On Shakespeare and Spanish Tragedy

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Identifying Shakespeare's Additions to

The Spanish Tragedy (1602): A New(er)
Approach
Brian Vickers
School of Advanced Study , London University

Published online: 08 May 2012.
To cite this article: Brian Vickers (2012) Identifying Shakespeare's Additions to The Spanish Tragedy
(1602): A New(er) Approach, Shakespeare, 8:1, 13-43, DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2012.660283
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2012.660283
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Shakespeare
Vol. 8, No. 1, April 2012, 1343
Identifying Shakespeares Additions to The Spanish Tragedy (1602):

A New(er) Approach
Brian Vickers*
School of Advanced Study, London University
Downloaded by [189.203.237.213] at 09:08 30 November 2013
For Marcus Dahl

In 1602 the fourth quarto edition of Kyds The Spanish Tragedy appeared, the
title page describing it as Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new
additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late been divers times
acted. The authorship of these five Additions, totalling 320 lines, has been much
discussed, the leading candidates being Shakespeare and Jonson. This essay uses a
new method in authorship attribution studies, drawing on insights from Corpus
Linguistics. The advent in the 1960s of large electronic corpora of actual language
use, and the ability to create concordances, revealed that human beings communicate not just by deploying single words but also by grouping words into
sequences, collocations of several words. Some of these are shared by language
communities (by the way, the bottom line), others are unique to individuals.
New software programs, devised to detect student plagiarism, can scan two texts
in parallel and reveal every collocation of three consecutive words (trigrams)
common to both. When applied to anonymous or co-authored plays, this method
automatically identifies collocations that occur in the target text and in works
of known authorship. By checking each result against a corpus of contemporary
texts it becomes possible to make authorship attributions of quite short samples
with greater precision than ever before. A word-by-word comparison between
the 1602 Additions to The Spanish Tragedy and over 400 plays and masques from
the period 1580 to 1642 revealed more than 100 unique collocation matches with
Shakespeares plays and poems, enabling a definite attribution.
Keywords: authorship attribution; corpus linguistics; collocations; Shakespeare;
Jonson.
1
The Spanish Tragedy was one of the most popular plays in the Elizabethan theatre.
Most scholars date it to a period before the Spanish Armada, variously 158384,
158387, 158587 and 1587 (Baldwin; Boas xxviiixxxi; Freeman 77; Erne 559).
It must have been performed in one of the Inns in the city of London that were used
for acting (Manley; Kathman), and it surely graced the stages of the new purposebuilt theatres that were erected in 157980 (Rowan). Little documentation survives
from this period in Elizabethan drama, but we know that The Spanish Tragedy was
revived by Lord Stranges Men at the Rose theatre on 14 March 1592. Kyds play,
with Edward Alleyn as Hieronimo, was a good earner for that company, for Philip
*Email: vickersbw@gmail.com
ISSN 1745-0918 print/ISSN 1745-0926 online
# 2012 Brian Vickers
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2012.660283
http://www.tandfonline.com
14
B. Vickers
Henslowe recorded 15 further performances by Stranges Men up to 22 January

