Shakespeare & Early Modern Proverbial Culture

Welcome to Shakespeare & Early Modern Proverbial Culture!

This AHRC-funded project will establish a multidisciplinary network of international scholars to reassess the forms, functions, and dissemination of early modern English proverbs. Proverbs saturated the everyday speech of early modern England and are recorded in many forms of writing – including letters, sermons, plays, and literary texts. The most influential creative writer of the period, William Shakespeare, used an estimated 4,600 proverbs in his works (Dent 1981), employing several as titles (e.g. All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure). While many of these sayings are now obscure or obsolete, others have survived into the digital age, reminding us that proverbs are both historically contingent and a transhistorical cultural-linguistic phenomenon. By bringing together a world-leading team of scholars who are often separated by disciplinary boundaries (e.g. English literature, history, linguistics, and computer science), this project will test and develop frameworks for studying proverbial language through multidisciplinary perspectives; consider the role of language in the construction of cultural and community identities; and develop new theories around orality and the early modern culture of collecting commonplaces.