Authorship Attribution and the Material Realities of Early Modern Play Texts

Abstract

The digitization of texts and the advent of big data analyses have transformed our understanding of authorship and collaboration in early modern drama. However, these advancements ought to be carefully contextualized within the material realities of early modern playwriting. The scarcity of surviving dramatic manuscripts underscores the significant role of agents like compositors, printers and editors, and the loss of the majority of plays from English commercial theatres casts doubt on the reliability of comparisons based on unique or common verbal parallels. The article focuses on drama from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, particularly the recently proposed collaboration between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare on the Henry VI plays. Applying the IT concept of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), it highlights the impact of textual transmission intricacies on authorship attribution, emphasizing that even the most sophisticated attribution techniques are only as reliable as the (often unreliable) data they utilize.