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This brief thirty-year history of Lexicons of Early Modern English, an online database of glossaries and dictionaries of the period, begins in a fourteenth-floor Robarts Library lab of the Centre for Computing and the Humanities at the University of Toronto in 1986. It was first published freely online in 1996 as the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database. Ten years later, in a seventh-floor lab also in the Robarts Library, it came out as LEME, thanks to support from TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) and the University of Toronto Press and Library. No other modern language has such a resource. The most important reason for the emergence, survival, and growth of LEME is that its contemporary lexicographers understood their language differently from how we, our many advantages notwithstanding, have conceived it over the past two centuries. Cette brève histoire des trente ans du Lexicons of Early Modern English, une base de données en ligne de glossaires et de dictionnaires de l’époque, commence en 1986 dans le laboratoire du Centre for Computing and the Humanities, au quatorzième étage de la bibliothèque Robarts de l’Université de Toronto. Cette base de données a été publiée gratuitement en ligne premièrement en 1996, sous le titre Early Modern English Dictionnaires Database. Dix ans plus tard, elle était publiée sous le sigle LEME, à partir du septième étage de la même bibliothèque Robarts, grâce au soutien du TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research), de la bibliothèque et des presses de l’Université de Toronto. Aucune autre langue vivante ne dispose d’une telle ressource. La principale raison expliquant l’émergence, la survie et la croissance du LEME est que les lexicographes qui font l’objet du LEME comprenaient leur langue très différemment que nous la concevons depuis deux siècles, et ce nonobstant plusieurs de nos avantages.

Picking up with CELJ's MLA 2000 topic on ways that the digital world is changing, and often guiding, copyright law and fair use in scholarly publishing (see JSP, April 2002), the Council of Editors of Learned Journals asked its keynote speakers for the 2001 MLA Convention to address two different faces of the ‘electronic muse.’ Patrick Harrison, who brings an expertise in law to concerns about the ramifications of the recent New York Times v. Tasini case on publishing electronic databases, discovers that at heart in the issue of copyright protection is the very definition of revision, which surprisingly has never been discussed in prior case law. What constitutes an electronic revision of a collective work such as a newspaper, magazine, or journal, and therefore a legitimate republication, according to copyright law, in electronic form such as a for-profit database? The Supreme Court came down on the side of protecting individual authors: the publication in an electronic database of a work originally appearing in a print journal or other collective work is not a revision but a new work. In stressing a text as material property at the centre of competing claims of ownership, this decision leaves open to question the status of a text's intellectual or creative relation to its community and to the common good. Ian Lancashire, a professor of poetry, has nimbly side-stepped the nettles of Net law in offering poetry for free to the world through an anthology of online poetry. His Representative Poetry Online (RPO) features over 2,500 English poems by 403 poets, nearly all in the public domain. Indeed, it is the public nature of this project, its conception of poetry and its study as a collaborative enterprise between scholarly editor and common reader, that safeguards its haven in the electronic world. This e-anthology challenges the concept of a poetic text as the product of individual genius whose access need be regulated by an elite class of academic professionals. Representative Poetry Online instead perpetuates the ‘representative’ life of poetry as belonging to the world. Existing online, this poetry is able to enter the very material lives of its readers.

John Heminge and Henry Condell first speak of Shakespeare's idiolect — his personal language behaviour — in their preface to the 1623 folio: `His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers.' They echo Shakespeare, who said, of his `noted weed,' that `every word doth almost [tell] my name, / Showing their birth, and where they did proceed' (sonnet 76.6–8). For these three men, style is more than `an elegant fourme or order in writynge or speakinge,' and invention more than rhetorical inventio, where one finds material in `loci or ``places, seats'' in one's notebooks.' Idiolect reflects `mind' and should be approached through cognition. Descartes notwithstanding, mind is now analysable biologically by scientific methods. Even in the humanities, authorship attribution now uses quantitative profiles of lexical, grammatical, metrical, and syntactic regularities, such as function-word combinations, rare words, and affix usage, as markers of idiolect. Computer text-analysis charts these regularities in concordance, graph, and table and distinguishes the random from the statistically significant, but understanding these textual objects gets us only partway towards idiolect because writing does not exhaust an author's uttering.

How can we detect Early Modern English semantic deviation, which Manfred Gorlach describes as “a difficult and largely unsolved problem for the history of the English lexicon”? Lexical and phrasal neologisms stand out from the simplest word-lists, but readers must understand the meaning of words in context before recognizing semantic drift. New diachronic corpora such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME), two web-based corpora, could help, were their vocabulary to be lemmatized and associated with specific senses in the Oxford English Dictionary. Only LEME tries to do so, however, and its more than half a million word-entries are not uniformly analyzed yet. Three instances of semantic deviation in Shakespeare’s plays serve to illustrate the challenge: the “pricking” of a witch’s thumb in Macbeth (a means of torture), the villain’s name “Aron” in Titus Andronicus (a new starch obtained from a weed of that name), and the term “acting” (for “enacting”) as used by Brutus in describing his dream of a conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. Because these innovative senses are undocumented in this period, because no monolingual English dictionaries survive from it, and because these instances of drift disappeared soon afterwards, they are hard to find. Manfred Gorlach’s problem will remain in force for some time to come if we have to rely on literary text analysis to locate semantic deviation.

The Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) is a historical database corpus of monolingual glossaries, bilingual dictionaries (in which either source or target language is English), lexical encyclopedias, and linguistic treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration periods. These texts document what speakers of English thought about their language over the lifetimes of authors like Sir Thomas More, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Dryden. LEME covers the period served by the Short-title and Wing catalogues from the advent of printing to the early eighteenth century. The scholar who pioneered the idea of the yet unrealized Early Modern English period dictionary, Charles Fries, would have recognized LEME to be a source of ‘contemporary comments’, quotations potentially useful in illustrating word usage. What Fries could not have imagined eighty years ago was a technology that would store all these quotations as distinct word-entries and list them, alphabetically by lemmatized headword, and then chronologically by lexicon date. A virtual Early Modern English period dictionary like LEME incorporates part of what he hoped to create. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a three-year grant that enabled me to begin LEME in 2000, and to the Canada Foundation for Innovation that is supplying the computing infrastructure required for its creation.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the role of computer in the preservation of records of early English drama. Since 1790, when Edmond Malone printed excerpts from the diary of Philip Henslowe, the major Elizabethan theater owner, literary antiquarians, and theater historians have eagerly searched for early English dramatic records. After the Malone Society was founded in 1907, partly to publish records of the professional theaters of Renaissance London, much information became available in its collections volumes, but many medieval provincial records were left unedited. In 1975, Records of Early English Drama (REED) was created by a team of researchers to edit and index documentary evidence for all performance and performers of drama, minstrelsy, and ceremony throughout Great Britain from the beginnings to 1642. Computer technology has already been helpful in editing. A Toronto program, Concordance Generation System (COGS), has produced, for the volumes of the York and Chester records, concordances that have been invaluable in verifying, glossing, and indexing texts by hand.