1593, with above-average takings (Foakes 1719).1 The Lord Admirals Men,
Alleyns successor company to Stranges, revived it again in 1597, performing it
13 times at the Rose between 7 January and 11 October (Foakes 5160). When Alleyn
returned to the stage in 1601, after a three-year retirement, it was at the Fortune
theatre, where the company revived two of his successes, The Jew of Malta in May,
and The Spanish Tragedy in September (Knutson). It was presumably in connection
with this latest revival that Henslow recorded two payments in his account book:
Lent unto mr alleyn the 25 of September 1601 to lend unto Bengeman Johnson
upon [his] writtinge of his adicians in geronymo the some of xxxxs (Foakes 182);
and Lent unto bengemy Johnsone at the A poyntement of E Alleyn & wm birde the
22 of June 1602 in earneste of A Boocke called Richard crockbacke & for new
adicyons for Jeronymo the some of xli (Foakes 203).
It is worth observing that we do not know whether Jonson, or Bird ever delivered
these additions, but at least the payments show that Henslowe found it worth his
while to dress up Kyds old play yet again. The Spanish Tragedy enjoyed great
popularity not only with theatregoers but with the reading public. Quarto editions
appeared in 1592, 1594, 1599, 1602, 1603, 161011, 1615, 1618, 1623, 1633, ten in all;
only Mucedorus, with 13 dated quarto editions between 1598 and 1639 (and perhaps
another undated), exceeded it in popularity.
Given the plays success, it is not surprising that an expanded version should have
appeared, with additions to five of the scenes, totalling 320 lines. The fourth quarto
edition (1602) describes itself as Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new
additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late been divers times acted
(Greg 12235).2 Naturally enough, some scholars have assumed that Jonson wrote
these additions (Barton 1328; Riggs 8791 and, for critical comments on their case,
see Erne 1202). Since Alleyn was the leading actor of the Admirals Men, which
revived The Spanish Tragedy in 1597 and again in 1601, the assumption may seem
reasonable. However, scholars who have examined the language of these additions
with care have found no trace of Jonsons dramaturgy or style. Percy Simpson
showed in 1925, in The Additions to The Spanish Tragedy (Herford, Simpson,
and Simpson 2: 23745), that the obstacle to accepting that assumption arises solely
from the extreme disparity between Jonsons known work and that here ascribed to
him (237).3 Philip Edwards also rejected Jonsons authorship (lxilxv). As Simpson
put it, the five Additions are all devoted to the elaboration of a single motive*the
harrowing grief of Hieronimo for his son (239). A convenient reference point is
Jonsons play The Case is Altered, produced in 1599, two years after Jonson had
himself acted Hieronimo for Henslowe. In it Count Ferneze, who has lost his son
Camillo, is shown as still agitated with the passion of his loss. When he recalls
that black and fearful night when he lost Camillo, he breaks off the narrative*
my heart is great. j Sorrow is faint; and passion makes me sweat (I.ix) But Fernezes
nearest approach to the unreason of grief consists of a brief hallucination. In
Simpsons judgement,
A comparison of these passages with the Additions discloses differences more radical
than can be explained by the greater vehemence of Hieronymos grief, or by its more
definitely unhinging effect upon his brain. Both the psychology and the poetry are of a
wholly different order. Jonsons description of Fernezes symptoms is competent and
Shakespeare
15
well expressed, but without one rare touch, one penetrating or memorable trait; on the
whole, his emotion is described from without, not from within. (242)
When Ferneze reacts to the news of Camillos capture, or experiences a hallucination, his is the language of analysis rather than of obsession (242). The narrow
range of psychological disturbance reflects, or is created by, Jonsons blank verse,
which is throughout uniform, regular, measured, without either the subtle modulations or the bold departures from the norm which add so much to the moving
power of Hieronymos outbursts (2423). Jonson, the most rational of the
Elizabethan dramatists, could hardly have produced the tumults of incoherence
[that] the typical Elizabethan accepted, and produced, as madness (243). While
firmly quashing any suggestion that Jonson could have written these scenes, Percy
Simpson recorded one impression that has proved to be worth exploring: The
ensuing colloquy with the Painter recalls yet unwritten work of Shakespeare at more
than one point (243).
In addition to this stylistic evidence, several other details eliminate Jonson as the
author of the 1602 Additions. As L.L. Schucking (347) and Harry Levin pointed
out, a mocking allusion in Marstons Antonio and Mellida dates the Additions to
1599 or earlier. As G.K. Hunter noted, both parts of this play were entered in the
Stationers Register on 24 October 1601 and published in 1602. The title-page
declares that the play was acted by the children of Pauls, and since they had been
prevented from acting between c.1590 and 1599, therefore the play cannot be before
1599 (x). Marston referred to the Painters scene in Antonio and Mellida, where the
clownish Balurdo quizzes a painter:
BALURDO.
PAINTER.
BALURDO.
PAINTER.
BALURDO.
PAINTER.
Approach, good sir. I did send for you to draw me a device,

an impresa, by synecdoche, a mott. . . .
Can you paint me a driveling,
Reeling song, and let the word be, Uh.
A belch?
O, no, no; uh; paint me uh or nothing.
It cannot be done, sir, but by a seeming kind of drunkenness.
No? Well, let me have a good massy ring with your own
posy graven in it, that must sing a small treble. . . .
O Lord, sir, I cannot make a picture sing. (5.1.1617, 2737)
Marstons target was this exchange from the Additions, where the mad Hieronimo
confronts a Painter whose son has also been murdered, and gives him an impossible
commission:
HIERONIMO.
How doost take it: art thou not sometimes mad?

Is there no trickes that comes before thine eies?
PAINTER.
O Lord, yes, sir.
HIERONIMO. Art a Painter? canst paint me a teare, or a wound,
Agroane, or a sigh? . . .
PAINTER.
Sir, I am sure you have heard of my painting, my
names Bazardo.
HIERONIMO. Bazardo, afore-god, an excellent fellow. . . .
Canst paint a dolefull crie?
PAINTER.
Seemingly, sir.
HIERONIMO. Nay, it should crie: but all is one. (Add. 4.10917, 12931)
16
B. Vickers
Marston echoed, or parodied, the Spanish Tragedy Additions again in Antonios

Revenge (1600) (Reavley 4.3.123501), when the Duke of Florence orders one of his
courtiers to leave, the courtier uttering an ominous exit-line:
PIERO.
ALBERTO.
Away with that same yelping cur, away!

Ay, I am gone; but mark, Piero, this:
There is a thing called scourging Nemesis. Exit ALBERTO.
Marston was recalling Hieronimos hopes for revenge, in an earlier Addition:

Well, heauen is heauen still!
And there is Nemesis and Furies,
And things called whippes,
And they sometimes doe meete with murderers,
They do not always scape, thats some comfort. (Add. 3.404)
Since The Spanish Tragedy had been played in London from about 1587 to
1588, and published in 1592 with no declaration on its title-page associating it with
a theatre company, then, according to Elizabethan pragmatic practices neither
Stranges nor the Admirals Men could claim it as their exclusive property, and other
companies were free to perform it. Several pieces of evidence survive suggesting
that Shakespeares company, the Chamberlains Men (after 1603, the Kings Men) may
also have performed it. In The Second Returne from Parnassus, a student play
performed at St Johns College, Cambridge in 1601, two famous actors are represented,
Will Kemp and Richard Burbage, the latter rehearsing a student in the leading role:
BURBAGE
M. Studioso, I pray you take some part in this booke and act it, that
I may see what will fit you best. I thinke your voice would serve
for Hieronimo, observe how I act it and then imitate mee:
Who calls Jeronimo from his naked bedd?
STUDIOSO Who calls, &c.
BURBAGE You will do well after a while. (Leishmann 4.3.123501)
(That non-commital comment leaves open a vast range of comic business.) Burbage
was the leading actor of the Chamberlains Men, and another allusion connects him,
and perhaps his company, with the play. The anonymous Elegie on the death of the
famous actor Rich: Burbage (1618) recalled some of his most famous tragic roles:
Hees gone and with him what a world are dead,
Which he revivd, to be revived soe.
No more young Hamlett, ould Heironymoe.
Kind Leer, the greved Moore, and more beside,
That lived in him, have now for ever dyde. (Chambers, William Shakespeare 2.309)
The significance of these two allusions linking the play with Burbage was noted by
E.K. Chambers in 1930:
The company which originally produced The Spanish Tragedy is unknown. The
Admirals revived it with adicyons in 1602. But the Chamberlains must also have
played it, and probably about the same time, since the authentic version of the elegy
Shakespeare
17
on Burbadge names ould Heironymo as one of his parts, and in 2 Parnassus

