The Beggars Bush N-Gram

This shows the frequency with which the Beggars Bush appears as a phrase in printed works which have survived and been digitised. The early spike includes Anger, Porter, and Marprelate, but the lull afterwards shows the absence of the phrase from the coney-catching pamphlets which followed. I think the small spike from c.1620 and the big spike and continued higher figures after 1660 are largely the result of the performance and then publication of the play when the theatres re-opened. With the sudden drop around 1690 arising from the Glorious Revolution and the arrival of King William of Orange. The database ends at 1700.

This is courtesy of the The EarlyPrint Lab which offers a range of tools for the computational exploration and analysis of English print culture before 1700. They say they apply these tools to a corpus of more than 60,000 early English printed documents, roughly 1.65 billion words. They intend the Lab as a provocation, not a finished toolkit. By exposing the corpus of early printed texts at scale we hope to defamiliarize familiar texts and invite exploration of unfamiliar ones. The tools and visualizations offer perspectives on the corpus that invite users to probe early English discursive history in ways that complement the search capabilities of EEBO-TCP and the Oxford English Dictionary (and LEME – the brilliant but sadly no longer available Lexicons of Early Modern English.

Try it for yourself.

Posted: October 20th, 2025 | Filed under: Writers, Uncategorized | | No Comments »