The Two Oldcastles of London
Hartmut Ilsemann · Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · 2016
Various features of R Stylo were applied to quartos Q1 (1600) and Q2 (1619) of Sir John Oldcastle, a play performed by the Lord Admiral’s Men in November 1599 and written by Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathwaye, according to Henslowe’s diary. Reference texts by Drayton and Hathwaye were not available, but those of Munday and Wilson did not surface stylistically anywhere in the texts. Instead, stylistic features of Shakespeare’s reference texts were abundant and explain why Q2 was subtitled ‘written by William Shakespeare’. Likewise, Dekker’s ‘additions’ were absent. As the Lord Chamberlain’s Men also performed a play that was referred to as Sir John Old Castell, the assumption is that Shakespeare’s play somehow crossed over to Henslowe’s theatrical company. Multiple approaches (rolling delta, rolling classify, bootstrap consensus tree, Craig’s zeta) all come to the same conclusions.