Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (review)

"Debates about authenticity and authorship have a perennial charm," wrote the classicist Ronald Syme over twenty years ago,¹ and despite postmodernist skepticism about attempts to determine who wrote what, questions of attribution are still of crucial importance. Inclusion of "A Funeral Elegy" in the Riverside, Norton, and Addison-Wesley editions of Shakespeare's collected works (all published in 1997) will surely appear as a strange aberration, in view of convincing recent demonstrations that the poem was written by John Ford.² By becoming better informed about methods and principles of defining authorial canons, scholars can guard against such mistakes. Harold Love offers a lively introductory guide to a fascinating field of study that has received a boost from the advent of electronic databases of machine-searchable texts and of various programs for analyzing their contents.

Love's own experience has been mostly with the verse of Rochester and seventeenth-century satirists, though he has also worked on unsigned newspaper journalism. But he covers the whole range of attribution studies, describing several of the classic contributions and devoting some space to controversies connected with Shakespeare. He sees as a central concern "the uniqueness of each human being and how this is enacted in writing," and begins with a consideration of "Individuality and sameness" (4). Chapter 2 is a brief historical survey of the foundations of research on authorship—in the ancient Greco-Roman world, in Jewish and Christian biblical scholarship, among Renaissance humanists, and among post-Reformation English clerics and seventeenth-century lawyers. In chapter 3 Love tackles theoretical issues concerning the nature of authorship, distinguishing between different varieties of individual agency that are "likely to be involved in the composition of a piece of published writing" (50): collaborative, precursory, executive, declarative, and revisionary authorship. His remarks are a salutary reminder of how complex and problematical may be the task of identifying "responsibility" for a particular literary work.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal, respectively, with types of external and internal evidence. Under the rubric of "ideas and ethos," Love cites R. W. Chambers's splendid essay "Shakespeare and the Play of More" (1939). Scholars who remain doubtful that Shakespeare wrote Hand D's three pages in Sir Thomas More should read that masterly work again. It is good, too, to find Love insisting that "literary quality is a genuine attribute of writing and one that can be recognised. As such it will be one of the criteria drawn on in conferring or denying attribution" (94). But, as he adds: "The problem lies in how it is to be established, a matter that comes under the philosophical problem of testimony" (94). Chapter 6 details several kinds of stylistic evidence, such as choice of synonyms, rare and unusual words, syntax and grammar, prosody and meter, and spelling and contractions. Chapter 7 asks whether there are "ways by which we can detect the gender of an author" and gives the answer "potentially, but not yet" (119 and 131). Chapter 8 introduces stylometry, or the sort of computational stylistics that is concerned mainly with statistical analysis of high-frequency words. This area of research has developed markedly over the past few decades, to the point where the best techniques can, with some consistency, distinguish the known true author of a text from among a large number of candidates. Love gives nonmathematical readers some notion of the kinds of articles that regularly appear in Computers and the Humanities and Literary and Linguistic Computing. In chapter 9 Love rightly stresses the primacy of bibliographical and textual investigation. Chapter 10 deals with forgery and fakes. Chapter 11 is specifically on "Shakespeare and Co." It focuses on the illogicalities of anti-Stratfordian arguments and uses Colonel B. R. Ward's The Mystery of "Mr W. H." (1923) to assess "the role of circumstantial evidence in scholarly reasoning" (203). A final chapter draws some general conclusions, returning...