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“Un-Shakespearian” Shakespeare Plays In Hartmut Ilsemann: “Un-Shakespearian” Shakespeare Plays In the library of Charles II a volume is labelled "Shakespeare. Vol. I". It contains three plays, namely Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester, Mucedorus and The Merry Devil of Edmonton. The attribution of these plays to William Shakespeare has not achieved much acclaim, and Eric Sams complained bitterly in similar circumstances that such testimony was treated as ‘gossip’, ‘stories’ or ‘quite wrong’ and ‘muddled’.1 Tucker Brooke who published these plays together with many other apocryphal plays2 comments: ‘The remaining members of the group [i.e. the above-mentioned plays] belong distinctly to a lower order, that is, except on the theory of apprentice work or the hastiest of retouching, modern criticism can hardly admit their claim of Shakespearian origin to be even plausible’ (Brooke, p. vi). Even worse: ‘There is a curious dramatic irony in the fact that Mucedorus and Fair Em have been attributed by serious and respectable critics to the pen of Shakespeare.’ (Brooke, p. vii) Quite bewildered he notes that as many as six quarto editions of The Merry Devil of Edmonton are recorded between 1608 and 1655, and the above-mentioned Shakespeare library volume is denounced by him as a commentary on knowledge of Shakespeare after the Restoration. Similar dismissals can be found in his introductions to the plays themselves and often Shakespeare attributions attract criticism, scorn, contempt, if not hatred. It is no wonder that traditional stylometry has never been in a position to substantiate any Shakespearian claim to these stylistically “un-Shakespearian” plays. In 2013, however, a version of Rolling Delta became available which had recourse to Burrows’s Delta (2002),3 and had opened up new possibilities of authorship attributions. Whereas Burrows’s Delta could only deal with whole texts and sole-authored plays, the improved version of Maciej Eder, Jan Rybicki and Mike Kestemont made use of windows of a particular size that rolled through the text with an overlap und could in this way indicate collaborations.4 Recent studies have thus been able to tackle problematic authorship issues and offer solutions. Locrine, which had the initials “W.S.” on the title page is in fact not an early play by Shakespeare, as Tieck believed and Eric Sams confirmed (Sams, p. 165), but a play by Christopher Marlowe (Brooke: ‘… which I feel a large degree of confidence in attributing as a whole to the pen of Robert Greene.’ p. xvii). Traditional stylometry was dependent on a rather small number of strong discriminators and was endangered by an insufficient number of variables producing statistical havoc, but it was nevertheless accepted in general as a signal, a hint or an indication. Burrows’s Delta makes use of weak discriminators, but in such numbers that statistically sound results are the outcome. Hoover 2 quotes Burrows’s original definition of Delta as ‘the mean of the absolute differences between the z-scores for a set of word-variables in a given text-group and the z-scores for the same set of word-variables in a target text.’5 When Locrine was analysed with a set of reference texts the lowest delta values of each measuring point, indicating the smallest stylistic difference between reference texts and exploration text, referred to Marlowe’s Tamburlaines (see: http://www.shak-stat.engsem.uni-hannover.de/esurvey.html). Other investigations dealt conclusively with Shakespeare’s role in Sir Thomas More and Sir John Oldcastle.6 Another paper, called “Stylometry approaching Parnassus,” was submitted to DSH7 and proved that John Marston and Thomas Nashe were the authors of The Parnassus Plays. For this reason it makes sense to apply the new non-traditional stylometry features to the texts in question bearing in mind that at least Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester and Mucedorus can lay claim to the theory of apprentice work that Brooke mentioned. Q 1 of Fair Em is undated, and the only known copy of this edition is in the Bodleian, the other quarto, Q 2 was printed for John Wright and gives the year 1631. Eric Sams saw Fair Em attacked by Greene in the Preface to his Farewell to Folly, printed in 1591, but already registered in 1587 (Sams, p. 163ff.) This would make Fair Em a really early play that ranges in the same period as The Famous Victories of Henry V.8 William Knell who had played the role of Henry was killed in Spring 1587, and it is a safe conclusion that the play was extant in 1586, if not earlier. Ever since Delta came into being various attempts have been made to find the best possible parameters in the process of authorship detection. Hoover achieved excellent results when the culling value was set to 70 % (automatic removal of words too