Christopher Marlowe: Hype and Hoax

Ilsemann, Hartmut

doi:10.1093/llc/fqy001

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…'Christopher Marlowe: Hype and Hoax' (Ilsemann 2018) describes using a version of John Burrows' Delta method, with rolling variable sample sizes, to overturn Marlowe's authorship of every play that has been attributed to him except for the two Tamburlaine plays. In each case except for Shakespeare, the comparison text used to determine an author's style was a single play.…”

Section: A Summary Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Marlowe and overreaching: A misuse of stylometry

Barber

2018

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

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In 'Christopher Marlowe: Hype and Hoax'(2018), Hartmut Ilsemann implies that his application of the Rolling Delta feature of R Stylo is sufficiently robust that a century and a half of traditional scholarship should be overturned, and Marlowe stripped of the majority of his canon, including Doctor Faustus and Edward II. The article concludes that 'Marlowe is totally overrated in his influence on modern English drama' (26), the natural consequence of stripping away 5/7ths of his canon. In this response, I demonstrate that the assumptions underlying this application of the Delta method, and the application itself, are fundamentally flawed, leading to predictably erroneous conclusions. Problems with the study include a poorly designed test environment; incorrect preparation of texts; assuming that 'Marlowe's style' can be determined by a single early play; selecting and constructing Shakespeare's comparison texts in a manner likely to prejudice results; ignoring the effect upon style of a play's date and genre; failing to consider the effect of different-length comparison texts; dismissing external evidence of authorship that conflicts with the test outcomes. I argue that in the light of these issues, the results and conclusions must be dismissed. Further, the question is raised as to whether the current methods of computational stylistics, even when more rigorously applied, are equipped to challenge the attribution of the accepted Marlowe canon.

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Section: A Summary Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Marlowe and overreaching: A misuse of stylometry

Barber

2018

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

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“…Omer and Oakes (2017) apply the Arabic science of poetic metre (Arud) to authorship attribution, but the texts they analyse are all prose. Historically, some significant work has been done on Shakespeare but, for example, the recent computational results of Ilsemann (2018) have been sharply criticised by Barber (2019) as a misapplication of Burrows' Delta (Burrows, 2002). Tizhoosh et al (2008) and Chaudhuri et al (2018) both set about distinguishing poetry from prose, but offer no analysis of the poetry itself.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metre as a stylometric feature in Latin hexameter poetry

Nagy¹

2019

Preprint

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This paper demonstrates that metre is a privileged indicator of authorial style in classical Latin hexameter poetry. Using only metrical features, pairwise classification experiments are performed between 5 first-century authors (10 comparisons) using four different machine-learning models. The results showed a two-label classification accuracy of at least 95% with samples as small as ten lines and no greater than eighty lines (up to around 500 words). These sample sizes are an order of magnitude smaller than those typically recommended for BOW ('bag of words') or n-gram approaches, and the reported accuracy is outstanding. Additionally, this paper explores the potential for novelty (forgery) detection, or 'one-class classification'. An analysis of the disputed Aldine Additamentum (Sil. Ital. Puni. 8:144-225) concludes (p=0.0013) that the metrical style differs significantly from that of the rest of the poem.

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2021

Performing Arts and Digital Humanities

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Christopher Marlowe: Hype and Hoax

Cited by 9 publications

References 12 publications

Marlowe and overreaching: A misuse of stylometry

Marlowe and overreaching: A misuse of stylometry

Metre as a stylometric feature in Latin hexameter poetry

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