The digital turn in early modern drama studies

In this essay we review the scholarly significance of the digital turn in early modern drama
studies, with a special focus on drama from the Low Countries. Two methodological
developments enabled this ‘turn’ in the last ten years: the ongoing digitisation of theatre archives
and corpora, and the integration of quantitative and computational methods. We assess the
impact of these developments with a brief overview of existing resources and computational
research on early modern (Dutch) drama. Furthermore we illustrate this impact with a case study
on multilingualism in character speech in a multilingual corpus of 2,501 early modern plays.
This overview and case study demonstrate that the digital turn introduced a productive new
paradigm expanding the field of early modern (theatre) history with new comparative,
cross-lingual and cross-cultural approaches. Besides reviewing the state of the field, we identify
a promising direction for future research in the use of transformer-based language models to
support both monolingual and multilingual, or cross-lingual, comparisons of drama corpora.
These computational methods and models offer unprecedented opportunities to analyse,
compare, and interpret early modern dramatic texts across temporal, cultural, and linguistic
boundaries.