::Play, % of words in text that are 'the' thanks to Wolfram AlphaCONCLUSION: Sure, MacBeth has many 'the's but not many more than a MidSummer Night's Dream or Hamlet and Less than other plays like Henry V. So, not extraordinary in any way.
COMEDIES
As You Like It, 3.22%
Measure for Measure, 3.22%
A MidSummers Night Drean, 3.42%
Much Ado about Nothing, 2.7%
The Tempest, 2.93%
TRAGEDIES
Hamlet, 3.68%
Julius Caesar, 3.01%
King Lear, 3.49%
MacBeth, 3.76%
Romeo and Juliet, 2.73%
HISTORIES
Richard III, 3.26%
Henry IV, Part 1, 3.43%
Henry IV, Part 2, 3.71%
Henry V, 3.92%
I,6: Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flowerRegarding "the owl":
I,6: Give me your hand;
II,1: The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
II,2: And wash this filthy witness from your hand.
II,2: My hands are of your colour; but I shame
IV,1: The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
etc.
Henry VI, Part 3: The owl shriek'd at thy birth,—an evil sign;So, yes, this does seem to me to be a specific owl rather than 'an owl'
Venus and Adonis: The owl, night's herald, shrieks, 'Tis very late;'
WordHoard’s figures show that ‘the’ occurs in Macbeth 422 times every 10,000 words. In Shakespeare as a whole, ‘the’ appears only 327 times every 10,000 words. In terms of actual instances, ‘the’ appears 703 times in Macbeth; but if Shakespeare were behaving ‘normally’, it would only appear 545 times. So we can say that there are about 150 ‘extra’ ‘the’ forms in Macbeth.Hope and Witmore also note that, along with the higher frequency of 'the' in Macbeth, there is a slightly lower frequency of 'a'. They conclude: 'there seems a reasonable statistical case for saying that there is a tendency in Macbeth, compared to the canon as a whole, for determiners to be definite (‘the’, ‘that’, ‘those’) rather than indefinite (‘a’, ‘some’).'
(They call it “The Scottish Tragedy”.)They do?
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posted by fairmettle at 11:44 PM on August 25 [1 favorite]