Was Shakespeare Marlowe? What does stylometry say?

Question

I am not sure why this isn't asked here already, but Peter Farey and Ros Barber convinced me that Christopher Marlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare.

This resolved my own cognitive dissonance from many years ago, when I picked up a copy of Tambourlaine, and immediately was annoyed that it was stylistically indistinguishable from Shakespeare (except for some minor maturity issues). At the time, I concluded that Shakespeare was just ripping off Marlowe, but it was a rip-off too methodical and too shameless to be consistent with literary genius, so I wasn't sure what to think of the bard. Of course, it's not a problem given that they're the same person.

This requires you to believe that Marlowe was not killed in 1593, but kept on writing, exiled in continental Europe. I believe that this is perfectly reasonable, considering the privy-council's death threat to Marlowe, his known connections, and the similar shenanigans in the McCarthy era. My question is not about this stuff, which I think is firmly on the Marlovian's side.

My question is simply about the stylometric evidence. Farey has compiled his own page on the stylometries (you can find two plots here: and there are more here ), his analysis concludes that any stylometry that claims to distinguish between Shakespeare and Marlowe's style is better interpreted as a maturity curve for a single writer in two periods of life.

I want to know how reasonable this conclusion is. I haven't checked the figures, and I do not know if there are other stylometries which are missed by his analysis. Further, is there any known way of establishing single-authorship from large batches of text, when the text is written several years apart, but is essentially infinite in length?

How good is this new stylometric evidence? What confidence level does it give to the assertion that Marlowe was the author?

There are previous stylometries which are weaker, namely Mendenhall's letter distribution, which was a major foreshadowing of modern Marlovian theory. I am not so interested in this, since this is well known to pick out Marlowe as the author of Shakespeare.

