Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”

Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”(onezero.medium.com)

48 points by rouli 4 years ago | 64 comments

karolisd 4 years ago |

I'd wager the use of "the" is mostly about making the meter work and having the iambic pentameter sound the way he wanted it to.

This isn't a data science question. Especially if the data science is blind to meter and to phonetics.

retrac 4 years ago | |

Shakespeare coined (or at least first wrote down) hundreds of neologisms presumably just to make the verses scan. His English was never the best, honestly. Like, in terms of being normal English. Much of his poetry was creatively odd, but also grammatically odd at the time. He sounded unusual even to his contemporaries. That's part of why he made such a big splash.

lupire 4 years ago | |

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.

retrac 4 years ago | | |

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 cat toy." (The one with special powers.)

smoldesu 4 years ago | |

Precisely. 'the' is an easy single-syllable choice to pad out your meter, so it makes perfect sense that it was abused here.

andensande 4 years ago |

The conclusions of the article seem a bit far-fetched to me, and seem to ignore the rhetorical style of poetry and theatre at the time. One of the examples the author gives (where they missed a contracted instance of "the"):

> [...] Look like th' innocent flower,/But be the serpent under ’t.

It is still acceptable in modern English to say something like

> Seem like the innocent flower, but be as the serpent underneath it.

Certainly not casual, everyday speech -- but using a rhetorical strategy of referring to an archetypal innocent flower, or an archetypal serpent. I think it's an enormous stretch to claim that Lady Macbeth and Macbeth had a specific innocent flower in mind when they were speaking.

allturtles 4 years ago |

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 surprising that the way (a way?) articles are used has changed in the last 400 years.

dylan604 4 years ago | |

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.

porknubbins 4 years ago | | |

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.

lisper 4 years ago | | |

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

galaxyLogic 4 years ago | |

But isn't the article saying that Macbeth uses the word "the" more frequently than other plays by Shakespeare? In other words it is not the way Shakespeare typically wrote, and that difference gives the play a peculiar flavor

allturtles 4 years ago | | |

The statistical evidence shows that "the" is used more frequently in Macbeth, but the anecdotal evidence used to connect that fact to the play's spookiness relies on the idea that there are differences in the grammatical use of "the" that are specific to Macbeth.

The fact that "the" happens to be used more often in Macbeth than in other Shakespeare plays seems to me more likely to be noise with no deeper meaning.

jwmhjwmh 4 years ago | |

Similar to the second quote, English speakers nowadays (at least where I live) say things like "I have the flu." In this phrase, I believe "the flu" refers to the ailment in general as opposed to what affects the speaker in particular. Maybe this is also the case with your second quote?

alisonkisk 4 years ago | | |

I have the coronavirus. I have Covid.

I have a headache and a toothache.

I have a cold and a fever. I have yellow fever.

I have a cough. I have whopping cough.

I have the flu.

I have the chicken pox, smallpox, the measles, and the mumps. I have rabies.

TillE 4 years ago |

There's a little too much amateurish analysis here which doesn't even attempt to distinguish between Early Modern English and 21st century English, but ultimately I think the conclusion is interesting and probably correct, that this helps set the tone of the play.

edgyquant 4 years ago | |

Didn't Shakespeare kind of use his own version of English; even by the standards of the day?

afthonos 4 years ago |

I’m going to be a bit snobbish here: I can’t take the article seriously when it misquotes “Double, double toil and trouble” as “Bubble, bubble toil and trouble”. Not so much because the mistake is egregious (it could make sense if you’re going by ear), but because the article claims to be about the language used, and this is one of the most famous lines in the play.

gerdesj 4 years ago | |

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.

wizzwizz4 4 years ago | | |

`` and '' is just unparsed markup.

a_e_k 4 years ago |

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" < $f | grep -A100000 ACT | egrep -v "^[A-Z]+$" | grep -i [A-Z] | egrep -i "^th['e]$" | wc -l; tr " \r" "\n\n" < $f | grep -A100000 ACT | egrep -v "^[A-Z]+$" | grep -i [A-Z] | wc -l; echo; done

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.

ldjb 4 years ago |

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.

mojuba 4 years ago | |

The article literally says: "So they compared word-usage in Macbeth to Shakespeare’s overall writing" - and found several creepy words in the top 15, also the word "the" occurring more frequently compared to his other plays.

