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Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”

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Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”

#41

Post by dylan604 »

porknubbins wrote: post #40
dylan604 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard the phrase "I've got the cancer". As if there's only one cancer to get, and everyone will know of it. Then again, the English say "I'm going to hospital" where an American would say "I'm going to the hospital", so maybe the Bard used up all of the (how do you pluralize the??) so that the English use it less? At least the TFA author might theorize as such.

As a US English speaker "I'm going to hospital" sounds a little bit off in that British English excessively sophisticated way. But then I realized that most of the time if you're sick the main thing is you're going to the institution to get treatment, not trying to specify which location you are going to. Its almost like if we went around saying "I go to the school" or "I'm in the college" which sounds pretty dumb.

In that American English way, "I'm going to ____" has a different meaning if the following word is a noun or verb. So reading "hospital" as a verb really distorts that meaning. "How does one hospital?" In Texas, "going to" is pretty much always assumed about to go to a place where "going to" as in about to do something is solved by using "fixin' to" ;-)

Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”

#42

Post by 2bitencryption »

retrac wrote: post #31
lupire wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why "the" but not "a"? Same meter. But I agree it's silly that say "the" is what makes Macbeth creepy, and not, you know, the occult theme that permeates it.

Stressed "the" and unstressed "the" have different implications for meter. (And meaning.) "The" has two pronunciations in English. "Thee" and "thuh". The former is stressed, the latter not. While part of it follows the same pattern as a/an governed by by the initial sound, some of the rules are complicated. "Thee" is also used for emphasis as a demonstrative. "Give me thuh cat toy." (Some ordinary toy.) "Give me thee…

But how was it pronounced at the time Shakespeare actually wrote Macbeth?

If you listen to a performance of Shakespeare that replicates the original pronunciation, it's wildly different.

I'd wager the "thuh" pronunciation is a modern simplification and not something Shakespeare accounted for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M

(though, having watched the second video, the actor clearly uses "thuh" and considers it Original Pronouniation, so perhaps I'm mistaken)

Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”

#44

Post by 8bitsrule »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #18
gerdesj wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sod that mate. The real problem is the weird quotes thing hereabouts. English uses 66 and 99 or this:". We never use double backticks and whatever the other thing is.

`` and '' is just unparsed markup.

Odd's bodkins

Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”

#45

Post by lisper »

dylan604 wrote: post #22
allturtles wrote: post #4

I think this is just the way Shakespeare wrote, not anything specific to Macbeth's 'creepiness.' I was able to quickly find a similar example in Julius Caesar: "Then he offered it to him again; then he put it by again; but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time; he put it the third time by;" Or Much Ado About Nothing: "I have the toothache." It is not surpr…

I've heard the phrase "I've got the cancer". As if there's only one cancer to get, and everyone will know of it. Then again, the English say "I'm going to hospital" where an American would say "I'm going to the hospital", so maybe the Bard used up all of the (how do you pluralize the??) so that the English use it less? At least the TFA author might theorize as such.

It depends on the disease. You have the measles, or the mumps, or the flu, or a cold.

Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”

#48

Post by ldjb »

Macbeth is certainly a creepy play, and certainly there is a lot of creepy language (e.g. Lady Macbeth's "Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash'd the brains out"). But I never felt that this was due to repetition of particular words, so this was interesting to read about.

That said, although these days it is uncommon to use generic nouns with the definite article ("the"), I understand that this was a lot more common in Shakespeare's day. I wonder if this is more common in Macbeth than in Shakespeare's other plays, whether it was a deliberate choice, and whether Jacobean audiences would have felt the same sense of creepiness.

Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”

#49

Post by ogogmad »

alisonkisk wrote: post #33
retrac wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stressed "the" and unstressed "the" have different implications for meter. (And meaning.) "The" has two pronunciations in English. "Thee" and "thuh". The former is stressed, the latter not. While part of it follows the same pattern as a/an governed by by the initial sound, some of the rules are complicated. "Thee" is also used for emphasis as a demonstrative. "Give me thuh cat toy." (Some ordinary toy.) "Give me thee…

Sure, but the article doesn't attempt to classify the stress, and the stress is often flexed as a convenience to help the meter or to avoid hard -to-pronounce double vowels, not to change emphasis. "I don't what that one; I want thee other one. Thuh yellow one, not thee orange one."

