Christopher Marlowe: Hype and Hoax
Hartmut Ilsemann · Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · 2018
This paper makes use of new tables that provide a comprehensive survey of authorship attributions derived from the Rolling Delta feature of R Stylo. Its main subject is the analysis of the Marlowe corpus and other plays connected to Marlowe. The two Tamburlaines and Locrine turn out to be sole-authored Marlowe plays. The core plays of the Marlowe corpus are largely un-Marlovian in their style and this casts further doubts on his authorship, going well beyond the assessment of Marlowe by Dabbs. But Marlowe was not a phantom. His stylistic presence could be observed in a number of the plays investigated, among them the anonymous Edward III and Shakespeare's Henry V. Contrary to findings of the New Oxford Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI is not found to have been co-authored by Marlowe. Methodological observations offer indicators for the preference of the most frequent character trigrams as variables and the possible provenance of model texts conveyed by the most frequent function words. The latter were often key pieces of evidence in traditional stylometry.