But I agree, we don't know what the real reason was for Shakespear's choice in this case, just that it explains what contributes to the creepiness for the modern readers.

ldjb 4 years ago | | |

Thanks, I must have overlooked that paragraph.

spoonjim 4 years ago |

Not going to read a Shakespeare article that misquotes the opening line of Macbeth.

IAmEveryone 4 years ago |

This comment on the original post deserves some love: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28336357

abathur 4 years ago |

Use of "the" considered harmful. :)

dylan604 4 years ago | |

Don't tell that to Matt Johnson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Johnson_(singer)

ncmncm 4 years ago | |

Overuse of "the" considered creepy.

smoldesu 4 years ago | |

Thank you for your diligence, we'll be pushing an update to git later this week removing this harmful language.

sandworm101 4 years ago |

This analysis appears to be of the modern shakespear text. That can differ from "first folio" versions closest to what was actually performed. The modern text has been sanitized, the poetry cleaned up. I wouldnt dig too deep into specific word counts as they are likely more a result of later rewordings. An extra the here or there may have been added by publishers to perfect the meter. That happens sometimes when a play for the stage starts being sold as a poem to be read in drawing rooms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio

pvg 4 years ago | |

The First Folio is the only surviving source of the text and more importantly minor edits aren't going to change statistical properties of text much at the counts-of-the-definite-article level.

fumblebee 4 years ago |

The opening sentence sort of broke my mind. It reads:

> Macbeth is a creepy play.

But my brain wanted really badly to swap the emphasised word:

> Macbeth is a creepy play.

Edit: Maybe that was the point of the author. A couple of paragraphs later they say “Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people.”

KwanEsq 4 years ago | |

Macbeth isn't actually being emphasised in that sentence, rather it is using italics to demarcate the title of a work. A music album or movie's name would also appear italicised. (If they've done it right Macbeth should only be in an <i>, or <span class="art-title">, rather than an <em>, though who knows what their CMS allows/is capable of)

bsza 4 years ago | |

It's quite common practice to write the title of something in italics. I think this is just that, not an emphasis.

Example: https://jayshams.medium.com/moby-dick-is-not-a-novel-e19e41f...

dunefox 4 years ago |

To me, this is a very pretentious take. Nothing about the usage of "the" in the examples is unusual or creepy. Saying "an eye" or "my eye" that winks at "an" or "my" hand results in a different meaning. "The" here means a general expression.

Grakel 4 years ago |

Not only is this riddled with spelling and grammar errors, but it's absurd.

Shakespeare's famous romantic scene does exactly the same thing: "it is the east, and Juliet is the sun." That's how he wrote.

sharkjacobs 4 years ago |

That's a really interesting observation and fun analysis. I'm going to reread Macbeth with this in mind and whether or not I agree with all of the articles conclusions its a unique lens to examine the text with.

rob_c 4 years ago |

Cute. I did something similar at a-level with another book for a stats course Mining data can be surprisingly satisfying way of going back to look at something you liked.

SeanLuke 4 years ago |

Did they bother analyzing the rest of the Shakespeare canon to see how often "the" appeared? The article doesn't say.

Zanni 4 years ago | |

Yeah, that's the chart in the middle of the article of the log likelihood of each word. The higher that score, the more a word is used in Macbeth relative to the rest of his plays. However ... the author blips right over the fact that "our" and "she"--two very common words--both have a higher log likelihood than "the".

test1235 4 years ago |

without paywall: https://archive.is/hGg5T

yesenadam 4 years ago |

I read this a few times, looking for evidence I missed that it's a joke. Apparently not, but I can't be sure. If it's serious, it's possibly the worst article I've ever read.

