Professor Hugh Craig awarded 2016 Discovery Project

Tuesday, 3 November 2015

Professor Hugh Craig has been awarded a Discovery Projects grant by the Australian Research Council for his project: 'Folio Shakespeare texts and their Quarto and Octavo antecedents'.

Professor Hugh Craig

Director of the University of Newcastle's Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing, Professor Craig plans to conduct a statistical analysis of the language of the 18 Shakespeare plays that appear both in the Folio and in previous Quarto versions, focusing on patterns of word use and orthography, to provide a better understanding of the Folio and new evidence about the texts of individual plays.

'I'm thrilled to be funded to do this work and I hope I can bring some new certainty about these early versions of Shakespeare's plays, especially about dates and authorship and what sort of texts they are, since scholars often disagree about whether they are pirated or straight from the author,' Professor Craig said. 'This sort of knowledge ultimately affects editions of Shakespeare and thus the words that are read and heard by everyone from students to theatre audiences."

Professor Craig's work is based largely on frequency data and has led to several breakthrough findings in regard to Shakespearean works. The results of which are presented in his 2009 co-edited book Shakespeare, Computers and the Mystery of Authorship.

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