he is represented as trying a novice in it. It is even possible that the edition of 1602
may contain the version of the Chamberlains and not the Admirals men. (William
Shakespeare, 1:148)
This final remark, made in passing, deserves serious consideration.

Some other contemporary allusions may connect the Additions with Shakespeares
company. In the Induction to Cynthias Revels (1601), Jonson mocked the taste for
outmoded plays:
Another (whom it hath pleasd nature to furnish with more beard then braine) . . .
swears . . . That the old Hieronimo (as it was first acted) was the only best and
Judiciously pend play of Europe. (Herford, Simpson, and Simpson IV, 42; emphasis
and quotation marks added)
Jonsons slighting remark may suggest that an altered version of the play had been
performed by some other theatre company in London before 1601; if so, that might
well have been the Chamberlains Men. Secondly, when Marstons play The
Malcontent was published in 1604, the title-page of the third quarto edition that
year claimed that it had been Augmented by Marston. With the Additions played by
the Kings Majesties servants. (I quote from Hunters Revels edition). In the
Induction (Written by John Webster, it is claimed), four members of the Kings
men Will Sly, John Sinclo, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage discuss the
circumstances by which their company had acquired a play originally written for the
Children of the Chapel Royal at the Blackfriars theatre:
BURBAGE. Would you be satisfied in anything else, sir?
SLY.
Ay, marry would I: I would know how you came by this play.
CONDELL. Faith, sir, the book was lost; and because twas pity so good a play
should be lost, we found it, and play it.
SLY.
I wonder you would play it, another company having interest in it.
CONDELL. Why not Malevole in folio with us, as Jeronimo in decimo-sexto with
them? They taught us a name for our play: we call it One for another.
SLY.
What are your additions?
BURBAGE. Sooth, not greatly needful; only as your sallet to your great feast . . .
(Ind., 7083)
The pun on book sizes, the large Folio against the diminutive decimo-sexto, evidently
alludes to the adult players and the boys,4 while the Jeronimo, the play that the
Children are alleged to have stolen, can hardly refer to the anonymous First Part of
Ieronimo (1604). George Hunter (13n) argued that the boy players were more likely
to steal the popular Spanish Tragedy than the obscure Jeronimo, as E.K. Chambers
supposed (The Elizabethan Stage 4.23). Hunter also argued that this exchange does
not necessarily imply that the stolen Jeronimo belonged to the Kings Men: maybe
not exclusively, but some proprietorial attitude is surely displayed by us and
them. Perhaps The Spanish Tragedy was by then considered common (or at least
shareable) property.
This evidence, taken together, makes it not unlikely that Shakespeares company
performed the revised version of The Spanish Tragedy at the Globe; if so, their
premier dramatist may have been the author of the Additions. So much was
18
B. Vickers
suggested as long ago as 5 April 1833, in one of Coleridges remarks at table,

dutifully noted by his nephews:
The parts pointed out in Hieronymo as Ben Jonsons bear no traces of his style; but they
are very like Shakespeare; and it is very remarkable that every one of them reappears
in full form and development and tempered with mature judgment, in some of
Shakespeares great pieces. (Woodring 355)
2
Coleridge in 1833, Percy Simpson in 1925, have not been the only readers to connect
the 1602 Additions with Shakespeare. In recent times three scholars have made
that attribution, independently of each other: C. Van Heyningen, Warren Stevenson
and Hugh Craig (Authorial Styles and The 1602 Additions), and although the
first-named can be discounted since he merely asserted Shakespeares authorship,
without performing the comparison and analysis necessary to justify that claim, both
Stevenson and Craig have made valuable contributions. Their work presents an
interesting contrast in method. Stevenson worked only from Shakespeares text and
Bartletts Concordance to the plays, listing all the words and phrases that he noticed
which also occur in the Additions. He also drew on The Oxford English Dictionary
(OED), but accepted it too easily as an accurate record of the first usage of a word
in English, although it is now widely accepted that its compilers, who listed over
29,000 citations from Shakespeare, were unduly influenced by the availability of
his works, and neglected equally inventive writers, such as Nashe (see Scha fer).
Stevensons method was the traditional one of locating parallels in vocabulary and
phrasing, a method often criticized, sometimes justly. It is true that some attribution
scholars have found parallels invisible to all other eyes, and have made categorical
assertions about the rarity of a word or phrase on too slender a knowledge of
Elizabethan drama. In such cases, the strictures that Muriel St. Clair Byrne made in
1932 were justified, especially the key point that parallels should only be cited when
parallelism of thought is coupled with some verbal parallelism (Byrne 24).
Byrnes most demanding criterion remains relevant, that
in order to express ourselves as certain of attributions we must prove exhaustively that
we cannot parallel words, images, and phrases as a body from other acknowledged plays
of the period; in other words, the negative check must always be applied. (24)
Stevenson cannot fulfil that criterion, since he only considered parallels with
Shakespeare. However, many of the 106 matches that he claims between the Additions
and Shakespeare seem to satisfy Byrnes other criterion of uniting parallelism of
thoughts and words. Several satisfy his own methodological principle that the
strongest proofs of common authorship are not single or isolated parallels, but
clusters or interrelated groups of images and phrases which combine to form a distinct
pattern (see his thesis, Shakespeares Hand). One curious aspect of discovering
these unique matches between the Additions and Shakespeare is to recognize that
the original contexts were often radically different. So Hieronimos mental collapse,
in which he Growes lunaticke and childish for his Sonne (Add. 4.9), makes him
fruitlessly search for the dead boy:
Shakespeare
19
I prie through every crevice of each wall,

