Abstract
Since the late seventeenth century, numerous plays have been attributed to William Shakespeare, whether correctly or not. With Shakespeare’s towering reputation and the collaborative nature of Renaissance playwriting, scholars have debated on the plays truly composed by Shakespeare. Thomas Middleton, Shakespeare’s contemporary and periodic writer for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, is known to have collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens. However, several Jacobean Tragedies/Tragicomedies including Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, The Revenger’s Tragedy, A Yorkshire Tragedy, continue to present dilemmas for authorial verification between Shakespeare and Middleton. The present article reports on an authorship verification analysis of Shakespeare and Middleton’s collaboration with a relatively “new stylometric method,” “Rolling Classification,” from the package ‘Stylo’ in the R language, utilizing “supervised machine-learning classification” along with “sequential analysis” in order to inspect texts’ “stylometric signals.” The quantitative results support the hypothesis that Middleton adapted Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well, collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens, added text to Macbeth, and solely authored A Yorkshire Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy. The scene-by-scene analysis performed in the study suggests several scene-bridges and interpolations in Measure for Measure, short scene interpolation in All’s Well that Ends Well, collaboration on Timon of Athens, and short scene additions in Macbeth by Middleton.
Keywords: Authorship Attribution, Machine Learning, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Rolling Classification, Support Vector Machine, Nearest Shrunken Centroids, Jacobean Theater
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