Vocabulary links between Shakespeare's plays as a guide to chronology: a reworking of Eliot Slater's tables
MacDonald P. Jackson · Shakespeare · 2014
In a doctoral thesis (1981) and then a book (1988) on the authorship of Edward III, Eliot Slater included tables showing the numbers of rare words that each Shakespeare play shared with each of the others. Figures were presented for three categories of words: (a) those that occurred in at least 2 plays but not more than 6 times within the canon, (b) those that occurred from 7 to 10 times, and (c) the combined totals of these. It was obvious that there was a correlation between the number of words shared between plays and their degrees of chronological proximity. Slater's data were among kinds of internal evidence used by the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1986) as aids to determining the order of the plays’ composition. However, in comparing actual frequencies of rare words shared between plays with frequencies expected had they been distributed on a purely random basis, Slater calculated the latter in a way that produced several misleading results. When expected figures are recalculated according to a mathematically appropriate formula, the true affinities between plays emerge with much greater clarity. Data for Shakespeare's poems have also been reworked, as have those for Edward III, which is shown (pace Slater) to be collaborative. However, this latter finding is peripheral to the main purpose of the present article, which is concerned with the order of composition of Shakespeare's works. The Oxford chronology is generally supported, but the new computations indicate the probable need for a few adjustments.