“When a man hath a familiar style”: An Introduction to Authorship Studies in Early Modern Drama and Literature

While I was an undergraduate at Cardiff University, I was introduced to the multi-authored play, The Booke of Sir Thomas More, in the 2005 edition of The Oxford Shakespeare. John Jowett’s editorial choices went some way to replicating the manuscript and offered readers the opportunity to distinguish the hands of different authors, censors, and professional scribes. I grew fascinated by the task of discriminating playwrights. Here was a field that enabled one to examine plays from every conceivable angle, whilst broadening knowledge of dramatic genres, repertoires, canonicity, chronology, intertextuality, and so forth. Here was a field that therefore offered the opportunity to make substantial contributions to literary scholarship. The detective work involved in such ventures also appealed to me, and at the time I was naïve to the fact that early modern authorship attribution studies is a field fraught with controversy. I was also somewhat ignorant of the computational methods that attributionists now have at their disposals. I spent a long time trying to develop an ear and eye for early modern dramatists’ styles through attentive and wide-ranging reading. I was struck, time and time again, by individual voices breaking through the passages of anonymous texts. It was not long before I realized that some of the conclusions I reached during these early studies had been anticipated by scholars for over two centuries. Although such approaches could be considered old-fashioned, I firmly believe that the reading-based methods I employed during these formative years helped me develop as an attributionist, especially when I came to consolidate my ascriptions with computational approaches. The most convincing contributions to attribution scholarship remain those that combine quantitative analysis with sensitive readings of play texts. Given that the early modern period “was a time when the aural rather than the visual understanding was much greater than in our own time” (Tobin 22), it is conceivable that audiences could discern differences between authorial styles. After all, we know that dramatists frequently parodied or mocked each other’s styles, as in the case of Robert Greene’s attack on, by my argument, Thomas Kyd (Freebury-Jones), who he claims “cannot write true Englishe without the help of Clearkes of parish Churches. ” Greene goes on to describe it as “a jollie matter when a man hath a familiar stile and can endite a whole yeare and never be beholding to art” (Grosart, ed. 9.233), which echoes Thomas Nashe’s diatribe against Kyd: “that run through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of noverint whereto they were born and busy themselves with the endeavours of art” (McKerrow, ed. 3.316–17). However, even contemporary writers sometimes struggled to distinguish each other’s hands. For instance, authorial fingers were pointed at both Nashe and Henry Chettle when Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance was published in 1592, that pamphlet representing a form of collaboration, as Steve Mentz suggests, “between a living author who claims to be merely an editor (Chettle) and a dead author whose role cannot be fixed” (2008, 118). As Chettle put it: