Shakespeare and Early Modern Proverbial Culture

Value

£81,000

Partners and collaborators

University of Hull, St Francis Xavier University, Hull History Centre, Playhouse Lab (University of Leeds), Brotherton Library Cultural Collections

Description

This 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. Proverbs thus offer fertile ways of thinking about questions of shared history and crosscultural understanding, as well as issues central to early modern studies – including the relationship between classical and popular culture; rhetoric and pedagogy; authorship, style, and creativity; and adaptation, appropriation, and afterlives. But, despite the importance of proverbs to the language and literature of the period, the topic has attracted surprisingly little critical attention. As a timely corrective, this project pursues the following main objectives: 

1. To create new frameworks for studying proverbs in early modern texts that incorporate different disciplinary approaches, and to instigate a fresh investigation into the formal and functional characteristics of early modern proverbs

2. To investigate the distribution and function of early modern proverbs across different media and social boundaries, and consider how proverbs construct cultural norms and social relationships 

3. To enhance public understanding of proverbs by demonstrating both their transhistorical reach and their ability to capture culturally specific world-views

4. To evaluate relevant tools and techniques for identifying and classifying early modern proverbs, including digital methods and artificial intelligence

5. To foster dialogue and knowledge exchange between academic and non-academic partners

6. To produce world-leading publications exploring the use of proverbs by Shakespeare and his contemporaries

7. To bring together an international network of leading experts from different disciplines to explore these questions collaboratively. We will coordinate three interdisciplinary workshops, an international conference, and linked public engagement events (objectives 1-3, 7). The workshops will focus on three key areas – methods (objective 1), materials (objective 2), and communities (objective 3) – and will inform the project team’s development of research tasks and case studies. The research will be disseminated via an essay collection, blogs, and online resources that will inform scholarly practice (objective 6) and engage non-academic audiences (objective 3). It will also feed into work with our project partners to generate innovative teaching methodologies and performance practices (objective 5). Alongside these events, the team will also produce a proof-of-concept analysis that will assess the viability of various computational methods to systematically identify proverbs in a curated electronic corpus of early modern texts (objective 4). The project thus has the potential to reshape how scholars, editors, and students engage with proverbs in early modern literature and culture; it will also transform public understanding of the use of proverbs, both historically and in the present.

Impact

Contributions to the generation of new ideas, tools, methodologies or knowledge relating to proverbs, their detection, distribution and importance for early modern culture and for how present-day researchers and readers engage with early modern texts

Publications and outputs

Participants at University of Leeds’ Be Curious festival (May 2025)

Three project workshops: ‘Methods’ (Hull; June 2025), ‘Materials’ (Leeds; September 2025) and ‘Communities’ (Stratford-upon-Avon; April 2026); seminar at European Shakespeare Research Association (July 2025), seminar at Shakespeare Association of America (April 2026), project conference (July 2026), workshop with Hull History Centre (August 2026).