Is the Author Really Dead? An Empirical Study of Authorship in English Renaissance Drama

Abstract

For some time there has been debate in literary studies, and especially in the field of Shakespearean scholarship, about the importance of authorship in understanding and categorizing literary texts. In an analysis of affinities between 100 plays by various authors from the Shakespearean period, based on frequencies of very common words, authorship emerged as distinctly more important than genre or date in grouping plays. Cluster analysis showed further that, while authorial affinities are overwhelmingly dominant in the early stages of clustering, where only the closest pairings are considered, a small subset ofan author's plays typically remains apart from his other works as the analysis proceeds. The study indicates that in Shakespearean drama authorship is objectively detectable, and indeed very important, though it must also be acknowledged that these authors also regularly created texts which are not easily assimilable to the larger clusterings oftheir works.

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