Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship

Abstract

FOLLOWING John Burrows’ use of the commonest (function) words in English and principal component analysis as the ‘key method for what came to be known as computational stylistics’, Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch extend quantitative analysis to include Random Forests, Shannon Entropy, Delta, and Student’s t-test as tools of literary exploration. Random Forests and Shannon Entropy are explained in Chapter 1, although their thorough understanding requires greater familiarity than that enjoyed by literary scholars. Unfortunately for the exposition, the PCA biplot of Figure 1.3 (37) overprints Figure 1.2 (36) with scant regard for the reader. Although the focus of computational stylistics has been chiefly on authorship, Craig and Greatley-Hirsch use the extended methods of computational stylistics to engage with six questions that exclude the determination of authorship. These questions are explored individually in Chapters 2 to 7: the difference between prose and verse; the affinity (or not) of dramatic characters within and without the same authorial canon; analysis of the type and distribution of stage properties in the early modern theatre; the ‘cultural drift’ of the English language used by dramatists 1585–1624; the influence of theatre company house style on early modern dramatists in comparison with individual authorial style; the relationship of Restoration plays to plays before the Puritan closing of the theatres. The common theme is the methodology of quantitative analysis.