Using Shakespeare's Sotto Voce to Determine True Identity From Text

Area of Science:

• Computational Linguistics
• Literary Forensics
• Stylometry

Background:

• Authorship attribution of William Shakespeare's works remains a 400-year-old scholarly debate.
• Existing computational methods (e.g., word counts, keyword density) lack definitive consensus.
• Alternative approaches are needed to analyze subtle stylistic characteristics in historical texts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and validate a novel text analysis technique, RPAS (Rhetorical Personality Analysis System), based on word semantics and authorial personality.
• To test RPAS's efficacy in distinguishing between authors of known and disputed literary works.
• To assess the applicability of personality-based stylometry to historical texts.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of works by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Elizabeth Cary.
• Application of Word Accumulation Curves, Hierarchical Clustering, Principal Component Analysis, and Linear Discriminant Analysis.
• Utilizing RPAS (Rhetorical Personality Analysis System), a multi-faceted approach analyzing writer's personality through text.

Main Results:

• RPAS effectively differentiated the known works of Shakespeare from those of Marlowe and Cary.
• The system also successfully separated disputed works attributed to Shakespeare.
• Demonstrated that personality-based stylistic markers are consistent across centuries.

Conclusions:

• RPAS offers a promising new method for authorship attribution by analyzing authorial personality.
• This technique provides a robust tool for identifying subtle writing style characteristics.
• The findings have potential applications in digital forensics and historical text analysis.