not to pay much attention to the thousand birches allaround them.

4. In addition to this movement towards saliency, human reading is characterized by a certain linearity:we start at the beginning, go on to then end, and then stop. Once we’ve identified salient passages, ifwe’re doing a literary reading, we might well read non-linearly, jumping about in Barthesian circleswithin the text, or even interlacing our readings of more than one text - but our experience of a text, inas much as it unfolds syntagmatically, proceeds one word at a time. Building on this topologicalmetaphor, an ‘overview’ of the text becomes possible as a retroactive representation of our readingexperience to ourselves. We might look at the spine of a book on our shelves if we want to experiencethe whole text ‘at once’. But this is not the same thing as reading, which always involves seeing theindividual trees, and then reconstructing a wood from our experience of them - we can’t take a stepback from our linear reading and survey the wood, except imaginatively.

5. The use of computers to analyse texts allows us to experience the information texts contain in differentways. Computers ‘read’ texts initially in a way as linear as human reading, it is true, but theinformation they gather is organised differently, and can be displayed differently in ways thatcomplement human reading.

6. Computer visualisation, for example, can allow access to ‘whole’ texts, just as they can allow us tovisualize solutions to mathematical problems. Figure 1 is a computer visualisation of the best knownsolution to the question: what shape can enclose two equal volumes with the least surface area? As youcan see, the solution to this problem is a ‘double-bubble’, where two partial spheres are stuck together. This solution could be represented mathematically with a formula, but the solution has an intuitiveappeal when it is rendered in a simulated three-dimensional image.

Figure 1 Double bubble

7. Figure 2 is another three-dimensional image of something that might not necessarily be understoodtopographically; here, the information being represented is a set of frequency counts for select‘content-words’ among three texts. The blob on the left of the picture ‘is’ Shakespeare’s Richard II andRichard III; the blob on the right ‘is’ an essay on the visual representation of Shakespeare’s texts. Notehow the (admittedly crude) translation of text into shape allows us to perceive a similarity betweenRichard II and Richard III, and their collective dissimilarity to a contemporary essay on the visualrepresentation of Shakespeare’s texts. The spatial arrangement of the blobs allows us to see this factabout the whole texts much faster than if we were presented with a page of quotations. Suchtechnologies have been developed because they enable other ‘readers’ -- say individuals searching theinternet for certain texts -- to identify salient items quickly without having to read through everythingavailable in a particular domain. [1]

Figure 2 Pink blobs

8. If computers allow us to experience something like a simultaneous (as opposed to linear), ‘total’reading of a text via topographical visualisation, they also allow us to pay closer attention to thethousand birches surrounding the three oaks. Strangers to saliency, computers treat all pieces ofinformation equally: they are just as aware of the 609 usages of the word ‘the’ in Macbeth as the 35uses of ‘hand’. To humans trained in the western literary tradition of reading for ‘understanding,’ thismay seem a pretty useless ability - even perhaps a blindness - and early concordances andconcordancing programs frequently omit words such as ‘the’ as being ‘too frequent’ to be of interest.[2] In fact, however, differing frequencies of such words may carry important information aboutauthorship, or other textual features - and differing frequencies can easily be represented visually byplotting them in imaginary three-dimensional or two-dimensional spaces.

9. This paper reports on a pilot project investigating the computer ‘reading’ of Shakespeare’s texts using

Docuscope, a text analysis program being developed at Carnegie Mellon University.[3] The papergives an indication of some of the ways in which computer reading can surprise us, and perhaps promptus to ask different questions about Shakespeare’s texts.

What the Machine Does

10. The easiest way to introduce Docuscope is to begin with one of its output screens. Figure 3 shows a setof results from the first folio Comedies. The texts analysed are listed on the right hand side of thescreen. On the left hand side of the screen is a list of rhetorical features (FirstPerson, InnerThinking,ThinkPositive and so on). These features have been identified by the developers of Docuscope ascrucial in setting the genre or discourse type of texts. When Docuscope ‘reads’ a text, it uses a set ofdictionaries to identify linguistic items (words and strings of words) which have been assigned to oneof these rhetorical features. Docuscope counts the frequency of all such items in the texts it analyses,and gives a visual display of this information. It should be recognized here that the categoriesDocuscope uses are themselves the result of “interpretation” or “understanding”: a computer could notitself sort out the salient terms to search for in order to classify texts along significant rhetorical axes.

