Automatic Compositor Attribution in the First Folio of Shakespeare

Compositor attribution, the clustering of pages in a historical printed document by the individual who set the type, is a bibliographic task that relies on analysis of orthographic variation and inspection of visual details of the printed page. In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised model that jointly describes the textual and visual features needed to distinguish compositors. Applied to images of Shakespeare's First Folio, our model predicts attributions that agree with the manual judgements of bibliographers with an accuracy of 87%, even on text that is the output of OCR.Comment: Short paper (6 pages) accepted at ACL 201

Shakespeare: editions and textual studies

Shakespeare: editions and textual studie

Shakespeare: editions and textual studies

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in The year's work in English studies, following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Egan, G. (2002) Shakespeare: editions and textual studies. The year's work in English studies, 81 (1), pp. 291-352 is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ywes/maf00

The Effectiveness of the Stylometry of Function Words in Discriminating between Shakespeare and Fletcher

A number of recent successful authorship studies have relied on a statistical analysis of language features based on function words. However, stylometry has not been extensively applied to Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic questions. To determine the effectiveness of such an approach in this field, language features are studied in twenty-four plays by Shakespeare and eight by Fletcher. The goal is to develop procedures that might be used to determine the authorship of individual scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII. Homonyms, spelling variants and contracted forms in old-spelling dramatic texts present problems for a computer analysis. A program that uses a system of pre-edit codes and replacement /expansion lists was developed to prepare versions of the texts in which all forms of common words can be recognized automatically. To evaluate some procedures for determining authorship developed by A. Q. Morton and his colleagues, occurrences of 30 common collocations and 5 proportional pairs are analyzed in the texts. Within-author variation for these features is greater than had been found in previous studies. Univariate chi-square tests are shown to be of limited usefulness because of the statistical distribution of these textual features and correlation between pairs of features. The best of the collocations do not discriminate as well as most of the individual words from which they are composed. Turning to the rate of occurrence of individual words and groups of words, distinctiveness ratios and t-tests are used to select variables that best discriminate between Shakespeare and Fletcher. Variation due to date of composition and genre within the Shakespeare texts is examined. A multivariate and distributionfree discriminant analysis procedure (using kernel estimation) is introduced. The classifiers based on the best marker words and the kernel method are not greatly affected by characterization and perform well for samples as short as 500 words. When the final procedure is used to assign the 459 scenes of known authorship (containing at least 500 words)almost 112 95% are assigned to the correct author. Only two scenes are incorrectly classified, and 4.8% of the scenes cannot be assigned to either author by the procedure. When applied to individual scenes of at least 500 words in The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, the procedure indicates that both plays are collaborations and generally supports the usual division. However, the marker words in a number of scenes often attributed to Fletcher are very much closer to Shakespeare's pattern of use. These scenes include TNK IV.iii and H8 I.iii, IV.i-ii and V.iv

Shakespeare and the Stationers

Ohio State University, Columbus Graduate School monographs. Contributions in languages and literature, no.15. English series, 5(print) x, 421 p. 24 cmONE THE PROBLEM OF THE STOLEN SHAKESPEARE QUARTOS 3 -- TWO THE STATIONERS' COMPANY IN OPERATION 25 -- THREE SURREPTITIOUS PUBLICATION IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY 87 -- FOUR A CONJECTURAL HISTORY OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN SHAKESPEARE'S FELLOWS AND THE STATIONERS, 1594-1623 155 -- APPENDIX A -- COPYRIGHT AND PUBLICATION HISTORY OF THE BAD QUARTOS 257 -- Fair Em 257 -- Edward I 258 -- Orlando Furioso 258 -- II Henry VI 259 -- The Famous Victories of Henry V 261 -- The True Tragedy of Richard III 261 -- George a Greene 262 -- III Henry VI 262 -- A Knack to Know an Honest Man 262 -- Romeo and Juliet 263 -- Richard III 264 -- The Massacre at Paris 265 -- Henry V 266 -- The Merry Wives of Windsor 272 -- Hamlet 273 -- Doctor Faustus 274 -- The Fair Maid of Bristow 275 -- If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, PART 1 275 -- Sir Thomas Wyatt 276 -- King hear 276 -- Pericles 277 -- Philaster 278 -- APPENDIX B Page -- TRADE BIOGRAPHIES OF THE PUBLISHERS OF THE BAD QUARTOS 281 -- Thomas Archer 282 -- William Barley 283 -- Cuthbert Burby 285 -- John Busby Senior 289 -- Thomas Bushell 291 -- Nathaniel Butter 292 -- Thomas Creede 294 -- John Danter 296 -- Henry Gosson 300 -- Abel Jeffes 300 -- Arthur Johnson 303 -- Matthew Law 304 -- Nicholas Ling 305 -- Thomas Millington 307 -- Thomas Newman 308 -- Thomas Pavier 309 -- John Trundle 311 -- Thomas Walfyey 312 -- Edward White Senior 314 -- John Winnington 318 -- Andrew Wise 318 -- NOTES -- For Chapter One 323 -- For Chapter Two 325 -- For Chapter Three 339 -- For Chapter Four 357 -- For Appendix A 377 -- For Appendix B 379 -- CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONAL NOTES 385 -- SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 403 -- INDEX 40