Arden of Faversham and Shakespeare's Early Collaborations: The Evidence of Meter
Jackson · Style · 2016
Most recent specialists in the attribution of authorship agree that the three Henry VI plays and Titus Andronicus , of the Shakespeare First Folio (1623) are collaborative, and that Shakespeare was also a coauthor of the anonymously published Edward III (1596). There is also growing support for the view that the middle scenes, 4–9, of the anonymous domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham (1592) were largely, if not wholly, Shakespeare’s. The evidence for all these conclusions has come mainly from computational analyses of lexical words and rates of use of high-frequency function words, from database searches of rare phrases and collocations, and from the detection of stylistic and sub-stylistic patterns of usage. Marina Tarlinskaja’s newly published investigation of the versification of English drama of the period 1561–1642 enables the allocations of shares in what are held to be Shakespeare’s early collaborations to be tested against her carefully compiled metrical data. Tarlinskaja is aware of the divisions of authorship proposed by modern attributionists and presents her counts of various verse features accordingly. Statistical analysis of the figures in her tables for the above-mentioned plays provides broad support for the latest findings. In particular, scenes 4–9 of Arden of Faversham , unlike the rest of the play, are significantly more akin metrically to the putatively Shakespearean portions of the four Folio plays and Edward III than to the putatively non-Shakespearean portions.