The ‘Restored’ Kyd Canon: Interpreting the Evidence of Unique Verbal Matches

Abstract

In a recent article, I gave reasons for thinking that the first four scenes of The Honest Man’s Fortune could confidently be added to Cyril Tourneur’s small dramatic oeuvre, and were not by Nathan Field, as Cyrus Hoy had claimed. ¹ I used Pervez Rizvi’s valuable website ‘Collocations and N-grams’ and, in particular, the data he supplies about trigrams shared between only two plays in his database of 527 early modern plays. ² As a preliminary to applying the evidence to the doubtful work, I cited data for twenty-two target plays by eighteen early modern playwrights, noting that in almost every case other plays by the same author tended to be most prominent in lists of the top dozen unique matches to the target play—prominent in terms of their position on the list or of their numbers or both. Matches were, as by Rizvi, ‘weighted’ proportionally to the combined total of words (as ‘tokens’ rather than as different ‘types’) in the plays compared. The first four scenes of The Honest Man’s Fortune yielded more unique trigram matches, in terms both of raw and weighted counts, with the Tourneur’s sole surviving play, The Atheist’s Tragedy than with any other play in Rizvi’s database.