Shakespeare’s clearest use of dialect for sociolinguistic reasons can be found in the play Henry V, where we meet the Welshman Captain Fluellen, the Scotsman Captain Jamy and the Irishman Captain Macmorris. But what might contemporary audiences have made of these Celtic characters? What popular understandings of Celtic identities did Shakespeare’s characters trigger? Recent technological developments, largely in the domain of corpus linguistics, have enabled us to construct robust but nuanced answers to such questions. In this study, we use CQPweb, a corpus analysis tool developed by Andrew Hardie at Lancaster University, to explore Celtic identity terms in a corpus developed by the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project. This corpus contains some 380 million words spanning the 80-year period 1560–1639 and allows us to tap into the attitudes and stereotypes that would have become entrenched in the years leading up to Henry V’s appearance in 1599. We will show how the words tending to co-occur with the words Scots/Scottish, Irish and Welsh reveal contemporary understandings of these identities. Results flowing from the analyses of collocates include the fact that the Irish were considered wild and savage, but also that the word Irish had one particular positive use – when modifying the word rug. In discussing our findings, we will take note of critical discussions, both present day and early modern, on ‘nationhood’ in relation to these characters and identities. We will also conduct, partly for contrastive purposes, a brief analysis of the English identity.

莎士比亚出于社会语言学原因而最清楚地使用方言，可以在剧本《亨利五世》中找到在这里，我们会见了威尔士人队长Fluellen，苏格兰人队长Jamy和爱尔兰人队长Macmorris。但是当代观众会对这些凯尔特人的角色有什么看法？莎士比亚的角色引发了哪些关于凯尔特人身份的流行理解？最近的技术发展（主要是在语料库语言学领域）使我们能够为此类问题构建可靠而细微的答案。在这项研究中，我们使用兰开斯特大学的安德鲁·哈迪（Andrew Hardie）开发的语料库分析工具CQPweb来探索莎士比亚语言项目百科全书开发的语料库中的凯尔特人身份术语。这个语料库包含了380万个单词，涵盖了1560年至1639年的80年间，使我们能够利用态度和陈规定型观念，这些观念和刻板观念在直到亨利五世（Henry V）于1599年问世。我们将说明倾向于与苏格兰/苏格兰，爱尔兰和威尔士语同时出现的词语如何揭示了当代对这些身份的理解。从搭配词的分析结果流包括爱尔兰被认为是事实野和野蛮，而且这个词爱尔兰有一个特别积极的用途-修改这个词的时候地毯。在讨论我们的发现时，我们会注意到有关这些特征和身份的“民族”的当今和早期现代的批判性讨论。我们还将（部分出于对比的目的）对英文身份。