Looke on each tree, and search through every brake,
Beat at the bushes, stampe our grandam earth,
Dive in the water, and stare up to heaven,
Yet cannot I behold my sonne Horatio. (Add. 4.1721)
The first line of his speech closely matches the words of the Moor Aaron, recalling
how he gloatingly spied on the misfortunes of Titus Andronicus:
I prie through every crevice of each wall (Add. 4.17)

I pried me through the Crevice of a Wall (Tit. 5.1.114)
(Exact verbal matches are set in bold face; words having the same semantic or
syntactic function in both texts are italicized.) Hieronimos next two lines match
Pucks description of how he intends to lead the mechanicals astray:
Looke on each tree, and search through every brake, j Beat
at the bushes (Add. 4.1819)
Ile leade you about a Round j Through bogge, through bush,
through brake, through bryer (MND 3.1.10910)
The vagaries of Elizabethan spelling would conceal some of these matches from a
scholar working with the original quartos, but Stevenson used modernized editions,
and fortunately noticed this match involving the verb jar, with the now obsolete
meaning tick, collocated with minutes. Richard II laments his wasted time:
My Thoughts are minutes; and with Sighes they jarre
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward Watch (R2 5.5.512)
Instructing the Painter how to represent his grief, Hieronimo itemizes

the Belles towling . . . the Minutes jerring, and the Clocke striking twelve. (Add. 4.14951)
(I mark the further verbal link, between Watch and Clocke.) Another individualizing detail in Hieronimos instruction to the Painter involves his wish to be
depicted together with his wife and his dead son, Horatio, in an affectionate pose:
My wife Isabella standing by me, with a speaking looke to my sonne
Horatio . . . and my hand leaning upon his head, thus. (Add. 4.1214)
As Stevenson noticed, here Shakespeare recalled a visual representation he had

constructed a few years earlier in The Rape of Lucrece, the painting or tapestry
depicting the Fall of Troy. In it Nestor can be seen addressing the Greek army:
In speech it seemd [that] from his lips did flie j Thin winding breath which purld up
to the skie (14057) compare Hieronimos question to the Painter: Canst paint
a dolefull crie? (Add. 4.129). Around Nestor were a presse of gaping faces (1408),
all jumbled together:
Here one mans hand leand on anothers head. (1415)
20
B. Vickers
No similar collocation of thought and language has been found anywhere else
in the period from 1580 to 1642, thus Stevenson was justified in claiming a unique
Shakespeare match here.
Despite his old-fashioned approach, of reading only Shakespeares plays and
checking in a concordance, Stevenson identified some truly idiosyncratic collocations that point unmistakably to Shakespeares authorship. As we have seen, Marston
mockingly alluded to the passage where Hieronimo, not yet considering taking
personal revenge, affirmed his faith in heavenly justice:
Well, heaven is heaven still.

And there is Nemesis and Furies,
And things called whippes,
And they sometimes doe meete with murderers,
They do not always scape, thats some comfort. (Add. 3.404)
That impotent invocation of unfulfilled justice, whether heavenly, derived from

classical myth, or executed in a contemporary fashion, echoes the occurrence of
justice fulfilled in 2 Henry VI, where Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, having exposed
the spurious miracle of St Albans, by which Saunder Simpcox claimed to have
suddenly had his sight restored, and sends the rogue off for punishment:
My masters of St Albons
Have you not Beadles in your Towne,
And Things called whippes? (2.1.1324)
The closeness of the parallel, in both words and thought, and the similarity in the
dramatic context, indicate that both passages come from Shakespeares verbal
memory.
Even more striking is the parallel that Stevenson noted between the Additions
and A Midsummer Nights Dream. In a deranged conversation with his servant
Pedro, ordered to appear at midnight with torches lit, Hieronimo denounces night,
the Moone, all those Starres that gaze upon the moon,
And those that should be powerfull and divine,
Doe sleepe in darkenes when they most should shine. (Add. 4.318)
When his servant remonstrates that the heavens are gracious (40), Hieronimo
indicts the moon for her absence on that night when Horatio was murdered:
Where was she that same night
When my Horatio was murdred?
She should have shone: Search thou the booke,
Had the Moone shone,
In my boyes face there was a kind of grace,
That I know, nay, I doe know, had the murderer seene him,
His weapon would have falln and cut the earth . . . (4650)
Pedro, unfortunately, has not thought to bring an almanack with him, but the rude
mechanicals, planning a play in which the moon has a starring role, take more
forethought. When Peter Quince raises the two hard things they are faced with,
Shakespeare
21
one being how to bring moonlight into a chamber (3.1.479), his fellows quickly
check:
SNOUT
BOTTOM
QUINCE
Doth the Moone shine that night wee play our play?
A Calendar, a Calendar, look in the Almanack, finde
out Moon-shine, finde out Moone-shine.
Yes, it doth shine that night. (515)
The combination of language and thought that make up this collocation has not
been found in any other author apart from Shakespeare. Indeed, as Stevenson noted
in 1968 (Shakespeares Hand 317), Shakespeare had already used that collocation,
for at the climactic Battle of Bosworth Richard III tries to account for the ominous
absence of the sun:
KING
Give me a Kalender: Who saw the Sunne today?
RATCLIFFE Not I, my Lord.
KING
Then he disdaines to shine: for by the Booke
He should have bravd the East an houre ago.
A blacke day will it be to somebody. (5.3.27781)
Later in the same scene Hieronimo instructs the Painter on how to represent the
night of his sons murder (Add. 4.14851). As Stevenson showed, he uses within one
sentence six collocations with which Shakespeare described the night of Duncans
murder, but spread over two scenes in Macbeth:
make the Moone darke,
the Starres extinct,
the
the
the
the
The Moone is downe. (2.1.2)

