Stylometric Analysis of Early Modern Period English Plays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel stylometric method using function word adjacency networks to attribute authorship of Early Modern English plays, outperforming traditional frequency-based techniques and providing detailed act and scene-level analysis.

Contribution

The study develops and validates WANs for authorship attribution, demonstrating superior accuracy and reliability, especially for collaborative and disputed co-authored plays.

Findings

WANs outperform traditional methods in attribution accuracy

WANs reliably classify collaborative plays

Detailed act and scene analysis supports existing co-authorship claims

Abstract

Function word adjacency networks (WANs) are used to study the authorship of plays from the Early Modern English period. In these networks, nodes are function words and directed edges between two nodes represent the relative frequency of directed co-appearance of the two words. For every analyzed play, a WAN is constructed and these are aggregated to generate author profile networks. We first study the similarity of writing styles between Early English playwrights by comparing the profile WANs. The accuracy of using WANs for authorship attribution is then demonstrated by attributing known plays among six popular playwrights. Moreover, the WAN method is shown to outperform other frequency-based methods on attributing Early English plays. In addition, WANs are shown to be reliable classifiers even when attributing collaborative plays. For several plays of disputed co-authorship, a deeper analysis is performed by attributing every act and scene separately, in which we both corroborate existing breakdowns and provide evidence of new assignments.