Fig 3 Docuscope: folio, first person

11. In the example screen, the feature ‘FirstPerson’ has been highlighted (we will see exactly whichlinguistic items are counted under this heading in a moment). The plays in the right hand column arearranged in descending order of relative frequency of this feature - so we can see that Comedy ofErrors has the highest relative frequency of first person, while Love’s Labour’s Lost has the lowest. The values of these relative frequencies are expressed numerically alongside the title of each play (4.63

for Comedy of Errors, 2.84 for Love’s Labour’s Lost) and graphically in a horizontal bar under eachplay title.

12. Moving to the left had side of the screen, we can see that there is a box plot next to the highlightedterm ‘FirstPerson’. This box plot gives a visual representation for all of the results in this analysis andan indication of the distribution of results in the sample. The two extreme ends of the box plot markthe upper and lower results (Comedy of Errors at 4.63 on the right, Love’s Labour’s Lost at 2.84 to theleft). The two extra dots at the left hand of the plot indicates a threshold at which parts of the samplehave ceased to be relevant for certain kinds of statistical generalization.

13. The central rectangle in the box plot covers the second and third quartiles of the results - effectively themiddle 50% of results. And the line in this rectangle represents the median of the sample (the mid-point of all the results). Thus, the longer the rectangle, the wider the range of results. Below thehighlighted feature of FirstPerson are the other box plots showing the results for each of the otherfeatures listed on the left of the screen.

14. Figure 4 shows a slightly different output screen from Docuscope. Here we are looking at the resultsfor just one play, Comedy of Errors, but the rhetorical features are still displayed on the left hand side. Note that each feature has an overall name (InnerThought, Relations, Description) and within this isbroken down into six subfeatures (for InnerThought, these include FirstPerson, InnerThinking,ThinkPositive, and so on). On the right hand side of the screen we can see one of the most usefulfeatures of Docuscope: it allows the user to see instantly what the program is counting in the analysedtext. In the text window, we can see a section of Comedy of Errors, with the items Docuscope hascounted underlined in a colour corresponding to the rhetorical feature they have been assigned to by thedevelopment team. The text is beginning to take on the characteristics of a surface; our eyes areattracted to its spatial features rather than its semantic content.

Fig 4 Docuscope: Comedy of Errors1

15. The grids at the top of the screen give an even more explicitly topographical representation of theoccurrences of each item counting towards each feature (note where the small squares are highlighted). Here the text begins to resemble a piano roll, patterned with different occurrences or “holes” that canbe compared for density, distribution and frequency.

16. Figure 5 is the same screen as Figure 4, but with all linguistic features except FirstPerson turned off. This allows us to see what Docuscope is counting in order to arrive at its frequency totals for thisfeature: first person pronouns.

Fig 5 Docuscope: Comedy of Errors2

17. Docuscope is thus a set of dictionaries which are designed to identify linguistic items (not just words,but strings of words) associated with a set of predetermined rhetorical categories (‘InnerThought’,‘Relations’, ‘Description’ and so on). The categories themselves reflect the phenomenological approachof its developers, who view texts as devices for creating distinctive reader-experiences -- that is, fororienting readers with respect to objects, actions and scene in particular, patterned ways. The programalso contains statistical analysis tools which allow the comparison of the relative frequencies of theseitems between different texts. Its third element is the visual interface which allows the user access tothis comparative data.

18. Docuscope was created for use on contemporary texts, and its rhetorical categories were not developedwith Early Modern texts in mind. The program is still in development, but it is being used at CarnegieMellon University in undergraduate composition classes to allow all of the students in a class tocompare their work without having to read 20-30 different assignments. Instead of reading others’work, students upload their pieces to Docuscope and ‘read’ the graphical information. This allowsthem to see immediately different stylistic decisions taken by students when approaching similarwriting tasks - using higher frequencies of first person forms, for example.

19. In this pilot study, we have taken an unmodified version of Docuscope and used it to ‘read’

Shakespeare’s First Folio. Our aim was to investigate the extent to which Docuscope’s categoriesremain valid for Early Modern texts, and to see if the program ‘saw’ anything of interest in the text. Inadvance of the test, we wondered if the program would have any sensitivity to date of composition orauthorship, but this was principally a ‘suck it and see’ experiment. This is what we saw.

Docuscope ‘Reads’ the First Folio

20. For the test run of Docuscope on the first folio plays, we took open source modernised texts of the firstfolio plays and fed each play into Docuscope as a separate text file. Docuscope analysed each play,producing frequency counts for all of its linguistic features. We then put these frequency countsthrough a standard discriminant analysis statistical package. In discriminant analysis, the programmakes a series of statistical comparisons between the results for a sample, attempting to sort the itemsin a sample into similar and dissimilar groups. The program also looks for those features which aremost important in producing difference and similarity. In other words, the program tries to sort the firstfolio plays into similar and dissimilar groups, while also identifying the rhetorical features which playthe most significant role in distinguishing these groups.

