Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth” (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Use of "the" considered harmful. :)

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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.)

“The Macbeth”

Paywall