> But fans of Macbeth often say its freaky qualities are deeper than just the plot devices and characters. For centuries, people been unsettled by the very language of the play.

> Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It’s as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the “continuous sense of menace” and “horror” that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes.

> For centuries, Shakespeare fans and theater folk have wondered about this, but could never quite explain it.

The article claims to explain it - in the play, the word "the" is used a lot!

Um.. gee, in high school it was pointed out to me how constant themes in Macbeth are how unnatural things have become, how everything is strange, qualities/values reversed from normal - fair is foul and foul is fair etc, animals doing weird things, bad omens etc. It never stops, all the way through. I had to go through the play and list how many animals are mentioned, doing strange things. It's constant. People meet and it's not "Lovely day isn't it" but an anecdote about how so-and-so saw something incredibly weird and impossible happen. Over that background is the quickly escalating paranoia and madness of Macbeth & Lady Macbeth. Etc. Can't be bothered writing more, I didn't want to say just "This is total nonsense.", but it is. (Flagged.)

ncmncm 4 years ago | |

You read the article several times, yet didn't understand it.

As noted in the article, the Scottish play displays other oddities. But this one had not been commented upon before. To demonstrate vacuity, you would need to identify other plays that do not come off as creepy, but use "the" in the way noted. For an academic presentation, we might expect the authors to have checked for it in other plays, but this article was not.

baol 4 years ago |

“The Macbeth”

Steve_Baker77 4 years ago |

Paywall

| 1 | macbeth | 724 | 16929 | 252 | | 2 | henry-v | 1065 | 25577 | 162 | | 3 | coriolanus | 1126 | 27294 | 151 | | 4 | loves-labors-lost | 855 | 21093 | 192 | | 5 | henry-viii | 962 | 24074 | 165 | | 6 | the-merchant-of-venice | 834 | 20985 | 189 | | 7 | henry-iv-part-2 | 1001 | 25762 | 150 | | 8 | henry-vi-part-2 | 990 | 25597 | 151 | | 9 | hamlet | 1142 | 30006 | 126 | | 10 | henry-iv-part-1 | 856 | 24100 | 147 | | 11 | henry-vi-part-3 | 866 | 24491 | 144 | | 12 | antony-and-cleopatra | 861 | 24465 | 143 | | 13 | king-lear | 898 | 25661 | 136 | | 14 | the-winters-tale | 854 | 24568 | 141 | | 15 | king-john | 717 | 20730 | 166 | | 16 | cymbeline | 959 | 27738 | 124 | | 17 | a-midsummer-nights-dream | 564 | 16377 | 210 | | 18 | richard-iii | 985 | 28914 | 117 | | 19 | richard-ii | 753 | 22224 | 152 | | 20 | henry-vi-part-1 | 715 | 21575 | 153 | | 21 | pericles | 605 | 18282 | 181 | | 22 | troilus-and-cressida | 837 | 25810 | 125 | | 23 | titus-andronicus | 659 | 20621 | 154 | | 24 | alls-well-that-ends-well | 724 | 22683 | 140 | | 25 | measure-for-measure | 693 | 21858 | 145 | | 26 | the-tempest | 518 | 16489 | 190 | | 27 | the-comedy-of-errors | 455 | 14552 | 214 | | 28 | the-two-noble-kinsmen | 735 | 23751 | 130 | | 29 | julius-caesar | 592 | 19251 | 159 | | 30 | as-you-like-it | 664 | 21692 | 141 | | 31 | twelfth-night | 573 | 19675 | 148 | | 32 | othello | 737 | 25670 | 111 | | 33 | much-ado-about-nothing | 591 | 20843 | 136 | | 34 | romeo-and-juliet | 677 | 23948 | 118 | | 35 | the-merry-wives-of-windsor | 604 | 21603 | 129 | | 36 | timon-of-athens | 504 | 18262 | 151 | | 37 | the-taming-of-the-shrew | 449 | 18709 | 128 | | 38 | the-two-gentlemen-of-verona | 404 | 17010 | 139 |