I think this question would benefit from being expressed in a more compact and general/objective way. Also should the title not be the other way around: "Was Marlowe Shakespeare?" — Martin Scharrer, Mar 27 '12 at 09:42
I agree with @MartinScharrer. This question would be a better fit here if it were allowed to show any evidence one way or the other. This may be more on topic (the stylometry question) on Writers SE. — Chad, Mar 27 '12 at 12:35
The *Skeptical Inquirer* featured this question once: [Did Shakespeare Write ‘Shakespeare’? Much Ado About Nothing](http://www.csicop.org/si/show/did_shakespeare_write_shakespeare_much_ado_about_nothing) — Martin Scharrer, Mar 27 '12 at 15:41
@Martin Scharrer: the "Skeptical Inquirer" is not a good source. Usually people attack straw man ideas, like Bacon wrote Shakespeare, or De Vere wrote Shakespeare, which are stupid and easy to refute. Marlowe wrote Shakespeare is the correct alternate hypothesis, and it is usually "refuted" by noting that Marlowe died to early. I have no interest in what people are saying about authorship--- I want to know the stylometry. — Ron Maimon, Mar 27 '12 at 16:54
Unless the stylometry provides new evidence I'd link to this question (started here, moved to literature.se): http://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/956/who-wrote-shakespeares-plays . I provided a pro-Shakespeare answer. — matt_black, Mar 27 '12 at 20:07
Stylometry is mathematical, and precise, and can give confidence estimates for a purported identification of authors. Mendenhall's stylometry definitively rules out Bacon as the author (and all other candidates with a known corpus, including DeVere), and it places Marlowe as indistinguishable from Shakespeare. The Farey stylometries, taken together, are more persuasive, and I personally cannot distinguish early Shakespeare from late Marlowe (and other people had a hard time too, especially regarding Edward II). I want numbers: is it 80%/99.9%/40%? How likely is this idea? — Ron Maimon, Mar 28 '12 at 04:01
How about a direct signature comparison? According to http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/50-megapixel-digital-imaging-system-uncovers-shakespeare-signature.ars, the signature on Archaionomia is "likely" to be legit-- how would it compare to Marlowe's signature? I realize it's not a stylometry approach, but maybe one more piece of evidence one way or the other? — mmr, Apr 04 '12 at 20:46
@mmr: The actual _dude_ named "William Shakespeare" is a historical person--- an actor, a wealthy property owner, and a guy who put his name on plays. He is definitely, without any doubt, a different person from Marlowe. The claim is that he is Marlowe's _front_, like Ian Hunter for Dalton Trumbo, not Marlowe's assumed identity. The signatures are nothing alike, Shakespeare's is a semi-literate scrawl, never the same twice, and Marlowe's is an ornate thing, like all the other writers of his time. — Ron Maimon, Apr 05 '12 at 00:14
@RonMaimon-- ah, interesting. I thought the doubt was really over his existence. As for your original question, would you also want to compare it to other potential candidates (such as http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1584)? Who else is on the list? — mmr, Apr 05 '12 at 00:38
@mmr: This is covered in the linked literature question. I see the other candidates as basically smoke-screens for Marlowe (except for Bacon, who had some Shakespeare anachronistically in his private notebooks--- this is explained by Marlovians). They are all easily ruled out by stylometry, and Marlowe's case is only made stronger by stylometry. I want to know the confidence interval, so I can add as many stylometries as necessary to make the case certain (there are plenty more to use). One of the nicest unexplored avenues is _grammatical_ stylometry, comparing parse-trees for sentences. — Ron Maimon, Apr 05 '12 at 06:46
@Ron: my fairly moderate understanding of stats is that it is dangerous to simply add more data, until you get a statistically-significant result. You should decide how much you need/the inclusion criteria before you start. — Oddthinking, Jul 23 '12 at 01:57
@Oddthinking: This is true--- but in this case, there is no danger--- the evidence from usual stylometry is already overwhelming. The latest paper claiming to disprove Marlovian authorship stylometrically, had their computer program misidentify all of Marlowe's drama except Tambouraine as Shakespeare. The criterion is that you should find a stylometry which distinguishes other authors reliably, and then when this stylometry tells you that Shakespeare and Marlowe are the same guy, just _take the results at face value_, since this is supported by the weight of the historical evidence. — Ron Maimon, Aug 10 '12 at 02:54
@DJClayworth: This was discussed before, it isn't a duplicate because the question is specifically on quantifiable stylometry, not on blah-blah-blah historian BS. It was stylometry that suggested Marlowe is Shakespeare, and it is stylometry that will make the case more airtight as more stylometries are added. The other question was migrated from Literature after this one was posted, so if you insist it is a dup, it's the other one that's duping. The question "Who wrote Shakespeare's plays" does not request scientific evidence, I do. — Ron Maimon, Aug 29 '12 at 00:51
Ron, it was you who provided the stylometry-based answer to that other question which @DJClayworth links to. Is your answer to that question an answer to this question too? Why does restricting the question to stylometry make it a different/better question? — ChrisW, Dec 10 '14 at 16:36
@ChrisW: That question was imported from literature.stackexchange which no longer exists. I answered it on literature, then added this question here, later it got imported. This is the first question on the topic _here_, the other was an import, so neither is duping. The restriction to stylometry was me trying to get the answer to why, if Shakespeare and Marlowe are separate authors, the stylometries keep failing. That's all I care about, because everything else is humanities, and so can be twisted one way or another by politics. Stylometrics is statistics, and is immune from politics. — Ron Maimon, Dec 11 '14 at 00:02

MarloweFan · Answer 1 · 2012-07-22T01:19:53.437

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Not a complete or final answer to your question, but a recent (2012) and seemingly rigorous statistical analysis of works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other contemporaries, in order to distinguish authorship, is here:

Their key conclusion:

...our results are best explained by the assumption that Marlowe is not Shakespeare.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/pubs/theses/masters/2012/ehmoda.pdf

The statistical comparisons were based on 1) general vocabulary and 2) a combination of "function word frequency, frequency of part of speech tags among words that are not on the function word list, and bigram...called 'two-word collocations'..."

The comparison tests "misidentified" four out of seven of Marlowe's works as Early or Late Shakespeare's; however, the "Unsupervised Clustering Experiment" clearly separated Marlowe's works from Shakespeare's.