In BrE, "the" before a vowel is pronounced "thee". So I'm not sure what you're saying.

Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”

#50

Post by a_e_k »

I got curious about how all the other plays ranked. For example, which plays used those words the least? So I downloaded the text files from the Folger Shakespeare Library (https://shakespeare.folger.edu/downloads/txt/shakespeares-wo...) and ran this command to get a rough count of "the" and "th'" vs. the total words:

    for f (*.txt); do echo $f; tr " \r" "\n\n"
Here were the results that gave me, formatted into a table and sorted by descending frequency:

    | Rank | Play                        | The or Th’ | Words | Per 10000 |
    |------+-----------------------------+------------+-------+-----------|
    |    1 | macbeth                     |        724 | 16929 |     427.7 |
    |    2 | henry-v                     |       1065 | 25577 |     416.4 |
    |    3 | coriolanus                  |       1126 | 27294 |     412.5 |
    |    4 | loves-labors-lost           |        855 | 21093 |     405.3 |
    |    5 | henry-viii                  |        962 | 24074 |     399.6 |
    |    6 | the-merchant-of-venice      |        834 | 20985 |     397.4 |
    |    7 | henry-iv-part-2             |       1001 | 25762 |     388.6 |
    |    8 | henry-vi-part-2             |        990 | 25597 |     386.8 |
    |    9 | hamlet                      |       1142 | 30006 |     380.6 |
    |   10 | henry-iv-part-1             |        856 | 24100 |     355.2 |
    |   11 | henry-vi-part-3             |        866 | 24491 |     353.6 |
    |   12 | antony-and-cleopatra        |        861 | 24465 |     351.9 |
    |   13 | king-lear                   |        898 | 25661 |     349.9 |
    |   14 | the-winters-tale            |        854 | 24568 |     347.6 |
    |   15 | king-john                   |        717 | 20730 |     345.9 |
    |   16 | cymbeline                   |        959 | 27738 |     345.7 |
    |   17 | a-midsummer-nights-dream    |        564 | 16377 |     344.4 |
    |   18 | richard-iii                 |        985 | 28914 |     340.7 |
    |   19 | richard-ii                  |        753 | 22224 |     338.8 |
    |   20 | henry-vi-part-1             |        715 | 21575 |     331.4 |
    |   21 | pericles                    |        605 | 18282 |     330.9 |
    |   22 | troilus-and-cressida        |        837 | 25810 |     324.3 |
    |   23 | titus-andronicus            |        659 | 20621 |     319.6 |
    |   24 | alls-well-that-ends-well    |        724 | 22683 |     319.2 |
    |   25 | measure-for-measure         |        693 | 21858 |     317.0 |
    |   26 | the-tempest                 |        518 | 16489 |     314.1 |
    |   27 | the-comedy-of-errors        |        455 | 14552 |     312.7 |
    |   28 | the-two-noble-kinsmen       |        735 | 23751 |     309.5 |
    |   29 | julius-caesar               |        592 | 19251 |     307.5 |
    |   30 | as-you-like-it              |        664 | 21692 |     306.1 |
    |   31 | twelfth-night               |        573 | 19675 |     291.2 |
    |   32 | othello                     |        737 | 25670 |     287.1 |
    |   33 | much-ado-about-nothing      |        591 | 20843 |     283.5 |
    |   34 | romeo-and-juliet            |        677 | 23948 |     282.7 |
    |   35 | the-merry-wives-of-windsor  |        604 | 21603 |     279.6 |
    |   36 | timon-of-athens             |        504 | 18262 |     276.0 |
    |   37 | the-taming-of-the-shrew     |        449 | 18709 |     240.0 |
    |   38 | the-two-gentlemen-of-verona |        404 | 17010 |     237.5 |
Ignoring the whole log-likelihood stuff and just looking at the simple frequencies, I'm not completely sure that I buy the article's argument. Macbeth does come out on top by my analysis. But some of the other plays seem to use "the" or "th'" nearly as frequently without being particularly creepy. In terms of ratios of the frequencies, Henry V, a history, is only 2.6% lower than Macbeth. And the first comedy, Love's Labors Lost, is just 5.2% lower.
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