Attribution of authorship of "The merchant of Venice" and "Henry VI" through linguistic parameters: a contrastive study between William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe
Juan Antonio Latorre García · 2017
This dissertation intends to attribute to The Merchant of Venice and Henry VI their likeliest authorship through a linguistic study, based on the belief that Shakespeare may not have written all the plays whose authorship has traditionally been attributed to him. There is historical evidence supporting the hypothesis that Christopher Marlowe did not die at the age of 29 as has been traditionally believed, given that he had a secret life as a spy and, for his own security, faked his own death to run away from England and settle in Italy, where he kept working on his literary production and sent his plays back to England, which were ultimately signed by Shakespeare. Consequently, this dissertation aims to test the truthfulness of this theory through a quantitative study belonging to the field of forensic linguistics, a relatively new branch of applied linguistics. For such end, a stylometric analysis was conducted with Hamlet and Dr. Faustus to delineate Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s idiolect, respectively, since the authorship of these two plays is beyond doubt. The abovementioned stylometric analysis included a lexical study which was carried out with a computer program specifically designed by the engineer David Garcia Lopez for this project, called PSH; as well as a syntactic study which was manually conducted by the researcher. Hence, the same analysis with which Hamlet and Dr. Faustus were objectively defined was applied to The Merchant of Venice and Henry VI to compare their results with those obtained by the aforementioned models for each authors’ idiolect, to conclude that The Merchant of Venice was written by Shakespeare, whereas Henry VI was produced in collaboration between Shakespeare and Marlowe.