It is noted that "Marlowe is hard to pin down because of the small corpus that exists for him". Would internal variability in the Marlowe works (written prior to all the Shakespeare works) versus more internal consistency in the Shakespeare works have produced this outcome? A skeptic would like to see more data from the "Unsupervised Clustering Experiment" and a better explanation for how it discriminates among authors.

edited Jul 22 '12 at 01:19

answered Jul 21 '12 at 23:03

MarloweFan

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[Welcome to Skeptics](http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1505/welcome-to-new-users)! So, what did they find? Please include a summary (and perhaps an excerpt) to protect us against link-rot. – Oddthinking Jul 21 '12 at 23:13
@MarloweFan I've added a very short quote from the paper to illustrate how to make better answers here. If you included more selections and summaries from the paper I think you would attract a lot of up votes. It is a great reference. – matt_black Jul 21 '12 at 23:54
Please fix your answer--- I must downvote for now, because as it stands, it repeats the bogus conclusion without giving the true content of the paper, which is extremely supportive of the idea that Marlow wrote Shakespeare, despite their best efforts to separate the two. I am sure you did not intend to do this, but repeating their dishonesty is not a good thing. – Ron Maimon Aug 10 '12 at 01:43
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I should also add a comment regarding "unsupervised clustering". This is basically taking 6 works by two authors, and seeing how well the division of works into two groups works according to the canonical authorship. The method is ridiculous--- it is not at all rigorous--- the result is a ranking integer with no estimator of reliability possible. You don't know how close the clusters are to each other from this data, or anything whatsoever. They obviously tacked this on to justify their conclusion, because the other methods weren't working. – Ron Maimon Aug 10 '12 at 03:05
The worst part of "unsupervised clustering" is that Marlovian ideas date Shakespeare to Marlow from 1593-1624, while Marlowe-Marlowe is from 1584-1593. So the natural clustering is obviously Marlowe/Shakespeare just by date of composition. There is nothing to extract from the clustering data, one cannot make any conclusions, or even learn anything new. I am disheartened that this paper went to such great lengths to misreport their results--- they identified Marlowe as the author of Shakespeare, and then lied about it. – Ron Maimon Aug 10 '12 at 03:06
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The paper doesn't seem to be reliable. It at best shows inconclusive evidence based on a small corpus for Marlowe. – Nick Aug 10 '12 at 09:22
@Nick: Marlowe's corpus is over 100,000 words, it's in no way small for the purpose of stylometry. It is only small for finding rare big words, but even there, it is sufficient. They made excuses in their paper that it is small, but this is complete hogwash--- stylometry can identify authorship of individual passages which are only a few pages long. This was used to resolve the authorship dispute for sections of the Federalist Papers, for example, and those guys are pretty close in style. – Ron Maimon Aug 11 '12 at 22:36
I finally figured out the _most terrible_ part of this paper. Why did their program not identify "Tambourlaine" as Shakespeare? Having read them, I think they are much more Shakespearian than Dido or Faustus. The reason is because their methodology was to remove one play, and compare to the rest. When you remove Tambourlaine I, you find a perfect stylometric match to, surprise, surprise, Tambourlaine II. This is the nail in the coffin for me--- if they didn't cheat, they would identify _every single dramatic Marlowe_ as Early/Lat Shakespeare, if they had combined the 2 Tamburlaines into one. – Ron Maimon Aug 11 '12 at 22:39
@RonMaimon This is why I hate leave-one-out cross validation. They should have used a proper separate training, test and validation set. I should have noticed that massive lapse! – Nick Aug 11 '12 at 22:59
@Nick: Or so I thought. I was bothered by the two misses of their method. So I google "The Case is Altered", the play by Johnson which was not stylometrically identified with Johnson, and I found out that Johnson didn't include this play in his folio of 1616, and his authorship has long been doubted. The _other_ misidentified play "the family of love" is also widely of disputed authorship. So the _only_ plays that were misidentified by the Stylometry were those of Marlowe and Shakespeare, it is essentially dead-accurate, and it supports the Marlovian conclusion beyond any reasonable doubt. – Ron Maimon Aug 28 '12 at 09:25

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 10 '12 at 02:58

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I disagree that The Skeptical Inquirer is not a credible source. It is a peer-reviewed publication and I have found that it is quite rigorous in its examinations of issues. The article cited here concludes:

To sum up, there really was a Shakespeare, and to believe that someone else wrote the plays and poems bearing his name—that there was in fact a conspiracy to perpetrate an elaborate hoax—is to gratuitously violate the principle of Occam’s razor, the dictum that the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is to be preferred.

