Stylometric Analysis of Early Modern Period English Plays

Function word adjacency networks (WANs) are used to study the authorship of plays from the Early Modern English period. In these networks, nodes are function words and directed edges between two nodes represent the relative frequency of directed co-appearance of the two words. For every analyzed play, a WAN is constructed and these are aggregated to generate author profile networks. We first study the similarity of writing styles between Early English playwrights by comparing the profile WANs. The accuracy of using WANs for authorship attribution is then demonstrated by attributing known plays among six popular playwrights. Moreover, the WAN method is shown to outperform other frequency-based methods on attributing Early English plays. In addition, WANs are shown to be reliable classifiers even when attributing collaborative plays. For several plays of disputed co-authorship, a deeper analysis is performed by attributing every act and scene separately, in which we both corroborate existing breakdowns and provide evidence of new assignments.

[1]  Cyril Tourneur,et al.  The Revenger's Tragedy , 2014 .

[2]  G. Yule.  ON SENTENCE- LENGTH AS A STATISTICAL CHARACTERISTIC OF STYLE IN PROSE: WITH APPLICATION TO TWO CASES OF DISPUTED AUTHORSHIP , 1939 .

[3]  Thomas Middleton,et al.  The Second Maiden's Tragedy , 1978 .

[4]  Hugh Craig,et al.  Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship: Plays in the corpus , 2009 .

[5]  Alan B Farmer,et al.  Early Modern Digital Scholarship and DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks , 2008 .

[6]  Fiona J. TweedieNovember.  Using Markov Chains for Identification of Writers , 2002 .

[7]  Patrick Cheney,et al.  The Cambridge companion to Christopher Marlowe , 2004 .

[8]  Dmitry V. Khmelev,et al.  Using Markov Chains for Identification of Writer , 2001, Lit. Linguistic Comput..

[9]  Allardyce Nicoll,et al.  The Elizabethan Stage. , 1924 .

[10]  O. Rosso,et al.  Shakespeare and other English Renaissance authors as characterized by Information Theory complexity quantifiers , 2009 .

[11]  David L. Hoover,et al.  Another Perspective on Vocabulary Richness , 2003, Comput. Humanit..

[12]  Shlomo Argamon,et al.  Measuring the Usefulness of Function Words for Authorship Attribution , 2020 .

[13]  Ants Oras.  Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: An Experiment in Prosody , 2012 .

[14]  James Loxley,et al.  The complete critical guide to Ben Jonson , 2001 .

[15]  Gary Taylor,et al.  Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works , 2008 .

[16]  T. V. N. Merriam.  Marlowe’s Hand in Edward III , 1993 .

[17]  G. Taylor,et al.  The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion , 2017 .

[18]  Stanley W. Wells.  Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story , 2006 .

[19]  David I. Holmes,et al.  Vocabulary Richness and the Prophetic Voice , 1991 .

[20]  Efstathios Stamatatos,et al.  A survey of modern authorship attribution methods , 2009, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[21]  Dennis McCarthy.  Shakespeare and Arden of Faversham , 2013 .

[22]  Hugh Craig,et al.  Shakespeare's Vocabulary: Myth and Reality , 2011 .

[23]  T. Merriam.  Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays , 2003 .

[24]  Gary Taylor,et al.  The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works , 2017 .

[25]  Peter Holland,et al.  Shakespeare After All?: The Authorship of Titus Andronicus 4.1 Reconsidered , 2014 .

[26]  Gary Taylor,et al.  Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606-1623 , 1993 .

[27]  Terence P. Logan,et al.  The New intellectuals , 1977 .

[28]  Jean C. Walrand,et al.  Relative entropy between Markov transition rate matrices , 1993, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[29]  Andrew Gurr,et al.  The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642 , 2004 .

[30]  William Shakespeare,et al.  The Taming of a Shrew: The 1594 Quarto , 1999 .

[31]  William Shakespeare,et al.  The Shakespeare Apocrypha: Being a Collection of Fourteen Plays Which Have Been Ascribed to Shakespeare , 2009 .

[32]  P. Gaskell,et al.  A new introduction to bibliography , 1972 .

[33]  S. C. Sen Gupta.  A Shakespeare manual , 1982 .

[34]  Terence P. Logan,et al.  The later Jacobean and Caroline dramatists , 1978 .

[35]  Terence P. Logan,et al.  The Predecessors of Shakespeare , 1973 .

[36]  Stanley Wells,et al.  Scenic Form in Shakespeare , 1972 .

[37]  Penelope Sibun,et al.  A Practical Part-of-Speech Tagger , 1992, ANLP.

[38]  MacDonald P. Jackson,et al.  Shakespeare and the Quarrel Scene in Arden of Faversham , 2006 .

[39]  Mark Eisen,et al.  Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency , 2016 .

[40]  John Burrows,et al.  'Delta': a Measure of Stylistic Difference and a Guide to Likely Authorship , 2002, Lit. Linguistic Comput..

[41]  D. Lake,et al.  The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays: Internal Evidence for the Major Problems of Authorship , 1975 .

[42]  F. Mosteller,et al.  Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist , 1966 .

[43]  Cathy Shrank,et al.  Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works , 2009 .

[44]  MacDonald P. Jackson,et al.  Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case , 2003 .

[45]  Norman Meuschke,et al.  State-of-the-art in detecting academic plagiarism , 2013 .

[46]  Marina Tarlinskai︠a︡,et al.  Shakespeare's Verse: Iambic Pentameter and the Poet's Idiosyncrasies , 1987 .

[47]  William Shakespeare,et al.  The Riverside Shakespeare , 1883 .

[48]  D. Holmes.  A Stylometric Analysis of Mormon Scripture and Related Texts , 1992 .

[49]  I.N. Bozkurt,et al.  Authorship attribution , 2007, 2007 22nd international symposium on computer and information sciences.

[50]  Santiago Segarra,et al.  Authorship attribution using function words adjacency networks , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[51]  Pablo Moscato,et al.  An Information Theoretic Clustering Approach for Unveiling Authorship Affinities in Shakespearean Era Plays and Poems , 2014, PloS one.

[52]  H. Dugdale Sykes.  John Ford, the Author of "The Spanish Gipsy" , 1924 .

[53]  Simon Günter,et al.  Short Text Authorship Attribution via Sequence Kernels, Markov Chains and Author Unmasking: An Investigation , 2006, EMNLP.

[54]  George M. Mohay,et al.  Mining e-mail content for author identification forensics , 2001, SGMD.

[55]  Jean-Baptiste Lully,et al.  The collected works , 1996 .

[56]  D. Holmes,et al.  The Federalist Revisited: New Directions in Authorship Attribution , 1995 .

[57]  Santiago Segarra,et al.  Authorship Attribution Through Function Word Adjacency Networks , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

[58]  Philip Wolcott Timberlake.  The feminine ending in English blank verse : a study of its use by early writers in the measure and its development in the drama up to the year 1595, with full tables of percentages , 1931 .