Attribution of authorship of Arden of Favershama forensic linguistic study of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe

Resumen

This research project sets out to accomplish two main objectives. On the one hand, to determine the authorship of the Elizabethan play Arden of Faversham with a forensic linguistic analysis considering William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe as the possible candidates. On the other hand, to develop the computational program ALTXA, which can carry out authorship attribution tests within the disciplinary framework of forensic linguistics and has an intuitive interface, which will facilitate the work of other linguists and the spread of studies of this kind in educational contexts. Firstly, some biographical data of Shakespeare and Marlowe is offered to establish a connection between both which justifies their possible cooperation in the elaboration of Arden of Faversham, together with a historical and literary analysis of the play itself. Afterwards, forensic linguistics is defined and a series of basic notions about its historical development and main areas of study are provided to narrow down progressively the scope of the thesis until authorship attribution studies are presented and explained in more depth, with a special emphasis on previous investigations on the authorship of Arden of Faversham. These sections are not merely descriptive, since they include theoretical contributions that anticipate the methodological approach selected for the posterior analysis. To study the authorship of Arden of Faversham, a corpus with undisputed plays was compiled for each of the two candidates of the investigation following the hypothesis that, if the idiolect of an author is a dynamic phenomenon, these reference corpora should be formed by plays that were written in a similar period to that in which the disputed work was created, with which they should also share a tragic tone. In addition, under the belief that the validity of each attribution method depends on the type of text and authors with which it is applied, the thesis is divided into a series of pre-studies and a case study. The pre-studies have the purpose of evaluating which authorship attribution methods present a high degree of effectiveness to distinguish between undisputed scenes of Shakespeare and Marlowe depending on their length. These scenes were divided in four groups whose range of words is from 100 to 450, from 500 to 950, from 1,100 to 1,700 and almost 2,000 or more. To carry out the pre-studies, five authorship attribution methods were selected and programmed as functionalities of ALTXA. These are based on the calculation of the relative frequency of a list of keywords selected by the researcher, the quantification of the average number of words per sentence of the texts and their lexical richness, tracing common n-grams and the conduction of the Zeta test. The first of these methods was eventually discarded because of its reliance on subjective criteria, whereas the others were included in the pre-studies. The identification of common n-grams proved to be effective to distinguish between Shakespearean and Marlowian scenes from the four groups, whereas the Zeta test proved its reliability to analyse scenes from the fourth group. Consequently, these were the methods employed in the case study, that is, in the attribution of authorship of the scenes of Arden of Faversham, which were studied independently, since the play may have been written in collaboration. The results of the case study associate the authorship of 15 of the 19 scenes of the play with Marlowe, whereas only one of them has a higher degree of resemblance with the Shakespearean idiolect. The three remaining scenes present inconclusive results. Even though there is the need to include other Elizabethan playwrights as possible candidates in future research, this thesis provides sufficient evidence to suggest that the participation of Shakespeare in the elaboration of Arden of Faversham is minor or non-existent, which is already a significant finding that contradicts what has been stated by other scholars. Furthermore, it also suggests that the participation of Marlowe is undeniable, especially in the elaboration of Scene V.i, whose results are so overwhelming that it seems unthinkable that it could have been written by another author. In sum, the present doctoral thesis attributes to Marlowe the authorship of a section of the Elizabethan play Arden of Faversham, which has been catalogued as anonymous for over four centuries. This breakthrough has been accomplished with the assistance of the software ALTXA, which will be used to build an educational project that aims at contributing to the development of the discipline, that has been constantly evolving over the last decades as a result of the irruption of new technologies.