The article is worth reading, and, I believe, represents the issue, and its answer, quite credibly.

edited Aug 10 '12 at 02:58

Oddthinking

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answered Jul 22 '12 at 15:45

Eva Thury

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Do you have a link to the original article? If so, please include it; otherwise, please cite the exact source. I do agree that the *Skeptical Inquirer* is probably appropriate as a source here. However, I’m less sure about calling it “peer-reviewed”, in the rigorous sense of the word. – Konrad Rudolph Jul 23 '12 at 16:15
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Citing Occam's razor in an instance where there is confounding data (stylometry and evidence of a dearth of literacy and education of Shakespeare) is a cop-out and an invalid application of the razor. – called2voyage Jan 08 '14 at 17:09

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 27 '13 at 18:16

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The problem with stylometric analysis is that you can make it show just about whatever you want to make it show if you pick and choose the works to be compared.

In comparing Marlowe and Shakespeare, there's no point in comparing "Edward II" to "The Tempest." They were written two decades apart. One would want to compare "Edward II" to "Richard III." And the bulk of the stylometric evidence shows that it is virtually impossible to distinguish early Shakesperean plays from Marlowe.

Furthermore, when any such comparison is done, "The Massacre at Paris" should be excluded from Marlowe's works, as it is known to exist in two versions, neither of which is thought to reflect the original version of the play. Many of the extant plays of Shakespeare also exist only in so-called "bad quartos."

The stylometric evidence doesn't prove that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare, but it doesn't exclude the possibility.

edited Jun 27 '13 at 18:16

Wertilq

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answered Jun 27 '13 at 17:51

daver852

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Please reference your facts. It's one of the rules of skeptics, for more info read the [help] – Wertilq Jun 27 '13 at 18:17
This is not exactly true--- you can get conflicting answers only if the two bodies are compatible. Most stylometries easily distinguish Shakespeare from DeVere, Johnson, Lyly, or any other contemporary writer with a corpus. This means that when you compare Edward II and Richard III and find no difference, it is very statistically significant, it suggests strongly that they are the same writer. It is made more striking by the fact that different independent stylometries agree. So you can't say "you can get any answer" with a straight face. You can't. You only can if they're the same guy. – Ron Maimon Jun 29 '13 at 22:54

score -2 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 29 '12 at 03:19

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From @MarloweFan's answer, I find that the most recent attempt to separate Marlowe and Shakespeare stylometrically is presented here:

Neal Fox, Omran Ehmoda and Eugene Charniak, Statistical Stylometrics and the Marlowe-Shakespeare Authorship Debate

The authors failed to separate Marlowe from Early Shakespeare, and yet wrote a conclusion that claimed that they did so. This is dishonest, as I see it.

Known Marlowe Detected As Shakespeare

Their computer program, designed to separate these authors, found the following probable authors for these plays:

Dido: Early Shakespeare (both methods)
Faustus: Early Shakespeare (both methods)
Edward II: Early Shakespeare (both methods)
Jew of Malta: Late Shakespeare/Early Shakespeare (depending on which method they used)

So that the only works of Marlowe which were not confused as Shakespeare were Tambourlain I and II, and the Massacre at Paris.

The methodology was "leave one and compare to the rest", so by separating the Tambourlaines, they leave out Tambourlaine I and compare to a corpus that includes Tambourlaine II. This is an unsafe comparison--- it is manifest that the closest match to Tambourlaine I is Tambourlaine II. If they had combined the two Tambourlaines into one text, there is no doubt in my mind it would have been misclassified as Early Shakespeare as well. So among the Marlowe works, only The Massacre at Paris is not misidentified!

