The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0193 Friday, 28 March 2008
From: Ward Elliott <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Mar 2008 12:58:16 -0700
Subject: 19.0176 Shakespeare's Style
Comment: RE: SHK 19.0176 Shakespeare's Style
Elliott Stone [SHK 19.0176] notes our skepticism of the handy assumption
that co-authors neatly divide their contributions by act and scene and
wonders how it might affect attributions of Titus Andronicus. Great
question! The short answer, not surprisingly, is that, in some cases, it
makes it harder to make clear ascriptions scene by scene, but maybe
easier to make sense of scenes with ambiguous or conflicting indicators.
We've been working for more than two years at applying our new-optics
methods to co-authored Shakespeare plays, typically analyzing passages
of about 1,500 words, which should be long enough to get our expected
accuracy in distinguishing single-authored texts to 95% or better.
We're still working on these and have only published some of our
results. Our current results on Titus are broadly consistent with the
old-optics consensus, magisterially described by Sir Brian Vickers in
Chapter 3 of his Shakespeare, Co-Author (2002): of the play's 13
blocks, all nine of the old-optics "Shakespeare" blocks are what we
cautiously call "Shakespeare could-be's," fitting more or less snugly
into our Shakespeare test profiles. Our results support the consensus on
these. Two of the old-optics "Peele" blocks, 1.01.1-257, and 4.01, look
like "Shakespeare couldn't-be's" by our tests, again supporting the
consensus. In other words, we are 85% in agreement with the old-optics
consensus.
But two of the consensus "Peele" blocks - 1.01.258-end and 2.01-.02 --
look like Shakespeare could-be's on our regular tests, and still look to
us like Shakespeare could-be's even after trying a few more new-optics
tests. For these, it's not so clear that the old consensus is right.
Some combination of further new-optics testing on our part and separate
old-optics testing of the suspect blocks might help clear this up. We do
get about 5% false positives from known non-Shakespeare blocks of this
size, and most of the old-optics results have been studied and presented
for all the "Peele" and "Shakespeare" blocks in aggregates, not just the
two blocks in question. Focusing on them separately might help. But it's
also entirely possible that further testing will not unmuddy the waters
on these two blocks and leave conflicting evidence as to who could have
written them. If so, it could be taken as an indicator that either
old-optics or new-optics tests still need further work-or that the
muddied picture lies not so much in the optics as in the authorship
itself. What might be a great mystery if you assumed that co-authorship,
which can easily be found in whole plays, could never be found in
subsections of plays, would be much less mysterious if you did not make
such an assumption.
Yours,
Ward Elliott
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