characteristic of individual texts), which led to a harmonization of the word lists and their comparability.9 Jack Grieve tested variable types and found the most frequent character trigrams (MF3C) superior to character bigrams (MF2C), word frequencies (MF1W) and other variables.10 Another important point is the choice of reference texts and their quality. It is obvious that modern spelling editions and the highly individual spellings of Renaissance drama editions (most of them quartos,) do not really match, even though MF3C does remarkably well in such situations. There is a certain degree of uncertainty when a best-fitting reference text is missing, and the scarcity of texts by a particular author can be a severe problem, which Rolling Delta shares with traditional stylometric approaches. If reference texts are not sole- authored the outcome is always doubtful, and whatever the results of text examinations are, they have to be seen as current evidence within a complex interdependent system of attributions where the exchange of one cornerstone requires a rebuild in parts of the edifice. 3 Happily the attribution with Shakespeare texts is less hazardous, as there are enough pure texts without collaborative passages. Moreover Rolling Delta seems to be very sensitive to temporal circumstances, while traditional stylometry worked with whole text corpora stretching over decades, as if there were no development of style within time. It is obvious that the choice of reference texts has to undergo a careful selection process in which a large number of samples (i.e. their lowest delta values) determine whether they are suitable. In the case of Fair Em the following texts were used as reference texts after the elimination of a fair number of unsuitable references. The folder with the primary_set contained: Anon. King Leir (c. 1594) (21306 words) Greene. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (16828 words) Kyd. Soliman and Perseda (17867 words) Munday. John a Kent and John a Cumber (13514 words) Peele. The Old Wives’ Tale (7713 words) Shakespeare. The Two Gentlemen of Verona (17255 words) The folder with the secondary_set comprised: Anon. Fair Em (11607 words) The surprise on this list is certainly the anonymous play King Leir which a mixed acting company of the Queen Elizabeth’s and Sussex’s Men, performed on 6 and 8 April 1594 at the Rose Theatre, as recorded by Philip Henslowe. This was before Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in June. Rolling Delta identified King Leir clearly as a play by Shakespeare, and this claim can be substantiated when we look into the chart that examines Fair Em with a 5000-word window, evaluating the most frequent character trigrams with a window overlap of 250 words and a culling percentage of 70. 4 Figure 1 Reference texts and lowest delta figures in the evaluation of Fair Em Of all texts King Leir has the smallest stylistic distance from Fair Em, immediately followed by The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a play that has made it into the First Folio, but is seen by many as a weak Shakespeare play that has many imperfections and was written around 1590. The idea that Shakespeare’s apprentice plays lack the complexity and maturity of the official corpus is somehow mirrored in the various window sizes tested with Rolling Delta. The smaller windows are normally unreliable, as Eder has shown in his paper “Small Samples, Big Problems”.11 When he examined 62 European novels he found that a window size of 5000 words was suitable, and this is also the default value of R Stylo’s feature Rolling Delta feature. In the majority of Shakespeare plays one can indeed not tell much below 5000- word windows whether the play is by Shakespeare or a collaborative piece of work. This is often due to the material that Shakespeare used, and at the beginning of his career there seems to be lot of plagiarism, if not pilfering, as attested by Greene and Nashe in many of their writings. But often these early “un-Shakespearian” plays give away their author at a very early stage of tested window sizes. But the large volume of data has made it almost impossible to grasp the overall results. For this reason the lowest delta value of each measuring point, indicating the smallest stylistic difference between reference texts and exploration text, was now noted and furnished with a capitalised letter representing the author of the respective text. The outcome can be seen in Table 1, a matrix that displays text segments of 250 words vertically (column A), beginning at 500 words where B6 is the first measuring point of the 1000-word window. The next window covers 1500 words and its first 5 measuring point (C7) is at 750 words. 750 words is also the second measuring point of the 1000-word window marking words 251-1250 of the text.
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