Getting started

Readers interested in authorship attribution may understandably find the sheer quantity of scholarship on the subject intimidating. For an engaging introduction to attribution study – its history, principles, and methods – written for the non-specialist reader, the general editors recommend Harold Love's Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).

For an overview of the history of attribution studies of Shakespeare and early modern drama, see Gabriel Egan's chapter, 'A History of Shakespearean Authorship Attribution', in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford UP, 2017), pp. 27–47. For a primer in Shakespeare authorship attribution, see Hugh Craig, 'Shakespeare and Authorship Attribution Methodologies', in The Arden Research Companion to Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. by Lukas Erne (Arden Shakespeare, 2021), pp. 225–43. For discussion of external and internal forms of attribution evidence, and the order and composition of the Shakespeare canon, see Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane's book-length study, 'The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Works', in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford UP, 2017), pp. 417–602.

Martin Wiggins's (in association with Catherine Richardson) British Drama: A Catalogue, 1533-1642 (10 volumes), is an important resource for information about the plays and entertainments of the period. We have adopted the titles used in the Catalogue for entertainments (masques, tilts, royal entries, and civic pageants) for ease of cross-reference. Another valuable resource for the print and reprint history of early modern drama, including title-page attributions, is DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, edited by Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser.

Works Cited

This section supplies bibliographical information for scholarship cited in CADRE entries as well as suggested reading.

A

• Argamon, Shlomo, 'Interpreting Burrows's Delta: Geometric and Probabilistic Foundations', Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23.2 (2008), 131–47.
• Ashley, Leonard R.N., Authorship and Evidence: A Study of Attribution and the Renaissance Drama Illustrated by the Case of George Peele (1556–1596) (Librairie Droz, 1968).

B

• Bruster, Douglas, 'Shakespearean Spellings and Handwriting in the Additional Passages Printed in the 1602 Spanish Tragedy', Notes & Queries, 60 (2013), 420–24.
• Burke, Séan, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 3rd edn (Edinburgh UP, 2008).
• Burrows, John, 'All the Way Through: Testing for Authorship in Different Frequency Strata', Literary and Linguistic Computing, 22 (2007), 27–47.
• Burrows, John, 'Delta: A Measure of Stylistic Difference and a Guide to Likely Authorship', Literary and Linguistic Computing, 17 (2002), 267–87.
• Burrows, John, and Hugh Craig, 'Attribution', in The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship, ed. by Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens, and Marysa Demoor (Cambridge UP, 2019), pp. 325–40.
• Byrne, Muriel St Clare, 'Bibliographical Clues in Collaborate Plays', The Library, 14 (1932), 21–48.

C

• Craig, Hugh, 'Authorial Styles and the Frequencies of Very Common Words: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Additions to The Spanish Tragedy', Style, 26 (1992), 199–220.
• Craig, Hugh, 'Authorship', in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. by Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford UP, 2012), pp. 15–30.
• Craig, Hugh, 'Shakespeare's Vocabulary: Myth and Reality', Shakespeare Quarterly, 62.1 (2011), 53–74.
• Craig, Hugh, 'Shakespeare and Authorship Attribution Methodologies', in The Arden Research Companion to Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. by Lukas Erne (Arden Shakespeare, 2021), pp. 225–43.
• Craig, Hugh, 'Style, Statistics, and New Models of Authorship', Early Modern Literary Studies, 15 (2010), 2.1-41.
• Craig, Hugh, and John Burrows, 'A Collaboration about a Collaboration: The Authorship of King Henry VI, Part Three', in Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities, ed. by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty (Ashgate, 2012), pp. 27–65.
• Craig, Hugh, and Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cambridge UP, 2017).
• Craig, Hugh, and Ruth Lunney, 'Who Wrote Dido, Queen of Carthage?', Journal of Marlowe Studies, 1 (2020).

