This article explores Shakespeare’s verbal indebtedness to works that have been attributed to Thomas Kyd, encompassing plays such as Soliman and Perseda, King Leir, and Arden of Faversham. Significantly, Martin Mueller has created an electronic corpus called Shakespeare His Contemporaries, which consists of over 500 plays dated between 1552 and 1662. Shakespeare His Contemporaries lists play pairs that share large numbers of dislegomena consisting of four words or more, and therefore provides empirical data that can help researchers to explore the intertextual relationships between early modern texts. This article investigates the nature of these parallels, drawing upon the idea of Shakespeare’s aural, or ‘actor’s memory’, and concludes that in order to distinguish between authorship and influence in contested texts like Arden of Faversham, more work needs to be done to ascertain the patterns of influence in Shakespeare’s plays.
John Marston (c. 1576–1634) was a dramatist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, known for his satirical wit and literary feuds with Ben Jonson. His dramatic corpus consists of nine plays of uncontested authorship. This article investigates four additional plays of uncertain authorship which have been associated with Marston: Lust’s Dominion; Histriomastix; The Family of Love; and The Insatiate Countess. The internal evidence for Marston’s hand in these four texts is examined and an analysis made of the potential divisions of authorship. The essay provides a survey of Marston’s individual style by testing vocabulary; prosody; collocations of thought and language; and versification habits within both his acknowledged plays and the contested texts, in comparison to plays written by other authorship candidates.
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