New Perspectives on Thomas Kyd’s Restored Canon
Darren Freebury-Jones · Notes and Queries · 2022
In this note, I explore probabilistic assumptions in the field of early modern authorship attribution studies. I reveal some significant findings concerning the distribution of linguistic items in uncontested plays, which will hopefully lead to more precise approaches towards examining texts for which the authorship is contested. As a case study, I offer new perspectives on the ‘enlarged’ sole-authored Thomas Kyd canon proposed by Brian Vickers: The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, King Leir, Arden of Faversham, Fair Em, and Cornelia.1 Utilizing Pervez Rizvi’s electronic corpus of 527 plays, ‘Collocations and N-grams’,2 MacDonald P. Jackson argues that other plays by the same author tend to share larger numbers of unique formal trigram matches than do plays by different authors.3 The n-gram, ‘I swear by heaven’, which co-occurs with Arden and Cornelia, contains two three-word phrases, ‘I swear by’ and...