E

• Eder, Maciej, 'Mind Your Corpus: Systematic Errors in Authorship Attribution', Literary and Linguistic Computing, 28 (2013), 603–14.
• Egan, Gabriel, 'A History of Shakespearean Authorship Attribution', in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford UP, 2017), pp. 27–47.
• Egan, Gabriel, 'What is Not Collaborative about Early Modern Drama in Performance and Print?', Shakespeare Survey, 67 (2014), 18–28.
• Eisen, Mark, Alejandro Ribeiro, Santiago Segarra, and Gabriel Egan, 'Stylometric Analysis of Early Modern Period English Plays', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 33 (2018), 500–28.
• Elliott, Ward E.Y., and Robert J. Valenza, 'Shakespeare's Vocabulary: Did It Dwarf All Others?', in Stylistics and Shakespeare's Language: Transdisciplinary Approaches, ed. by Mireille Ravassat and Jonathan Culpeper (London: Continuum), pp. 34–57.
• Evert, Stefan, Thomas Proisl, Fotis Jannidis, Isabella Reger, Steffen Pielström, Christof Schöch, and others, 'Understanding and Explaining Delta Measures for Authorship Attribution', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 32.2 (2017), ii4–16.

F

• Freebury-Jones, Darren, and Marcus Dahl, 'Searching for Thomas Nashe in Dido, Queen of Carthage', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 35 (2020), 296–306.

G

• Greatley-Hirsch, Brett, 'Computational Studies', in The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, ed. by Evelyn Gajowski (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2020), pp. 205–21.
• Greg, W.W., 'Authorship Attributions in the Early Play-Lists, 1656–1671', Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 2 (1946), 305–26.

H

• Hammond, Antony, and Doreen DelVecchio, 'The Melbourne Manuscript and John Webster: A Reproduction and Transcript', Studies in Bibliography, 41 (1988), 1–32.
• Holdsworth, Roger, 'Stage Directions and Authorship: Shakespeare, Middleton, Heywood', Memoria di Shakespeare, 8 (2012), 57–63.
• Hope, Jonathan, The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge UP, 1994).
• Hoy, Cyrus, 'The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (I)', Studies in Bibliography, 8 (1956), 129–46.
• Hoy, Cyrus, 'The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (II)', Studies in Bibliography, 9 (1957), 143–62.
• Hoy, Cyrus, 'The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (III)', Studies in Bibliography, 11 (1958), 85–106.
• Hoy, Cyrus, 'The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (IV)', Studies in Bibliography, 12 (1959), 91–116.
• Hoy, Cyrus, 'The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (V)', Studies in Bibliography, 13 (1960), 77–108.
• Hoy, Cyrus, 'The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (VI)', Studies in Bibliography, 14 (1961), 45–67.
• Hoy, Cyrus, 'The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (VII)', Studies in Bibliography, 15 (1962), 71–90.

J

• Jackson, MacDonald P., 'Collaboration', in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. by Arthur F Kinney (Oxford UP, 2012), pp. 31–52.
• Jackson, MacDonald P., 'Cyril Tourneur and The Honest Man's Fortune', Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 32 (2019), 203–18.
• Jackson, MacDonald P., 'The Date and Authorship of Thomas of Woodstock: Evidence and Its Interpretation', Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama, 46 (2007), 67–100.
• Jackson, MacDonald P., Determining the Shakespeare Canon: "Arden of Faversham" and "A Lover's Complaint" (Oxford UP, 2014).
• Jackson, MacDonald P., 'John Webster, James Shirley, and the Melbourne Manuscript', Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 19 (2006), 21–44.
• Jackson, MacDonald P., 'John Webster and Thomas Heywood in Appius and Virginia: A Bibliographical Approach to the Problem of Authorship', Studies in Bibliography, 38 (1985), 217–35.
• Jackson, MacDonald P., 'Late Webster and His Collaborators: How Many Playwrights Wrote A Cure for a Cuckold?', Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 95 (2001), 295–313.
• Juola, Patrick, 'Authorship Attribution', Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, 1.3 (2006), 233–334.

K

• Kahan, Jeffrey, '"I tell you what mine author says": A Brief History of Stylometrics', ELH, 82.3 (2015), 815–44.
• Knapp, Jeffrey, 'What Is a Co-Author?', Representations, 89 (2005), 1–29.