Theres Husbandry in Heauen,
Their Candles are all out: (2.1.45)
Windes blowing,
The Night has been unruly:
Our Chimneys were blowne downe. (2.3.545)
Belles towling,
The Bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a Knell,
That summons thee to Heauen, or to Hell. (2.1.624)
Owle shriking, . . .
It was the Owle that shriekd,
The fatal Bell-man, which gives the sternst good-night.
(2.2.34)
I heard the Owle screame (2.2.15)
Clocke striking twelve. The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.
And she goes down at twelve. (2.1.23)
Such a series of matching interlinked collocations far exceeds the bounds of

coincidence.
Although his approach was traditional, and subject to some methodological
reservations, Warren Stevenson cited a sufficient number of parallels between the
1602 Additions to The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeares plays and poems to make
scholars take his attribution seriously. Stevensons method has the great virtue
of being text-specific. It deals with the text directly at the verbal level, identifying
sequences of words common to two or more plays in such a way as to preserve
something of their verbal fabric. These phrases are like patches cut from a swathe of
cloth, preserving what Stevenson called the stylistic warp and woof of an authors
22
B. Vickers
writing, together with its distinctive patterning, the element of meaning that can be
conveyed by even a small fragment of text. In that wonderful scene in the 1602
version where Hieronimo instructs the painter to depict the murder of Horatio in all
detail, including the murderers, he communicates his wish by using a distinctive
metaphor. Hieronimo questions the painter, canst thou draw a murderer?, receives
the confirmation I have the patterne of the most notorious villains, and then gives
detailed instructions:
O, let them be worse, worse: stretch thine Arte,

And let their beardes be of Judas his owne collour,
And let their eie-browes juttie over. (Add. 4.1338)
The metaphor of juttie must refer to prominent, threatening eyebrows, overhanging like a cliff. Warren Stevenson noticed a striking parallel in Henry V, perhaps
written in the very same year (1599), where the King bids his troops to
Disguise faire Nature with hard-favourd Rage:
Then lend the Eye a terrible aspect
. . . let the Brow oerwhelme it
As fearefully, as doth a galled Rocke
Ore-hang and jutty his confounded Base,
Swilld with the wild and wastfull Ocean (H5, 3.1.914)
The apparently old-fashioned method of citing parallel passages allows us to recreate

the context of use, as philosophers of language call it, which preserves the word
juttie, in Shakespeares idiolect, as a property of eyebrows with threatening and
fearful connotations.5 It is very unlikely that any other Elizabethan dramatist used it
with those associations, but to be sure we would need to make a negative test,
searching the existing canon of plays written before 1602. Stevensons text-specific
method, preserving parts of the verbal fabric that convey interpretable meaning, is
evidently one that, if carefully circumscribed, can produce sound results.
3
Hugh Craigs method is completely different, being number-specific rather than
text-specific. Stylometry, as previous practitioners have called it (Craig prefers
computational stylistics) fragments a literary text into its component words, which
it divides into two categories: first, so-called grammatical or function words,
which have low semantic content, such as pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and
so forth; and secondly, lexical words, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so
on. (It is not concerned with the meaning of lexical words, merely the fact that
they occur less frequently than the other type, and are thus subjected to different
statistical operations.) With the unmatched ability of the computer to sort and count
items at high speed it calculates the occurrence of function words first as a raw
number, then as a frequency per hundred words. Computational stylisticians stay
at the numerical plane and subject the resulting scores to statistical processing.
According to them, the rationale for counting function words is that they operate at
a sub-stylistic level, below an authors conscious process of shaping words and
concepts into coherent utterances. To practitioners of this approach, the specific joy
Shakespeare
23
of the function-word tests is that they identify features of language that no one would
think of manipulating, whereas, they claim, larger phrasal structures are open to
appropriation, imitation and parody. Since the whole aim of linguistic attribution
methods is to identify an authors specific idiolect and differentiate it from that of
other candidates, the function word test would indeed be welcome if it could reliably
identify individual authorial styles. But the results of Craigs two experiments on the
Additions yielded no certainties.
In his 1992 essay, Craig took nine plays each by Shakespeare and Jonson,
identified the 50 words found most frequently in these 18 plays, and calculated the
relative occurrence of each word in either dramatist. The results were represented
visually, rather like the squares of a map marking the intersections of longitude and
latitude. Jonsons frequent use of the function words or, of and all help to place his
text samples in a north-eastern quadrant, while Shakespeares more frequent use of
the words me, this, my and thou place his text samples in a south-western quadrant,
and so forth. This method can undoubtedly make broad distinctions between two
authors for whom an adequate corpus of firmly ascribed plays exists. But it may
not be reliable on such a short text as the 1602 Additions, only five scenes, 2656
words in all (Authorial Styles 212). Having used the 50 most common words to
distinguish Jonsons nine plays from Shakespeares, Craig suddenly removes four
words (thy, thou, this, and he) whose presence tends to confuse the result achieved
in other tests (206): the reader is given no explanation as to how these words might
confuse a result. Craig then produces a scatterplot (Figure 4) in which the
Additions are said to be located comfortably within Shakespeares territory,
providing strong evidence that Jonson did not write the additions (212). Despite
these confident-sounding phrases, Craig expresses caution that this finding
gives ground for an alternative hypothesis that Shakespeare is the author, though only
for a hypothesis, since along a vector separating Shakespeare from another candidate
for authorship*from Webster, say*the additions might of course move away from
Shakespeare. Though more like Shakespeare than like Jonson, in other words, the added
scenes might still prove to be more like some third author than like Shakespeare. (215)
The limitation of computational stylistics, as Craig has recently admitted, is that it