ion with a long history, but it suggested a very specific figure after the 1494 publication of Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff, and the appearance of its two English translations in i509, Barclay's verse Ship of Fools (printed by Pynson), and Henry Watson's prose version (printed by de Worde).1 The playwright seems to have modelled Hyckescorner on the poem's vaguely described Folly only as conceived in this distinctly Brantian sense: a sailor from a ship of fools who represents its more than five thousand abstract malefactors (366). The Assembly of Gods, then, is not a direct source for Hyckescorner, but all the same explains how the sea-rogue came to replace Youth's foppish courtier Pride in the playwright's mind. In the play Freewill's choice to commit himself to vice occurs first when he declares his kinship with Imagination and Hyckescorner as one of 'thre knaves in a lease' (420), and agrees to the former's scheme to pimp, rob, and murder. Freewill's engagement is fully realized when he offers, unsolicited, to fetch shackles to bind Pity (479). This job is done in Youth by Riot, but is switched in Hyckescorner to pinpoint the moment of Freewill's moral change. What motivates this desertion from semi-neutrality is not Imagination's proposed adventure in criminal night-life, but rather the conviction giving rise to those plans, 'Now vertu shall drawe arere, arere' (404), and ultimately the reason why he believes that virtue will succumb is the story that Hyckescorner has just previously related. His seemingly irrelevant 'psychomachia' tale-the Irish Sea's destruction of the navy of virtues in sight of his own ship of malefactors about to take their place triumphantly in England-is really the play's turning-point, for it is the catastrophe that corrupts Freewill. Its source, of course, lies in the poem's own psychomachia. Verbal debts already characterize the playwright's use of the battle in Hyckescorner's news: not only do the words of Imagination's conviction that virtue will 'drawe arere' recall I For a convenient survey, see Paul R. Baumgartner, 'From Medieval Fool to Renaissance Rogue: Cocke Lorelles Bote and the Literary Tradition', Annuale Mediaevale, iv (1963), 57-91. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 04:56:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 266 LANCASHIRE: THE SOURCES OF HYCKESCORNER Virtue's retreat in the poem, but Hyckescorner's lists of vices and virtues are gleaned from the poem's own catalogues of them. With such verbal debts in mind, the broader borrowing is plain. Though the battle in the poem is won by Virtue, at one point Vice seems to have conquered him: the discomfiture of Virtue's host by Sensuality's 'weeds', and Vice's complete possession of the field. In Hyckescorner the battlefield is, so to speak, England, and the disembarking of Hyckescorner's mates on her shores (together with the drowning of the virtues just set out from England) is equivalent to the driving of Virtue from Macrocosm. This neat correspondence has only one flaw. Though Imagination acts like Sensuality in other matters, so that one would expect him to imitate Sensuality's personal victory in convincing Freewill to support Vice (1053-4), Imagination only indirectly corrupts the play's Freewill after being swayed himself by Hyckescorner. Despite his debt to Folly, Hyckescorner's tale and its conclusion (a description of his shipboard bawdy-house) really make him function as a Sensuality figure, the sexual tempter with a convincing argument of virtue demolished, first affecting Imagination and then, through him, Freewill himself. The poem's last two influences on the play concern the method of Freewill's conversion. In Hyckescorner Good Perseverance (8o) and Perfect Contemplation (42) return to free Pity from the fetters in which the three rogues chained him, and, sending Pity off to 'seke them throughe the countre' (621), take charge of the conversion of Freewill and Imagination as soon as they re-enter. In Youth Charity (Pity's counterpart) and Humility convert the man-type, and the Hyckescorner playwright's alteration of his dramatic source here seems inexplicable until the poem's influence is taken into account. There Good Perseverance (not Virtue) revitalizes the retreating host of virtues and personally seizes victory when he crushes Vice in single combat. The playwright's substitution of Perfect Contemplation for Humility no doubt was occasioned by the realization that Good Perseverance, representing the active life of virtue, would be admirably complemented by Perfect Contemplation as partner, since he stands for precisely the opposite sort of virtuous life, the contemplative. Moreover, the name 'Parfyte Contemplacion' is readily at hand in the list of Virtue's lesser captains (849). In addition, the poem may have suggested Pity as the name of the divine power that the playwright substitutes for Youth's Charity, since 'Pyte' is also one of Virtue's lesser captains (828). The poem is responsible, finally, for two more abstract converters mentioned at the play's end. Contemplation's instructions, 'And, Frewyll, ever to Vertue applye; I Also to Sadnes gyve ye attendaunce' (878-9), recall the poem's conversions: Virtue makes Freewill bailiff of Macrocosm and puts Sensuality under restraint of Sadness (1259, 1270). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 04:56:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms LANCASHIRE: THE SOURCES OF HYCKESCORNER 267 The play's last tangible adaptation of the poem is the type of argument used by the play's two virtues to convert Freewill and Imagination. At the poem's end Doctrine solves the poem's central moral problem, the means by which Sensuality can be led to agree with Reason, who always advises virtue over sensual pleasures. One issue alone unites the two abstractions: 'Rather Dethe to fle then with hit to be tane' (2013). This piece of allegorical exegesis gives to the Hyckescorner author a homiletic approach to conversion not found in Youth. Charity's one argument against a sinful life is that it damns men to be 'burned in hel without ende' (79). As a result, Youth turns to God because Christ redeemed man from eternal damnation, from 'the bondage of the deuyll of hell' (713), and promised him instead bliss in heaven 'Where all ioye and myrth is' (92, 774). On the other hand, Good Perseverance's one warning of the 'grete paynes of hell' (770) is dismissed by Freewill on impeccable grounds: 'I wyll not go to the devyll whyle I have my lyberte; I He shall take the laboure to fet me and he wyl have me!' (774-5). Freewill does not deny that hell is reserved for him, but argues that, being what he is, he will only end up there if he chooses. Given his 'lyberte', Freewill views hell as a mere bogey, and only by cracking this trust in his freedom can Good Perseverance convert him. The argument that makes Freewill repent, then, modelled on Doctrine's exegesis, appeals to his impending death, the one event over which he has no control, and the door to heaven or hell (853-4). Reference to heaven's 'blysse' (967-8) fails Good Perseverance in his attempt to convert Imagination as surely as did the threat of eternal hell-fire in Freewill's case. What converts Imagination, who rejects heaven because he feels he can get what he wants less dangerously by being 'by the nose tyde In a wenches ars somewhere' (978-9), is what converted Freewill: fear of death (994-5)Though the evidence is limited, the Hyckescorner playwright apparently used at least two other sources (so far unnoticed) in writing the play: the pseudo-Skeltonic 'now-a-days' ballad and Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. John Peter finds no evidence that the dramatist was 'actually transcribing or echoing the lines' of the first source, the ballad,' but strong verbal parallels do exist. Pity's refrain in his complaint, 'Worse was hyt never!' (552, 556, 56o, 596, 6oo00), is the refrain also of the last two stanzas of the 'Maner of the World Now a Dayes' ballad, and nearly two complete consecutive stanzas spoken by Pity correspond, sometimes word for word, with two quatrains (in this case not consecutive) in the ballad, as a comparison shows (again the excerpts from the poem are on the right): I Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956), p. 190. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 04:56:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 268 LANCASHIRE: THE SOURCES OF HYCKESCORNER There be many goodly gylte knyves; And, I trowe, as well apparaylled