Who Wrote That? by Donald Ostrowski

Author:Donald Ostrowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Stylometrics

From 1987 to 1990, professors Ward Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza conducted a study at Claremont McKenna College in which they looked at fifty-eight “full and partial Shakespeare claimants,” as listed by The Reader’s Encyclopedia of Shakespeare.74 They submitted the verses of the Shakespearean corpus and the writings of thirty-seven of the claimants to stylometric analysis. Their explanation for not analyzing the verses of all fifty-eight is that “[t]he remaining twenty-one claimants have left no known poems or plays to test.”75 They concluded that no similarity exists between the poetry of Shakespeare and that of his contemporaries, so none of them, including Edward de Vere, could have been the author of Shakespeare’s corpus.76 Somewhat significantly, neither they nor the Encyclopedia included William of Stratford among the claimants. If they had, he would have been listed as claimant number 59, and he would have fallen into the category of claimants who “have left no known poems or plays to test.” Thus, he would have failed the test to being included. By not including William of Stratford as one of their claimants, but then concluding he was the author, they are committing the fallacy of the circular proof (or assuming the conclusion).77

The inadequacies of their analysis are significant. For starters, the Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic ignored the changing nature of English punctuation over time, as Moore noted in The Lame Storyteller: “The Clinic feels that one of its best tests is its exclamation mark count; Shakespeare’s works show some exclamation marks, and Steven May’s edition of Oxford’s poems shows none. But, again, the Clinic neglected the time factor.” Moore pointed out that: “According to [A. C.] Partridge, the exclamation mark was not used in England until the 1590s, that is, after Oxford’s poetry was written.”78 Moore also pointed out that the clinic took their Shakespearean punctuation from the 1974 Riverside edition of Shakespeare’s works, overlooking the description of the editor, G. Blackmore Evans of Harvard University, of his idiosyncratic approach to punctuating the texts.79 What the Claremont clinic in effect may have done was to compare the punctuation styles of publishing houses rather than of authors. As Partridge wrote: “Despite the rationalization of theorists, however, and even the force of literary and theatrical example, printing-houses seem to have called the tune, and to have re-modelled, in varying degree, what came to their hands [in regard to dramatic punctuation]. Nowhere does this become clearer than in the quartos of plays printed in the decade 1594–1604.”80

Moore went on to analyze “the four non-punctuation dependent tests” and pointed out that “[t]he Clinic passed Oxford on Line Beginnings and … on Percentage Word Length once the Clinic’s faulty data is corrected, but he allegedly fails on Relative Clauses.” The Relative Clauses test has two subtests: Relative Pronouns and Relative Clauses. In regard to the Relative Pronouns subtest, Moore found Edward de Vere to be “within Shakespeare’s range and within two deviations of Shakespeare’s mean … so he passes that subtest.” In regard to the Relative

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