Identifying Shakespeare's Additions toThe Spanish Tragedy(1602): A New(er) Approach
Brian Vickers · Shakespeare · 2012
In 1602 the fourth quarto edition of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy appeared, the title page describing it as “Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late been divers times acted”. The authorship of these five Additions, totalling 320 lines, has been much discussed, the leading candidates being Shakespeare and Jonson. This essay uses a new method in authorship attribution studies, drawing on insights from Corpus Linguistics. The advent in the 1960s of large electronic corpora of actual language use, and the ability to create concordances, revealed that human beings communicate not just by deploying single words but also by grouping words into sequences, collocations of several words. Some of these are shared by language communities (“by the way”, “the bottom line”), others are unique to individuals. New software programs, devised to detect student plagiarism, can scan two texts in parallel and reveal every collocation of three consecutive words (“trigrams”) common to both. When applied to anonymous or co-authored plays, this method automatically identifies collocations that occur in the target text and in works of known authorship. By checking each result against a corpus of contemporary texts it becomes possible to make authorship attributions of quite short samples with greater precision than ever before. A word-by-word comparison between the 1602 Additions to The Spanish Tragedy and over 400 plays and masques from the period 1580 to 1642 revealed more than 100 unique collocation matches with Shakespeare's plays and poems, enabling a definite attribution.