can only weigh up the vocabulary usages of two authors at a time.6 While welcoming
Craigs candour, literary scholars expect that an authorship attribution methodology
will provide a more conclusive result than showing a text to be more like or less
like Shakespeare. By how much is it more or less like, and in what ways?
Hugh Craig returned to the Additions some 20 years on, with a larger corpus
of plays. Given the huge increase in computing power in the intervening years,
he was now able to chart the frequencies of 200 common function words, concluding,
once again, that the Additions were judged to belong to the Shakespeare group
(The Shakespeare Additions 173). Despite having used many more plays, and many
more function words, Craig described this method as effective, if far from infallible.
He then introduced a second method, which identifies 500 lexical words that
appear more regularly in Shakespeare segments than in Jonson ones, and 500 more
common in the Jonson segments, setting up a one-on-one contest that will enable
experimenters to see which of the two authors patterns of use it resembles (174;
emphasis added).
24
B. Vickers
The resulting tests, displayed in graphic form, place the Additions on the
Shakespeare side of a diagonal line bisecting the boundary between Shakespeare
and Jonson territories (175). The same tests, applied to Dekker and Webster,
achieve the same statistical and typographical separation (1768). But the more
definite result we had been led to expect fails to emerge, and Craig abruptly
announces: At this point we are reaching the limits of the methods at their present
stage of development (178). Ruefully wishing that he could pose the question of
Shakespeare or not with more finality than is possible when working one by one
with rival candidates (179), Craig sums up his latest experiment in terms that
drastically limit its applicability:
Thus on these measures the Additions are like Shakespeare, but not to the point that all
doubt is removed. As the Shakespeare-versus-all-others experiment shows, whatever
resemblances there are between the Additions and Shakespeare plays, they are not
always strong enough to tell against other forces when we seek patterns that discriminate between Shakespeare plays and plays by all other authors and from all other
periods. (179; emphasis added)
Craig is commendably honest, but while he discusses various possible factors

