ABSTRACT
The project "Shakespeare's Insides", which began in 2010 and is now in its final phase, applies a combination of computer-assisted quantitative analysis and traditional modes of close reading to all soliloquies and monological asides in Shakespeare's complete plays. The chief novelty of Shakespeare's Insides lies in the employment of quantitative, computer-assisted analysis as a complement to traditional interpretive practices. Computer-assisted analysis can help uncover overriding patterns, and exceptions from these patterns, that are hard to detect by just reading the plays. Coding around 7 percent of 39 Shakespeare plays is a time-consuming and highly fallibilistic endeavor, obviously, but the notable pay-off is that one can quantify much more intellectually stimulating phenomena than any computer software could handle. This chapter concludes with some very brief preliminary results on Shakespeare's selective use of a particular rhetorical figure—apostrophe—with a particular eye to the language of interiority in Hamlet.