21. The program we used automatically attempts to resolve samples it is given into two groups. Theresults of this sorting are given in Figure 6.

Fig 6 Group 1 and Group 2

22. It will be seen from Group 1 and Group 2 in Figure 6 that Docuscope and the discriminant analysisprogram have divided the plays almost exactly according to the folio genres of History (Group 1) andComedy (Group 2).[4] There are some anomalies in this grouping, which we will come to, but wewant to underline here the interest of this result: a program which knows nothing about the foliodivisions or the largely content-based definitions of genres, has been able to reproduce them solely bycounting the relative frequencies of linguistic items. This, it seems to us, is an unexpected result whichdeserves further study.

23. First, a word about the anomalies. Readers will see that Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’sDream, and The Tempest are placed in Group 1 by the program, alongside Histories; Henry VIII, on theother hand, is placed in Group 2, with Comedies. We will investigate these results more fully in futurework, but for now, note that the three aberrant comedies are grouped together by the program (highly

similar texts are placed next to each other) and that there is a gap between them and the next group ofhistories (gaps within the group suggest a degree of difference). As for Henry VIII, its evidentdifference on this result from the other histories is perhaps not surprising given its frequently remarkedgeneric differences, its lateness of composition, and its collaborative nature.

24. These anomalies noted, what features of the Comedies and Histories allow Docuscope to distinguishthem? The final three Figures give an indication of the linguistic differences between the Comediesand the Histories and also go some way to underlining the ‘inbetween’ status of the Tragedies. In eachof these figures (7, 8, and 9), Docuscope is combining the individual texts in each of the folio genresand treating them as a member of a group -- Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. The overall results foreach group are then compared using box plots. Thus, in Figure 7, we have results on the left hand sideof the screen for three rhetorical features: Interacting, Notifying, and Linear Guidance. There are fourbox plots against each rhetorical feature: in each case, the first box plot records the results for all of theComedies, the second for the Histories, the third for the Tragedies, while the fourth gives a compositeresult for all of the folio plays together.

Fig 7 Docuscope: folio genres, Interacting

25. Using the inner rectangle, it becomes easy to compare results for each feature, since if the rectangles ofadjacent plots do not overlap, we can say that the differences between the results are statisticallysignificant. Thus, for the first feature, Interacting, we can see that the rectangles for Comedies andHistories are a long way apart - suggesting statistically significant differences for these texts on thisrhetorical feature. The rectangle for Tragedies, however, lies in between the rectangles for Comediesand Histories, almost overlapping with both. Interacting, therefore, is a feature which can be used todifferentiate between Comedies and Histories, but is not useful for differentiating Tragedies fromeither.

26. Moving down to Notifying, we can see that this is a much less frequent feature, and that the samples donot differ significantly from each other (the rectangles are very close together). Similarly,LinearGuidance does not clearly distinguish the genres: they all use it at roughly the same frequency.

27. To return to the result for Interacting for a moment, it is possible to offer a content based explanationfor this difference between Comedies and Histories. It seems intuitively likely that Comedies, withtheir fast-paced dialogue, will feature more interaction than Histories, where we might expect longerset-piece speeches. Thus the results of the computer ‘reading’ can be said to conform to a humanexpectation of the type of discourse found in the plays.

28. Moving on to Figure 8, we return to the feature FirstPerson. Here, we can see by comparing therectangle plots that the Comedies have significantly more first person forms than either Histories orTragedies. Perhaps the difference between Comedies and Histories on this feature is not surprising andcould have been predicted, but it seems to us that the difference between the Comedies and Tragedies iscounter-intuitive: Comedy is supposed to be the genre of society; Tragedy of the individual. Soliloquymight have been expected to boost the frequency of first person in the Tragedies. If we see EarlyModern plays as one of the places where the modern ‘self’ is constructed, perhaps we have beenlooking in the wrong place with our concentration on Hamlet: should we turn instead to Comedy ofErrors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona?

Fig 8 Docuscope: folio genres, FirstPerson

29. Figure 9 provides us with a feature which distinguishes Histories from Comedies. This feature istermed WordPicture, and counts items such as concrete and visual nouns and verbs. Note again thecharacteristic result of a significant difference between Histories and Comedies, with the Tragedieslying in between. Going back to human reading techniques, perhaps we can account for this result byappealing to the concrete visualisation of the world and geographical space which are frequent in

Histories.

