Shakespeare & Early Modern Proverbial Culture

The event opened by addressing the enduring challenge articulated by scholars like Archer Taylor in 1931: that is, the ‘incommunicable quality’ that distinguishes a proverb from other forms of expression. Erasmus’s Adagia (first edition published in 1500), for instance, described proverbs as popular sayings “fitted to things and times,” while James Howell, in Paramoigraphy (1659) emphasized the ‘sense, shortnesse, and salt’ that make a true proverb memorable and powerful. These insights provided the conceptual grounding for subsequent explorations of how such expressions were deployed, perceived, and preserved in Shakespeare’s corpus and beyond.

The workshop featured short presentations from researchers in paremiology (the study of proverbs), early modern literature, corpus linguistics, digital humanities, historical pragmatics, Shakespearean studies, textual editing, and computational linguistics. The combination of disciplines and expertise revealed shared questions and approaches, as well as contrasting areas of emphasis and analysis.

One of the key themes of the workshop was how to define a proverb, and whether that could be achieved successfully across historical periods and cultures. Dr Marcas Mac Coinnigh delved into typologies of proverbial forms ranging from wellerisms and proverbial comparisons to enumerative and interrogative proverbs and stressed the role of metaphor, rhyme, and syntactic fixedness in identifying proverbial utterances. Dr Mel Evans’s session brought a cognitive linguistic perspective, suggesting that proverbs, as a subset of formulaic expressions, are stored and retrieved differently from novel utterances, with implications for their enduring cultural traction. With a more explicitly early modern focus, Professor Neil Rhodes and Dr Kirk Essary highlighted how Renaissance humanists, including Erasmus and Gessner, viewed proverbs as both stylistic ornaments and ethical tools, expressing moral truths via brief, metaphorical language.

Corpus methods, of differing linguistic and literary flavours, were proposed as possible routes into the identification and classification of proverbial language. Professor Jonathan Culpeper consider how CQPWeb search tools might be used to investigate tri-grams structures associated with known proverbs in EEBO-TCP e.g. ‘to meddle (meddle not) with another man’s matter’ could use the wildcard options: (not) * {meddle} ***** *m?n’s matter?. Culpeper emphasised the tool’s accessibility for researchers across humanities disciplines. Evans showed how metadiscoursive framing in early modern correspondence, e.g. ‘as the proverb says’, could yield insights into the proverbial practices of letter-writers, with sociolinguistic and pragmatic dimensions. Professor Brett Greatley-Hirsch also proposed a digital approach – his “Reverse Tilley” experiment – seeking to identify proverbs computationally via syntactic patterns and positional markers within large corpora. His method challenges traditional proverb classification by detecting recurring syntactic templates, potentially revealing proverbial forms not yet canonized. Dr Aoife Curran’s presentation complemented these insights by showing how natural language processing and corpus techniques such as pattern matching and part-of-speech tagging could help detect proverbial structures in large datasets, thus bridging literary and computational methodologies. This was a thought-provoking strand of the workshop, indicating the potential of big data and computational approaches to engage with early modern materials, and long-standing debates about linguistic-cultural forms of knowledge.

The workshop also considered performance and audience perception. Shakespeare’s works often play with proverbiality; not just quoting known sayings but parodying or subverting them. Professor Cathy Shrank’s talk explored Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women of Abingdon, in which a character ‘speaks nought but proverbs,’ demonstrating how proverbial speech could signal both folk wisdom and comic excess. Workshop discussions also returned repeatedly to the difficulty of distinguishing between genuine proverbs and other fixed or formulaic expressions, particularly in editorial contexts.

Participants raised the question of what value was added for a reader (and what kinds of readers) if an edition flagged something as solely ‘proverbial’, and how a more comprehensive understanding of proverbs in early modern England might be shared with, and beneficial for, those reading, studying and performing those texts today, perhaps via a digital resource. The myth of Shakespeare’s impact on the English language was considered by Culpeper, and one point of enquiry raised in discussions was the impact of Shakespeare’s use of pre-existing proverbs in his plays, and their wider longevity in subsequent periods of literature and the language.

Altogether, the workshop underscored the proverb’s dynamic place at the intersection of literary artistry, rhetorical tradition, and cultural memory in early modern England. The next workshop will focus on early modern materials, and the different kinds of proverbs, and proverbial functions, we might find across extant genres, literary and non-literary. It will be held at the University of Leeds in autumn 2026.