Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship/Shakespeare's Additions to Thomas Kyd's the Spanish Tragedy: A Fresh Look at the Evidence regarding the 1602 Additions
Gary Taylor · Medieval & Renaissance drama in England · 2011
Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship, edited by Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xix + 234. Hardback $99.00. Shakespeare's Additions to Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy: A Fresh Look at the Evidence Regarding the 1602 Additions, by Warren Stevenson. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Pp. xi + 100. Hardback $89.95. With Craig and Kinney's collection computational stylistics has come of age, achieving at last the kind of maturity, clarity, and authority found in the best work of great manual attribution scholars like MacDonald P. Jackson. Jackson is often cited, because the digital databases and statistical packages used by Craig, Kinney, and their team provide new and independent evidence for conclusions Jackson had reached by other means. Any hermit who still doubts that Shakespeare wrote some of his plays in collaboration should henceforth be treated with the deference we reserve for relatives who've stopped taking their medication. But the new tools do not simply strengthen some old theories; they challenge others, and offer exciting solutions to more than one still-vexed Bermuda triangle. The database consists of 165 Early Modern English plays, around 3.25 million words of dialogue (xvii). Craig has been quietly building that carefully defined database, and testing ways to use it, for many years; his work is known and admired by a small cadre of statisticians and attribution scholars but hasn't until now broken out into the mainstream. Kinney, by contrast, brings humanist to sit at the table with Craig's digital. Kinney insures that the book speaks to readers more familiar with English Literary Renaissance than with Empirical Studies in the Arts. The co-authored Introduction elegantly situates authorship and attribution within a theoretical, transhistorical, cognitive framework, without ever losing sight of the stylistic achievement that makes us interested in these plays at all. Craig and Kinney explain their Methods in the second chapter. They begin by finding data that works in undisputed cases. Duh, you may say. This seems so obviously elementary and logical a preliminary stage that it isn't worth discussing. But it takes rare, patient determination to spend years developing a technique that tells people what they already know: that, for instance, Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus and Middleton wrote Hengist, King of Kent. Professionals and amateurs alike prefer to leap, immediately, to grab the glory of solving the most famous mysteries. In fact, most published studies of attribution (including those trumpeted in the newspapers) never establish the reliability of their data or their methods so painstakingly. Craig and Kinney do. They focus, throughout the book, on very common words that one playwright demonstrably uses more or less often than other playwrights of the period, and on very rare words that one playwright demonstrably uses more than anyone else. This evidence is then evaluated using well-established statistical techniques. But you don't need to be a statistician to understand the argument: 54 figures, 17 tables, 2 appendices (including one that defines technical vocabulary) make the evidence easily comprehensible, even to the most numerically challenged Shakespearian. The first fruits of this method confirm conclusions that should by now be familiar and uncontroversial: Titus Andronicus contains material written by Peele, Timon of Athens material by Middleton, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen material by Fletcher. Later chapters confirm that Shakespeare wrote nothing in Edmond Ironside (Philip Palmer, 100-115), but that he is indeed Hand D in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, and that he wrote that addition early in the seventeenth century (Timothy Irish Watt, 134-61); the same methods credit Shakespeare for the Countess scenes of Edward III, but assign to an unidentified collaborator the battle scenes from III. …