which limit the effectiveness of computational stylistics, he never considers its basic
design flaw, that it depends entirely on counting word frequencies, thus separating
single words, whether grammatical or lexical, from the context of utterance in which
the author placed them. Its methods are quantitative, and it reaches global, rather
than text-specific results. It is unable to identify any single utterance as authorspecific, in the way that we can reasonably do with Shakespeares juttie metaphor
(once we have performed the negative check). It can only define a set of statistical
results as creating a zone within which one sample belongs, rather than in a similar
zone defining another author. It needs but little reflection on language to see that
words are merely the building blocks that an author puts together in all kinds of
idiosyncratic and imaginative ways. Counting their frequency, however scrupulously
and with whatever safeguards, will always limit experimenters to a superficial
level of analysis, a form of inventory; static, not dynamic. Further, the methods
that Craig uses, discriminant analysis and Principal Component Analysis, have
been judged by other practitioners of computer-assisted attribution studies to be
inappropriate and outmoded (Vickers 11421). A leading figure in modern authorship attribution studies has recently complained that too many practitioners treat
language . . . as a simple bag of words, a collection of every word that appears
in the document without regard to order . . . (Juola 253). Attributionists need to
develop methods that go beyond the lexicon, beyond the atomistic form of analysis
that single words offer, into a holistic method that can respect the phenomenon of
language as words that a speaker or writer has joined together in unique sequences.
To isolate either function words or lexical words ignores the fact that every linguistic
utterance beyond the most simple uses both categories.
The basic problem is that, in other disciplines, data consists of discrete items
resulting from multiple observed events. But in language the data is words separated
out from a literary text which was composed to be performed or read as a unit, and
which relies on the interaction of all its constituent words to create meaningful
utterances.
Shakespeare
25
4
We seem to be faced with two opposed methods, one qualitative (Stevensons
accumulation of verbal parallels), the other quantitative (Craigs computation of
word frequencies), with no way of mediating between them. To an exponent of
the first method, statistical data seems the result of translating literary language
into an alien medium, on the numerical plane, with no guarantee that the results
of mathematical processing will correspond to the words from which it began.
An exponent of the second method is likely to be looking for a cold hard number,
regardless of whether the examples are significant by literary criteria. Is there no
middle way?
That metaphor of a via media should not be understood too literally. An
alternative method is coming into view which transcends the weaknesses of both
approaches. Its first virtue is that it satisfies the expectations of experimental method,
in that its criteria are announced in advance and its results can be verified by other
scholars. One notorious weakness of the parallel passages approach has been that
its users did not specify what constituted an acceptable match, that is, a unique set of
words found in the target document (a play of anonymous or multiple authorship)
and only in the work of a known author. With the advent of electronic word processing it is now possible to search large databases in a fraction of a second, and to
establish whether a rare word was indeed unique to one individual author. But as we
now know, to study individual words is not enough: we shall need to identify longer
word sequences, and to check their use by all the relevant authorship candidates in
a given time span. Nor will it be sufficient to use new methods: we shall also need
a linguistic theory that can validate the relevance of longer word sequences in
identifying a particular idiolect. I believe that recent scholarly advances provide
solutions to both needs: the first is provided by corpus linguistics, the second by new
software.
The relatively new discipline of corpus linguistics uses a quantitative approach to
language, albeit not in the same way as the computation of single word frequencies.
With the advent of electronic word processing it became possible, for the first time, to
create massive corpora of actual language use. The first of these appeared in 1964,
the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present Day American English, consisting of
one million words, drawn from texts printed in the United States in the year 1961.
Soon a parallel project started up in England, directed by John McHardy Sinclair
(19332007), and jointly sponsored by the dictionary publisher Collins and
Birmingham University. Known as the Cobuild corpus of written and spoken
English (Collins Birmingham University International Database), it expanded into
The Bank of English, which had grown to 254 million words by 2004, and the
British National Corpus (100 million words) now available online.7 With machinereadable texts it is easy to make concordances, and as linguists experimented with
these resources they realized that in natural languages, many words serve as a centre
around which other words cluster, and that human beings communicate not just by
placing single words in the appropriate slot in a grammatical structure, according to
Chomskys open-choice principle. Rather, we speak and write by grouping several
words together, creating collocations, chunks of words or N-grams, as linguists
now call them (two words regularly collocated form a bigram, three make a trigram,
and so on).
26
B. Vickers
This observed fact of language use confirmed the insight of a pioneer British
linguist, J.R. Firth (18901960), whose seminal 1951 essay on Modes of Meaning
(190215) is widely credited with having sparked off collocation study. Firth drew
attention to recurrent contexts of situation in language utterances, where familiarity
with frequently used word associations arouses expectancies that the collocation
will be completed, a process which Firth described as the communication of meaning
by collocation (1934). For example, The word time can be used in collocations
with or without articles, determinatives, or pronouns. And it can be collocated with
saved, spent, wasted, frittered away, with presses, flies, and with a variety of particles,
even with no (195). Firths insight was developed by John Sinclair, who formulated
what he called the principle of idiom, namely that a language user has available to
him or her a large number of semi-constructed phrases that constitute single choices,
even though they might appear to be analysable into segments (Sinclair 110; for an
excellent study summarizing and extending recent research, see Wray). Sinclair
suggested three reasons why the principle of idiom encouraged the use of readymade collocations: the exigencies of real-time conversation, the recurrence of
similar situations in human affairs, and a natural tendency to economy of effort
(109). The first two explanations are certainly relevant, as anyone can testify who has
noticed the routine nature of many conversational exchanges, or the formulaic way in
which we often repeat a narrative of an event to different people, using the same words.
But the third of Sinclairs explanations has been the most influential in corpus
linguistics, and it is the one most relevant to literary study, the fact that all writers
tend to draw on a limited lexicon of words and phrases, ready-made formulae or
recurrent verbal patterns. Sinclair defined collocation as the occurrence of two
or more words within a short space of each other in a text (the usual measure of
proximity being a maximum of four words intervening), and he distinguished two
types, occurring in both the individual and the social domains:
Collocations can be dramatic and interesting because unexpected, or they can be important in the lexical structure of the language because of being frequently repeated.
This second kind of collocation, often related to measures of statistical significance,
is the one that is usually meant in linguistic discussions. (170)
To use the familiar categories established by Saussure, the frequently repeated

collocations belong to the domain of langue, the shared lexicon of a speech community, while the unexpected collocations belong to parole, an individuals lexicon,
and are for that reason more valuable for authorship attribution.
The first application of collocation study to Shakespeare was made in 1996 by
Ian Lancashire, a medievalist turned linguist and lexicographer, who did pioneering
work investigating how writers process language. Recently, Lancashire has combined
approaches from neuroscience and corpus linguistics, both of which show that the
mind retains and reproduces words not as single units but as chunks or wordstrings, whether shared or idiosyncratic. Lancashire was the first to apply this method
to literary texts, devising and adapting software programs to show that both Chaucer
and Shakespeare, like many other writers, made great use of collocations (Lancashire
Phrasal Repetends and Probing Shakespeares Idiolect; Taylor et al.; Schreibman
et al.). Indeed, Lancashire argued that Shakespeares idiolect may be partly defined
in terms of what he called phrasal repetends, or recurring collocations and
Shakespeare
27
combinations of words that can be traced from play to play. Contrary to