This means their program failed to separate nearly all of what Marlowe work from Shakespeare, consistently across two completely different methods, and despite their obvious bias against the Marlovian hypothesis.

One of their methods is based on vocabulary, how similar the word choice is in the works. It is notable that the vocabulary of Jew of Malta matches Late Shakespeare, because nobody else matches Late Shakespeare in any way. The other method is based on function words, which are indicative of sentence structure. Both methods agreed in their misclassification of the majority of Marlowe works as belonging to Shakespeare (the two exceptions being Tambourlaine and Massacre). This is a ridiculous failure in a paper that claims to have something negative to say about Marlovian theory, considering the low failure rate with other authors (there were only a couple of other plays by other authors misclassified in this way - please read the paper).

Known Shakespeare Detected As Marlowe

Further, one of Shakespeare's known works, I Henry VI, was misclassified as Marlow in one of the methods, and classified as Shakespeare in the other. This is also notable, because the statistical biases they list explain why it is very unlikely for a work not by Marlowe to be classified as Marlowe by vocabulary (there are fewer words in Marlowe, so you find fewer matches to rare words). The biases in their method, that they explain, make it extremely significant when even a single work is misclassified as Marlowe - it means that the vocabulary in I Henry VI is essentially a dead match to that of the few Marlowe works that exist.

Other Authors: Disputed Works not ascribed to them

There were two plays not by Shakespeare/Marlowe that were not correctly identified as by their canonical authors:

The Family of Love (Middleton), program attributed to (Johnson/Shakespeare) by (vocabulary/function-words)
The Case is Altered (Jonson), program attributed to (Shakespeare/Chapman) by (vocabulary/function-words).

For "The Case is Altered", Jonson did not include it in his Folio, and it is of dubious authorship. To my mind, their program conclusively establishes it was not authored by Jonson, not exclusively, and not predominantly. Since their program finds a best-match within the list, one cannot say that Shakespeare or Chapman contributed to "The Case is Altered", only that it is not by Jonson.

"The Family of Love" also is of disputed authorship, it is only attributed to Middleton by academic convention. Their program's failure should conclusively demonstrate that the canonical attribution is wrong. Their program therefore did not have a single failure other than in the case of Marlowe/Shakespeare, where the failure would have (if they hadn't stupidly separated the Tambourlaines) have misidentified all but one of Marlowe's work as Shakespeare by two different methods, and misidentified I Henry VI as by Marlowe.

Estimating chance of authorship

Given that their program is dead on accurate for every single play they examined, only failing to discriminate between Shakespeare and Marlowe, one can estimate the probability that they are different authors. Vocabulary and function words are independent, so each mismatch, assuming separate authorship is at most 10% probable, otherwise the perfect match in the other play identifications is not reasonable. There are 5 mismatched plays, so a probability of $10^{-5}$ of different authorship under these generous assumptions (it is probably closer to 1 in $10^10$), so the chance is more like 1 in 100,000.

Co-authorship?

The only other hypothesis that is reasonable is that Shakespeare modified existing unfinished texts of unpublished Marlowe's plays into his early works. This is unlikely, considering that there is no sharp break in style between Shakespeare and Shakespeare. If one attributes the Shakespeare canon to one author, which I am sure is correct, one must attribute it to Marlowe, with at least 4 sigma confidence level, probably much more.

Their Dubious Conclusion

The content of their computer experiments are an unacceptable counterpoint to their conclusion. Their methods classified nearly all of Marlowe dramatical works, other but the Tambourlaines, as Shakespeare, consistently in both methods, and over two different trials.

From this failure, I feel confident to conclude, unlike these authors, that there is no stylometric difference between Shakespeare and Marlowe, and it is nearly certain in the scientific sense that Marlowe and Shakespeare are the same person.

I am not sure this exhausts the question, considering that these authors are not so reliable, having published a paper with contents and conclusion diametrically opposed. A further more neutral study, even just a replication of their methods with a more quantitative Bayesian estimate of identity, would be useful.

edited Aug 29 '12 at 03:19