Did Shakespeare WriteDouble Falsehood? Identifying Individuals by Creating Psychological Signatures With Text Analysis

Abstract

More than 100 years after Shakespeare's death, Lewis Theobald published Double Falsehood, a play supposedly sourced from a lost play by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Since its release, scholars have attempted to determine its true authorship. Using new approaches to language and psychological analysis, we examined Double Falsehood and the works of Theobald, Shakespeare, and Fletcher. Specifically, we created a psychological signature from each author's language and statistically compared the features of each signature with those of Double Falsehood's signature. Multiple analytic approaches converged in suggesting that Double Falsehood's psychological style and content architecture predominantly resemble those of Shakespeare, showing some similarity with Fletcher's signature and only traces of Theobald's. Closer inspection revealed that Shakespeare's influence is most apparent early in the play, whereas Fletcher's is most apparent in later acts. Double Falsehood has a psychological signature consistent with that expected to be present in the long-lost play The History of Cardenio, cowritten by Shakespeare and Fletcher.

Dictionaries and distributions: Combining expert knowledge and large scale textual data content analysis

“…Preferring to focus on content words, many computational approaches dismissed these as "stopwords" (Wilbur & Sirotkin, 1992) which could be safely ignored. However, psychological applications of dictionaries and word counts showed these to be essential to understanding a range of phenomena including emotional state (Pennebaker, 1997), authorship identification (Boyd & Pennebaker, 2015), and social hierarchies (Kacewicz et al, 2013).…”

Stylometric Techniques for Multiple Author Clustering

“…The analysis would suggest that the five authors, Barnfield, Delaney, Griffin, Marlowe, and Raleigh were not acknowledged, and several poems may well be collaborative works between Shakespeare and others but this also was common [54]. It is also possible that several poems (7,14,18,19) are not early work or collaborations, but other writer's poems not studied here. This failing to acknowledge all author's poems would seem, at least by today's standards, to be an injustice.…”

“…= 3.6 million and 20! = 2.4x10 18 , or 2.4 billion billion (or quintillion). Thus, even for quite small N, it is not possible to calculate the shortest path by calculating all possible paths.…”

“…However, there are other techniques used in this period of Shakespearean analysis, including simple function words [16,17] and word adjacency networks (WANs) [9]. However, the meaningextracting method (MEM) from the field of psychology to extract themes from commonly used adjectives and describe a person from their personality, or self is very different [18,19]. The authors offer a new and alternative approach to authorship identification using personality.…”

Co‐presence and mobile apps: Technology's impact on being with others

“…Firstly, we rely on software content analysis using an algorithm proposed by psychologists (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count – LIWC), which helps identify a text's linguistic structure around certain dimensions: social, cognitive, emotional, perceptual, and linguistic (Boyd & Pennebaker, ; Pennebaker, Boyd, Jordan, & Blackburn, ). Inspired by linguistic theory and methods, the marketing literature has recently highlighted the relevance of automated text analysis (Humphreys & Wang, ).…”