Fig 9 Docuscope: folio genres, WordPicture

Genre, History and Attention

30. Before we make our grand closing claims, it is necessary to post a series of caveats. Docuscope is aprogram under development: the dictionaries are being refined as tests like the one reported here aremade. Docuscope is designed to work on contemporary prose, not Early Modern blank verse: there isno guarantee that its rhetorical features are valid for Early Modern English, or that its dictionariesidentify all the relevant items in Early Modern English. The texts we used for these tests were publicsource texts containing speech prefixes and stage directions: for future work we are preparing a set ofstripped texts. The results reported here come from relatively random ‘messing about’ with theprogram to see what would happen: we had no clear research objective or hypothesis beyond the ideasthat Docuscope might be sensitive to date of composition or authorship.

31. In the event, we think our results are sufficiently interesting to put aside for the moment worries aboutDocuscope’s suitability, to justify publication, and to encourage further work. We think several generalareas for further research are suggested by these initial results:

32. Genre Theory. Throughout antiquity and the Renaissance, theories of genre have focused on a work’scontent, mode of presentation, and social function. Thus Ben Jonson, building on classical and Italianmodels, could argue for the salutary value of comedy--a genre which he saw as typically depicting thevices of the lower and middling social classes--by countering claims that audiences simply repeat thenasty behaviours they see on stage. Rather, he argued, the spectator of comedy learns to avoid thebehaviours he or she observes. In order to make these claims, Jonson had to have a sense of what thegenre ‘comedy’ was about and what it was for. Similarly, contemporary genre theorists think about the

relationship between particular genres like the Epic and particular historical settings or ideologicalprograms (for example, colonial expansion). As a critical tool, then, genre is itself the product ofinnumerable reading encounters and discussions of texts: it is an artefact of literary history, like thetexts themselves.

33. Docuscope’s encounter with early modern texts--limited to counting things and comparing numericalresults--has in effect produced another one of these literary-critical artefacts, albeit a statistical one. The mere existence of such a statistical recipe for ‘genre’ suggests that there is an empirical, linguisticbasis to interpretive classes such as Comedy and History, classes which have traditionally been definedin qualitative terms. (Indeed, the very word genre reveals this qualitative thrust, since it literally means“kind.”) At the broadest level then, Docuscope is a machine that makes us think about the nature ofliterary classifications and the way they are experienced and constructed. New questions emerge thatmight not have been asked using previous methods. What is the linguistic texture of Comedy andHistory and how is this texture, to the extent that it is distinctive, related to the variousphenomenological, social and historical factors that constrain literary production and reception? What,moreover, might the effect on our theories of genre be if it turns out that Tragedy is not as linguisticallydistinct as other genres? This kind of linguistic-physiognomical approach to texts generates newquestions that must be answered by further reading and historical contextualization. We are not thefirst to ask such questions, but we have a tool that will let us formulate and test them with moreempirical clarity and speed. [5]

34. Prosthetic Reading. Tools like Docuscope allow human readers to pay attention to very highfrequency items we usually ignore as part of the background noise of reading. As we have seen in thecase of first person, these items can be linked to ongoing arguments in literary history, such as the hotlydebated claim that modern self-hood emerged first in Early Modern Tragedy. Being able to payattention to massively iterated linguistic items with the aid of such a ‘prosthetic’ may thus provide newevidence for existing debates, or provoke different questions. The tool raises questions about readingas well. If certain linguistic features correlate with the rise of certain cultural or literary forms, perhapswe have to rethink the relationship between what goes ‘unnoticed’ in a text and the real experiencesand social attitudes that the text may nevertheless shape or express. If there is a correlation betweenliterary styles (dramatic genres), cultural forms (like possessive individuality), and linguistic features(first person reference), how are these factors to be understood in relation to one another given theseresults? How, moreover, do we explain the effects of massively iterated textual features on individualswho may not consciously attend to their persistent recurrence? Is there a ‘cultural,’ ‘ideological’ or‘unconscious’ connection between these linguistic patterns and what Raymond Williams has called the‘structure of feeling’ in a particular place and time? We believe that this kind of research may, at somepoint in the future, make it possible to demonstrate the effects of recurring linguistic features on readersand communities in much the same way as others have done using categories like culture, ideology orthe unconscious. If this approach bears fruit, perhaps we should be prepared to think of texts ascontraptions for the direction of attention instead of transmitters of information, concepts, orworldviews. As the old maxim of the trees suggests, some things are just too obvious to be noticed;they may, nevertheless, exert a shaping power on what readers experience outside the locus ofconscious attention.

