Prosaic Diction: Finding Patterns in the Words of Spenser’s View

Abstract

Scholars have long noted the eccentric vocabulary of Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, primarily with an eye toward glossing words unfamiliar outside of a contemporary Irish context. This essay steps back from consideration of individual words to ponder what can be learned from word frequencies, primarily focusing on what the tools of corpus linguistics can tell us about the View and especially the View in relation to Spenser’s poetry. What words are most common in the View? What words in the View are most likely (or least likely) to occur in Spenser’s poetry? Is the vocabulary of Eudoxus similar to or notably different from the vocabulary of Irenius? What parts of Spenser’s poetic corpus have the greatest (or least) affinity, vocabulary-wise, with the View? This essay answers those questions and argues that linguistic analysis must go hand-in-hand with traditional close reading in order to draw conclusions from those answers.