L

• Lake, David J., The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays: Internal Evidence for the Major Problems of Authorship (Cambridge UP, 1975).
• Lake, David J., 'Three Seventeenth-Century Revisions: Thomas of Woodstock, The Jew of Malta, and Faustus B', Notes & Queries, 30 (1983), 133–43.
• Loughnane, Rory, 'Re-editing Non-Shakespeare for the Modern Reader: The Murder of Mutius in Titus Andronicus', The Review of English Studies, 68.284 (2017), 268–95.
• Loughnane, Rory, 'Thomas Middleton in All’s Well that Ends Well? Parts One and Two', in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford UP, 2017), pp. 278–302, 307–20.
• Loughnane, Rory, 'Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Traces of Authorship' in The Birth and Death of the Author: A Multi-Authored History of Authorship, ed. by Andrew J. Power (Routledge, 2020), pp. 54–78.
• Love, Harold, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).
• Luyckx, Kim, and Walter Daelemans, 'The Effect of Author Set Size and Data Size in Authorship Attribution', Literary and Linguistic Computing, 26 (2011), 35–55.

M

• Merriam, Thomas, 'Marlowe and Nash in Dido Queen of Carthage', Notes & Queries, 47 (2000), 425–28.

O

• Oliphant, E.H.C., The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: An Attempt to Determine Their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others (Yale UP, 1927).
• Oliphant, E.H.C., 'Problems of Authorship in Elizabethan Dramatic Literature', Modern Philology, 8 (1911), 411–59.

R

• Rowland, Richard, '"Speaking Some Words, but of No Importance"? Stage Directions, Thomas Heywood, and Edward IV', Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 18 (2005), 104–22.

S

• Schoenbaum, S., Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship: An Essay in Literary History and Method (Northwestern UP, 1966).
• Segarra, Santiago, Mark Eisen, Gabriel Egan, and Alejandro Ribeiro, 'Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency', Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (2016), 232–56.
• Smith, M.W.A., 'The Authorship of "A Lover’s Complaint": An Application of Statistical Stylometry to Poetry', Computers and the Humanities, 18 (1984), 23–37.
• Smith, M.W.A., 'The Authorship of Acts I and II of Pericles: A New Approach Using First Words of Speeches', Computers and the Humanities, 22 (1988), 23–41.
• Smith, M.W.A., 'An Investigation of Morton’s Method to Distinguish Elizabethan Playwrights', Computers and the Humanities, 19 (1985), 3–21.

T

• Taylor, Gary, 'Finding "Anonymous" in the Digital Archives: The Problem of Arden of Faversham', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 34 (2019), 855–73.
• Taylor, Gary, 'Empirical Middleton: Macbeth, Adaptation, and Microauthorship', Shakespeare Quarterly, 65 (2014), 239–72.
• Taylor, Gary, 'Middleton and Rowley — and Heywood: The Old Law and New Attribution Technologies', Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 96 (2002), 165–217.
• Taylor, Gary, 'Shakespeare, Arden of Faversham, and Four Forgotten Playwrights', The Review of English Studies, 71 (2020), 867–95.
• Taylor, Gary, 'Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and The Bloody Banquet', Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 94 (2000), 197–233.
• Taylor, Gary, and John V. Nance, 'Imitation or Collaboration? Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare Canon', Shakespeare Survey, 68 (2015), 32–47.
• Taylor, Gary, John V. Nance, and Keegan Cooper, 'Shakespeare and Who? Aeschylus, Edward III and Thomas Kyd', Shakespeare Survey, 70 (2017), 146–53.
• Taylor, Gary and Rory Loughnane, 'The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Works' in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford UP, 2017), pp. 417-602.

V

• Vickers, Brian, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford UP, 2002)

W

• Wiggins, Martin, 'When Did Marlowe Write Dido, Queen of Carthage?', The Review of English Studies, 59 (2007), 521–41.

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Page created by Brett Greatley-Hirsch on 29 August 2021; updated by Rory Loughnane on 17 January 2023.