Relative contributions of Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII: An Analysis Based on Most Frequent Words and Most Frequent Rhythmic Patterns

The versified play Henry VIII is nowadays widely recognized to be a collaborative work not written solely by William Shakespeare. We employ combined analysis of vocabulary and versification together with machine learning techniques to determine which authors also took part in the writing of the play and what were their relative contributions. Unlike most previous studies, we go beyond the attribution of particular scenes and use the rolling attribution approach to determine the probabilities of authorship of pieces of texts, without respecting the scene boundaries. Our results highly support the canonical division of the play between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher proposed by James Spedding, but also bring new evidence supporting the modifications proposed later by Thomas Merriam. 1 Introduction In the first collection of William Shakespeare's works published in 1623 (the so-called First Folio) a play appears entitled The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight for the very first time. Nowadays it is widely recognized that along with Shakespeare, other authors were involved in the writing of this play, yet there are different opinions as to who these authors were and what the precise shares were of their authorial contributions. This article aims to contribute to the question of the play's authorship using combined analysis of vocabulary and versification and modern machine learning techniques (as proposed in [1,2]). 2 History and related works While the stylistic dissimilarity of Henry VIII (henceforth H8) to Shakespeare's other plays had been pointed out before [3], it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that Shakespeare's sole authorship was called into question. In 1850 British scholar James Spedding published an article [4] attributing several scenes to John Fletcher. Spedding supported this with data from the domain of versification, namely the ratios of iambic lines ending with a stressed syllable ("The arXiv:1911.05652v1