35. Thus if the modern linguistic features that have been identified in this study are even partially usefulfor tracking cultural and linguistic shifts that would otherwise go unnoticed, a significant area ofresearch remains to be undertaken. Central to that project is the creation of a corpus of texts which canbe analyzed ‘prosthetically’ and--much more daunting--the incremental sophistication of the linguisticcategories being used. Part of this refinement involves un-modernising the things a program likeDocuscope counts. A version of this program containing early modern words and phrases would thus

be invaluable. But historical difference is not the only factor that might need to be accounted for infurther explorations. We may also have to re-think what it is that we are counting when we approachtexts as surfaces or strings rather than windows into another world or soul.

36. Counting Things. Clearly Docuscope is not totally blind in what it counts, since its categories(FirstPerson, etc.) embody a particular view (a poetics, a rhetoric) of how texts communicate and whatmakes them distinct. The empirical basis of ‘genre,’ then, is empirical only to the extent that certaininterpretations of what it is important to ‘look for’ have been tested against others in a range of textsdeemed ‘relevant’. Genre is not popping out of texts ex nihilo. But it is--and here is the theoreticalsignificance of our claim--showing itself to be ‘legible’ at levels that are not immediately accessible tothe conscious reader. A critical project that uses tools like Docuscope to investigate historicallyspecific notions of genre thus adds to the body of material evidence we use as we try to understandtexts and the readers/writers who encounter them. The interpretive status of claims like ‘selfhood inthe western tradition emerges with certain early modern genres of drama’ remains the same. Theevidence for such claims, however, may lie as much on the surface of very large textual objects as itdoes in the breasts of fictional characters who have “that within which passeth show’.

Notes

[1] As one of our anonymous referees pointed out, such computer approaches to the content analysis of textsdate back to the sixties (see Philip J. Stone, ‘The General Inquirer: A computer system for content analysisand retrieval based on the sentence as a unit of information’, Behavioral Science 7 (1962), pp. 484-94; and‘Improved Quality of Content Analysis Categories: Computerized Disambiguation Rules for High-FrequencyEnglish Words’ in G. Gerbner et al. (eds.) The Analysis of Communication Content (1969, New York) pp.199-221).

[2] For example, the Arden Shakespeare CD-ROM (1997) has a ‘stop list’ of words, explained as follows: ‘Astop list is a list of words that are not tracked by the search function, due to their excessive frequency. Thestop list includes very common words that are seldom useful to search for.’ (General Help > Searching >Advanced Searching > Narrowing your search > The Stop List).

[3] Docuscope was designed at Carnegie Mellon University by David Kaufer and Suguru Ishizaki. A studyof Docuscope’s categories can be found in David Kaufer et al, The Power of Words: Unveiling the Speakerand Writer’s Hidden Craft. Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates, 2004. The statistical reliability of thesecategories in distinguishing genres of modern English has been analysed by Jeff Collins, Variations in WrittenEnglish Characterizing Authors’ Rhetorical Language Choices Across Corpora of Published Texts, DoctoralDissertation, Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University, 2003.

[4] We have removed the Tragedies from this result as the program does not identify them as a distinctgroup. Some reasons for this are given later in this paper, and we will be investigating this further in futurework.

[5] Barron Brainerd (‘Pronouns and genre in Shakespeare’s drama’, Computers and the Humanities, 13(1979), pp. 3-16) has also sought to correlate linguistic feature with genre, and the sensitivity of secondperson singular pronouns to genre is confirmed by Jonathan Hope (The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays,Cambridge University Press, 1994, chapter 4, with some caveats about Brainerd’s method on pages 63-4).

Works Cited

Brainerd, Barron. ‘Pronouns and genre in Shakespeare’s drama’. Computers and the Humanities, 13(1979), 3-16.Collins, Jeff. Variations in Written English Characterizing Authors’ Rhetorical Language ChoicesAcross Corpora of Published Texts, Doctoral Dissertation, Department of English, Carnegie MellonUniversity, 2003.Hope, Jonathan. The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays. Cambridge University Press, 1994.Kaufer, David, et al. The Power of Words: Unveiling the Speaker and Writer’s Hidden Craft. LawrenceErlbaum & Associates, 2004.Stone, Philip J. ‘The General Inquirer: A computer system for content analysis and retrieval based onthe sentence as a unit of information’. Behavioral Science 7 (1962), 484-94.Stone, Philip J. ‘Improved Quality of Content Analysis Categories: Computerized DisambiguationRules for High-Frequency English Words’ in G. Gerbner et al. (eds.) The Analysis of CommunicationContent (New York, 1969), pp. 199-221.

Responses to this piece intended for the Readers’ Forum may be sent to the Editor at M.Steggle@shu.ac.uk.

© 2004-, Matthew Steggle (Editor, EMLS).