The versified play Henry VIII is nowadays widely recognized to be a collaborative work not written solely by William Shakespeare. We employ combined analysis of vocabulary and versification together with machine learning techniques to determine which other authors took part in the writing of the play and what were their relative contributions. Unlike most previous studies, we go beyond the attribution of particular scenes and use the rolling attribution approach to determine the probabilities of authorship of pieces of texts, without respecting the scene boundaries. Our results highly support the canonical division of the play between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher proposed by James Spedding, but also bring new evidence supporting the modifications proposed later by Thomas Merriam.

This article describes pilot experiments performed as one part of a longterm project examining the possibilities for using versification analysis to determine the authorships of poetic texts. Since we are addressing this article to both stylometry experts and experts in the study of verse, we first introduce in detail the common classifiers used in contemporary stylometry (Burrows’ Delta, Argamon’s Quadratic Delta, Smith-Aldridge’s Cosine Delta, and the Support Vector Machine) and explain how they work via graphic examples. We then provide an evaluation of these classifiers’ performance when used with the versification features found in Czech, German, Spanish, and English poetry. We conclude that versification is a reasonable stylometric marker, the strength of which is comparable to the other markers traditionally used in stylometry (such as the frequencies of the most frequent words and the frequencies of the most frequent character n-grams).

The article presents the Corpus of Czech Verse (i.e. a lemmatised, phonetically, morphologically, metrically and strophically annotated corpus of Czech poetry) and the online tools and frequency lists that give access to its data. The following online tools are described: Database of Czech metres – the main tool for working with the corpus data, Gunstick – a web application that serves to investigate the frequency of rhyme pairs and their historical development, Hex – an application which enables to search the Corpus of Czech Verse for texts which contain a keyword specified by the user, or to display all keywords found in the group of texts specified by the user, and Euphonometer – application which enables to quantify the degree of non-randomness of sound repetition in any text.

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The following paper describes the algorithms of phonetic and metrical components of the Czech verse processing system KVĚTA, updating information contained in previous reports (