Forensic stylometry
Hartmut Ilsemann · Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · 2018
The R Stylo program features, Rolling Delta and Rolling Classify, were applied to Thomas Kyd’s closet drama Cornelia. After the elimination of a large number of unsuitable reference texts, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine 1 turned out to be the play with the lowest delta values; that is it showed the smallest stylistic difference from Cornelia. In previous investigations the anonymous play The Tragedy of Locrine had been identified as a play by Christopher Marlowe (see Appendix). In a double check the procedures were repeated with Locrine, and it was Locrine in particular that came to the foreground. This was confirmed by traditional stylometric measurements like bootstrap consensus trees, multivariate analyses, and multidimensional scaling. Craig’s Zeta located Cornelia’s preferred vocabulary in the vicinity of the Marlowe compound. The safe conclusion is that Cornelia’s real provenance is Christopher Marlowe, who had shared lodgings with Kyd before he was killed by fellow government agent Frizer in Deptford on 30 May 1593.