Relative contributions of Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII: An Analysis Based on Most Frequent Words and Most Frequent Rhythmic Patterns

Abstract

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 authors also 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.

Metrical Tagging in the Wild: Building and Annotating Poetry Corpora with Rhythmic Features

“…However, for projects that work with larger text corpora, close reading and extensive manual annotation are neither practical nor affordable. While the speech processing community explores end-toend methods to detect and control the overall personal and emotional aspects of speech, including fine-grained features like pitch, tone, speech rate, cadence, and accent (Valle et al, 2020), applied linguists and digital humanists still rely on rulebased tools (Plecháč, 2020;Anttila, 2016;Kraxenberger and Menninghaus, 2016), some with limited generality (Navarro-Colorado, 2018;Navarro et al, 2016), or without proper evaluation (Bobenhausen, 2011). Other approaches to computational prosody are based on words in prose rather than syllables in poetry (Talman et al, 2019;Nenkova et al, 2007), rely on lexical resources with stress annotation such as the CMU dictionary, (Hopkins and Kiela, 2017;Ghazvininejad et al, 2016), are in need of an aligned audio signal (Rosenberg, 2010;Rösiger and Riester, 2015), or model only narrow domains such as iambic pentameter (Greene et al, 2010;Hopkins and Kiela, 2017;Lau et al, 2018) or Middle High German (Estes and Hench, 2016).…”