Shakespeare vs Rappers
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What is the debate about Shakespeare's vocabulary versus rappers?
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We're the programme that fact-checks the numbers in the news and in life. I'm Tim Harford and this week James Fletcher's poked his big smiley face round the studio door. Hello James, what have you got for me?
I've got a question for you. Which of these do you think has more literary merit? This? What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty.
Or this.
Well, to be honest, I've got a lot of time for both Shakespeare and hip-hop, but I'd be a bit shocked if schoolchildren stopped learning Shakespeare and started taking rap lessons, so I'm going to go for Shakespeare.
Well, Tim, I think that's a bit wishy-washy. This is more or less, I want to see the numbers. Where's your evidence base for saying Shakespeare is so great? Where is it?
I don't have it.
Well, here's a suggestion from a loyal listener in northern China.
Alex Wegerman. I've been an English teacher for many years now. Every year, I tell my students that Shakespeare had a larger vocabulary than any of us can ever aspire to.
Now, students everywhere are probably going to be familiar with this. Literary merit is very hard to quantify, but this is an exception, an objective reason why Shakespeare sits at the very pinnacle of English literature, that he had the largest English vocabulary of any writer in history. But Alex got in touch with us because he's worried.
I am usually greeted with many wise nods, but now I'm thinking maybe I've been lying all those years.
So what's caused Alex to lose faith? Well, he saw a chart which was doing the rounds on the internet earlier this year comparing the vocabulary sizes of various rappers. It was the brainchild of data scientist and hip-hop fan Matt Daniels. And while his main purpose was to compare the rappers to each other... he thought it would be good to throw in Shakespeare too. So how do you go about comparing the vocabulary of Shakespeare and a bunch of rappers? Well, Matt used a method called token analysis. That counts the number of unique words in any body of text that you feed into a computer program. He analysed the first 35,000 words of lyrics recorded by around 100 hip-hop artists and for comparison, the first 5,000 words of seven Shakespeare plays.
So 35,000 words again. Matt ran the numbers and found one name at the head of the pack.
He was actually off the chart, like orders of magnitude higher. So that was eye-opening and I actually had to, I should have readjusted the scale for him.
I really hope he's talking about Shakespeare. You just know that he isn't, Tim. It's actually this guy.
That's Rickety Rackety, a track from a rapper called Aesop Rock.
Yeah, I know who it is. He's not a mainstream star. He's got a loyal underground following. But what about Shakespeare?
Not too bad, Tim. I'm impressed by the infinite variety of your knowledge. Shakespeare doesn't do too badly. He does come out ahead of most of the big mainstream stars like Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z or Kanye West. They're all... back in the pack behind Shakespeare. The size of his vocabulary puts him in the top quarter, but barely. Shakespeare had 22 rappers ahead of him, and they're mostly these more underground rappers.
Well, I can see why our listener Alex is worried, but hang on, can you actually just grab 35,000 words from everyone, bung them in a computer and name the winner?
Fair enough question. I asked Matt if it's fair to compare Shakespeare to the rappers this way.
It's not quite apples to apples. Shakespeare is writing prose often. In hip hop, you're obviously writing song lyrics. There's much more slang in hip hop. So it's not a direct comparison. And to get it actually methodologically bulletproof and publishable in like a linguist journal would take probably years of data cleaning. And again, I wanted this to be fun and really a side project versus a scientific analysis.
Well, we're all in favour of fun, but this is the reputation of the bard that's at stake here, James.
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