The Ambassador’s Vocabulary

Does a vocabulary chosen from Neville’s embassy correspondence become more prominent in Shakespeare’s works written around the same time? An ordinary term such as “passport” belonged to the business his dispatches recorded, alongside audiences, treaties, proposals and commissions. The study assembled a panel of nineteen diplomatic and administrative terms to test whether their timing in Shakespeare differed from their timing in other drama.¹

In the selected sample, the terms rise more sharply in Shakespeare around 1599–1603 than in comparison drama. The observed pattern is clear, although the direct estimate of the difference between the two changes remains uncertain. The terms occur at broadly similar rates in the earlier Shakespeare works and comparison drama. The Shakespeare rate then rises in works assigned to 1599–1600, reaches its greatest concentration among the four selected periods in 1601–03, and falls partway back thereafter. Comparison drama changes much less.

The Shakespeare sample contains forty-one works, including three poetic units as well as plays; the comparison sample contains 203 plays. The overall rates therefore describe Shakespeare’s works, while the five works in the peak period are all plays.²

The rise during and after the embassy

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The five plays assigned to 1601–03 are Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. Together they contain thirty-four occurrences of panel terms in 120,752 words of text. Their rate is 2.18 times the earlier Shakespeare rate and 2.51 times the contemporary comparison rate.³

A vocabulary defined from Neville

The terms were selected from Neville’s correspondence and comparison drama, without using Shakespeare’s counts, titles or dates. Chapter 13 asks which plays score higher against a fixed linguistic profile; this study asks when a smaller panel of vocabulary becomes more frequent. The samples overlap but are not identical, and the studies are not independent replications.

Each term had to belong to the declared diplomatic or administrative vocabulary, occur at least five times across at least five Neville documents, first appear in his surviving record in 1599 or 1600, and be at least fifteen times as frequent per word in Neville as in the comparison plays.⁴

The choice of vocabulary and thresholds belonged to an exploratory research programme. The comparison drama helped select the terms before serving as a baseline.

The full panel is: advertise, advertisement, allowance, audience, avow, commissioner, communication, difficulty, insist, mediation, memorial, negotiation, overture, parliament, passport, propose, proposition, secretary, and treaty.

These are dictionary forms, counted across spelling and inflectional variations. Some have several meanings: an audience may be a formal reception or a body of spectators. The aggregate measures a concentration of vocabulary; particular passages show how that vocabulary works in the drama. Nor does a word’s first appearance in the surviving letters establish when Neville first learned or used it. The survival pattern matters: the collection described in Chapter 11 contains only seven letter records before 1599, against ninety-six in 1599–1600. Selecting first surviving uses in those two years may therefore partly select the point at which the archive becomes abundant, rather than the moment Neville acquired the vocabulary.²

Dates and dramatic uses

The rise also survives several plausible changes of date. Moving Measure for Measure to 1604, All’s Well after 1603, and Hamlet to 1600 leaves the remaining 1601–03 plays at 327.3 uses per million words. That final grouping contains only Twelfth Night and Troilus and Cressida, so it supports the direction of the change across these alternative dates, without fixing its exact year.⁵

Troilus and Cressida has the widest range: eight of the nineteen terms, appearing twelve times. Hamlet has nine occurrences across three panel terms. The difference makes Troilus particularly useful for examining the vocabulary in action, in scenes of council, negotiation, and prisoner exchange.

Negotiation on stage

In Troilus and Cressida, the vocabulary helps conduct the business of the war. Calchas asks the Greek leaders to exchange their prisoner Antenor for his daughter Cressida. Antenor’s value lies in his importance to Trojan affairs: without him, their negotiations must slow. Agamemnon approves the exchange and sends Diomedes to carry it out. Negotiation determines who can return home.⁶

Later in the same scene, Patroclus urges Achilles to act before his refusal to fight destroys his standing (Troilus and Cressida, 3.3):

PATROCLUS […]
Omission to do what is necessary
Seals a commission to a blank of danger,
And danger, like an ague, subtly taints
Even then when they sit idly in the sun.

The administrative language makes the warning precise: failing to act gives danger its authority. These two words belong to the play’s broader administrative register; they are not among the nineteen terms counted in the updated test.⁶

How well does the pattern hold?

Removing any individual term or peak-period play preserves the rise. Work-level resampling gives a 95% interval of approximately 1.48–4.03 for the peak’s ratio to contemporary comparison drama, and 1.18–4.11 for its ratio to earlier Shakespeare. A stricter comparison asks whether Shakespeare’s rise exceeds the change in other drama: the estimate is 2.02, but its interval, 0.91–4.48, includes no difference. The intervals remain broad because the peak contains only five plays.⁷

An exploratory calibration asked whether other panels of words concentrated in Neville’s prose would show a similar rise. About 5.7% of 20,000 matched panels rose at least as sharply within Shakespeare. The observed rise exceeds most matched panels, but does not reach the conventional 5% level in this comparison. Matching was imperfect, and the exercise was designed after the original pattern had been observed.⁸

A search across the three-year windows tested found its largest concentration in 1600–02, rather than exactly 1601–03. That maximum was not unusual after allowing for the search across all eligible windows. The result supports a broad change around the embassy and its aftermath, without isolating a uniquely exceptional three-year period.⁹

The updated study also failed to establish that Shakespeare reproduced Neville’s local network of word associations. Its evidence is a rise in vocabulary, not a personal linguistic fingerprint. Diplomatic language could reach a dramatist through books, news, conversation, or collaborators. The comparatively steady rate in other drama makes a general theatrical fashion a less satisfactory explanation, while differences of genre and subject matter still require consideration.

A set of terms defined from his surviving diplomatic record becomes substantially more prominent in Shakespeare around the embassy and its aftermath. The group result complements the particular documents and passages elsewhere in the book; it asks why this change in Shakespeare’s language accompanies this documented change in Neville’s working life.