Anne Francis, née Gittins (1738 – 7 November 1800) was an English classical scholar and poet. She is notable for a poetic translation of the Bible's Song of Songs that focuses on the dramatic action of the song, rather than its Christian allegorical interpretation.
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"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them", quoth William Shakespeare. Or did he? Some people question whether Shakespeare really wrote the works that bear his name, or whether he even existed at all. They speculate that Shakespeare was a pseudonym for another writer, or a group of writers. Proposed candidates for the real Shakespeare include other famous playwrights, politicians and even some prominent women. Could it be true that the greatest writer in the English language was as fictional as his plays? Most Shakespeare scholars dismiss these theories based on historical and biographical evidence. But there is another way to test whether Shakespeare's famous lines were actually written by someone else. Linguistics, the study of language, can tell us a great deal about the way we speak and write by examining syntax, grammar, semantics and vocabulary. And in the late 1800s, a Polish philosopher named Wincenty Lutosławski formalized a method known as stylometry, applying this knowledge to investigate questions of literary authorship. So how does stylometry work? The idea is that each writer's style has certain characteristics that remain fairly uniform among individual works. Examples of characteristics include average sentence length, the arrangement of words, and even the number of occurrences of a particular word. Let's look at use of the word thee and visualize it as a dimension, or axis. Each of Shakespeare's works can be placed on that axis, like a data point, based on the number of occurrences of that word. In statistics, the tightness of these points gives us what is known as the variance, an expected range for our data. But, this is only a single characteristic in a very high-dimensional space. With a clustering tool called Principal Component Analysis, we can reduce the multidimensional space into simple principal components that collectively measure the variance in Shakespeare's works. We can then test the works of our candidates against those principal components. For example, if enough works of Francis Bacon fall within the Shakespearean variance, that would be pretty strong evidence that Francis Bacon and Shakespeare are actually the same person. What did the results show? Well, the stylometrists who carried this out have concluded that Shakespeare is none other than Shakespeare. The Bard is the Bard. The pretender's works just don't match up with Shakespeare's signature style. However, our intrepid statisticians did find some compelling evidence of collaborations. For instance, one recent study concluded that Shakespeare worked with playwright Christopher Marlowe on "Henry VI," parts one and two. Shakespeare's identity is only one of the many problems stylometry can resolve. It can help us determine when a work was written, whether an ancient text is a forgery, whether a student has committed plagiarism, or if that email you just received is of a high priority or spam. And does the timeless poetry of Shakespeare's lines just boil down to numbers and statistics? Not quite. Stylometric analysis may reveal what makes Shakespeare's works structurally distinct, but it cannot capture the beauty of the sentiments and emotions they express, or why they affect us the way they do. At least, not yet.
Biography
Anne Gittins was born in 1738 as the daughter of the Rev. Daniel Gittins, rector of South Stoke, near Arundel, Sussex. She was educated by her father in the classics and Hebrew. She married the Rev. Robert Bransby Francis, rector of Edgefield, near Holt, Norfolk.
Though she lacked formal classical training, Anne Francis was in contact with the leading Old Testament scholars of the time: her Poetical Translation of the Song of Songs was dedicated to John Parkhurst, and other subscribers included Robert Lowth and Benjamin Kennicott. The Poetical Translation focused on what she saw as the direct dramatic action of the song, rather than its Christian allegorical interpretation. Taking a cue from Thomas Harmer, Francis distinguished the voice of an "Egyptian Spouse" from that of a "Jewish Queen": in this love triangle, Solomon's marriage to the daughter of Pharaoh being resented by an earlier wife.[1]
Francis's translation has not received much continuing attention. Yet in the verdict of one recent commentator, Francis's "insistence on bringing together learning and feeling, what she knew as male and female worlds, makes her Song of Songs an outstanding feminist monument."[2]
In 1787, Francis changed publishers to raise her voice in response to Goethe's "Charlotte to Werther. A Poetical Epistle".[3] Throughout the 1790s, she further strengthened the reactionary side of the political divide by periodically publishing work.
Despite Francis's lack of formal education, she aided in efforts to adapt French and German playscripts, as did various other female writers.[4]
Anne Francis died on 7 November 1800, at the age of 62.
Selected works
- A Poetical Translation of the Song of Solomon from the original Hebrew, with a preliminary Discourse and Notes, historical and explanatory, 1781, 4to.
- The Obsequies of Demetrius Poliorcetes: a Poem, 1785, 4to.
- A Poetical Epistle from Charlotte to Werther, 1788, 4to.
- Miscellaneous Poems, 1790, 12mo.
References
- ^ Al Wothers (2012). "Francis, Ann (1738–1900)". In Marion Ann Taylor; Agnes Choi (eds.). Handbook of Women Biblical Interpreters: A Historical and Biographical Guide. Baker Books. ISBN 978-1-4412-3867-2.
- ^ Mary Dove, "Merely a Love Poem? Common Sense, Suspicion, and the Song of Songs". In Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden, eds., Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 151–163, p. 161. Quoted in Wothers.
- ^ Susan Brown, et al. "Anne Francis". Orlando Project, Cambridge University, orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=franan.
- ^ Catherine B. Burroughs, Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Bibliography
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Francis, Anne". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.