“We, John Cade”: Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the authorship of 4.2.33–189 2 Henry VI

Abstract

In 2009, Hugh Craig acknowledged Christopher Marlowe as a probable collaborator on 2 Henry VI through the use of computational stylistics. His results most confidently identified Marlowe in 4.2.160–5.1.13, a section of the play that includes the majority of the Cade rebellion and the majority of the play’s dramatic prose. Despite the preponderance of Marlovian features in 4.2.160–5.1.13 – Craig’s data for 4.2.1–159 – a portion of the scene that includes our first exposure to Cade and the origin of the rebellion – were inconclusive. In 2011, Brian Vickers rejected Craig’s attribution to Marlowe on the basis of Craig’s failure to identify Marlowe (or any other candidate) for the authorship of 4.2.1–159. Vickers interpreted these inconclusive results as an indication that Craigrsquo;s methods were fundamentally flawed. Vickers then suggested that computational stylistics (a method that searches for the consistent preference of single words) was an inferior method when compared to traditional stylometrics (a method favored by many attribution scholars that examines word combinations). The following study seeks to evaluate how the results of stylometric testing compare to results using computational stylistics in 4.2 2 Henry VI.