some scholars expectations, Lancashire discovered that in Shakespeares phrasal
lexicon . . . repeating collocations are more numerous than single words. In 10 early
works, totalling 197,000 words, Lancashire counted 12,600 different word forms
which combine to form about 32,300 fixed phrases, and deduced that this phrasal
lexicon must exhibit traces of Shakespeares networked associational memory and
thus of his idiolect (Probing Shakespeares Idiolect 744). In the nunnery scene of
Hamlet (3.1), for example, Lancashire found eight fixed phrasal repetends that occur
only within itself, thirty-five more that occur elsewhere in Shakespeares writings from
1597 to 1603/4. There are about 25,700 separate occurrences of these 892 different
phrases in the 12 plays produced during that period (Phrasal Repetends 48).
Although Lancashires main interest in phrasal repetends subsequently developed in
the direction of cognitive linguistics and neuroscience, he did observe that, As a
system, phrasal repetends may be a fingerprint of authorship (Chaucers
Repetends 316). That was a prescient remark.
In retrospect, it was only a question of time before authorship attributionists
would realize the potential of phrasal repetends, collocations, N-grams, call
them what you will. As Patrick Juola saw, the discipline could transcend the limitation
of counting word frequencies by switching to an approach that combines lexical and
syntactic information through the use of word N-grams (bigrams, trigrams, etc.)
to capture words in context (265). Accordingly, in 2004 Juola arranged an Adhoc Authorship Attribution Competition to test competing attribution methods.
A dozen research teams took part, being set 13 unsigned texts in several languages,
including both the first acts and entire plays by Elizabethan dramatists, and extracts
from the Paston letters. Three of the five most successful teams used N-grams of two
to four consecutive words, proving that, by extracting commonly appearing word
sequences, the resulting index tends to form a fingerprint of a documents style . . .
(28896). Juola concluded that methods based on simple lexical statistics, such as
word frequencies, tended to perform substantially worse than methods based on
N-grams or similar measures of syntax in conjunction with lexical statistics (2967).
This would suggest that computational stylistics is a less reliable method than
collocation matching. Rather than the atomistic approach of counting isolated
word frequencies, and then ascending to the numerical-statistical plane, collocation
matching remains at the verbal plane, dealing directly with chunks of language that
preserve something of the warp and woof of the original verbal fabric and constitute
a writers phraseognomy, in John Sinclairs happy coinage.8 A further advantage
of this direct access to a works verbal fabric is that collocation matching does
not depend on the existence of large quantities of text. In traditional stylometry it is
regarded as best practice to specify a minimum length for samples of at least 3,000,
and preferably 5,000 words (Rybicki and Eder). The Additions to The Spanish
Tragedy, which amount to 2,600 words, are too short for these criteria. Yet collocation
matching, as demonstrated here, has no difficulty in eliminating a group of rival
candidates and establishing Shakespeare as the author. Since the allocation of coauthorship in the Elizabethan and later periods was usually by scenes, its ability to
gain results on quite small amounts of text makes collocation matching especially
appropriate to solving attribution problems in this field.
Collocation study has emerged as a fundamental area of corpus linguistics due to
the development of automatic concordancing programs. The second new scholarly
28
B. Vickers
tool, easily combined with collocation study, is what we now call plagiarism
software. The rise of the Internet increased the opportunities for unscrupulous
students to plagiarize their writing assignments from other sources, but at the same
time it allowed university authorities to devise software programs which could detect
such illicit activity. The program that we use, called Pl@giarism (www.plagiarism.
tk, available free of charge), was developed by Dr Georges Span for the law faculty of
the University of Maastricht. It works by collating two texts in parallel and listing
every instance where the same three consecutive words (trigrams) appear in both.
This method overcomes a notorious deficiency of which earlier exponents of
parallel passages were often accused, namely that their choice of parallels was
subjective and partial: that is, favouring those passages which supported a particular
attribution, and ignoring those which did not. Now the electronic searching process
is automatic, immune to personal bias or manipulation in advance, and can be
replicated by any one using this program on these texts. Once it has read the two
texts in parallel, Pl@giarism displays both texts on the screen, the master text in
the upper window, the target text in the lower. The shared phrases are highlighted in
both texts, and listed (in their order of occurrence in the master text) in a separate
window. By clicking on each phrase in this list, the program displays the full context
in both the texts being compared. These collocations may be fragments of discourse,
having no independent semantic status, such as if he then, or they may be coherent
speech units, such as within the hour.
Having identified the collocations shared, let us say, by a Shakespeare play and an
anonymously published work, we must address the question posed by Craig, how
can we be sure that some of the distinctive Shakespearean phrasings are not in fact
common expressions from his own time? (The Shakespeare Additions 15). The
only way to do so is to check them against a database of other plays performed on
the public stages in London within a given period. Commendably, in his recent essay
on the 1602 Additions Craig has taken note of Warren Stevensons work (mainly his
1968 essay),9 and has checked Stevensons claimed Shakespeare matches by reference
to a machine-readable archive of early modern drama. Although better resources
were available, Craig chose for this purpose Chadwick-Healeys English VerseDrama,
available on CD-ROM since 1995. Craig can now confirm that some of Stevensons
parallels do prove to be genuinely exclusive, some really are rare, and there are others
he overlooked (The Shakespeare Additions 167).
In the first category Craig accepted the genuinely exclusive parallel between the
Additions and Titus Andronicus in the phrase I pry through every crevice of each
wall (Add. 4.17; Tit. 5.1.114).10 In the unique match Stevenson identified between
Hieronimos query about the moon shining on the night of Horatios murder and the
injunction to search the calendar (Add. 4.47), Craig confirmed that Shakespeare
was echoing similar passages in his own work, Richard III and A Midsummer Nights
Dream (The Shakespeare Additions 169; although mentioning only the first
parallel).11 Craig also agreed with Stevenson that the parallel between Hieronimos
instruction to the Painter to make the murderers eie-browes juttie over as fearfully
as those of Henry Vs soldiers was truly idiosyncratic to Shakespeare. In the second
category, of rare but not unique parallels cited by Stevenson, Craig accepted that
Hieronimos phrase the Minutes jerring (Add. 4.150) uniquely echoes Richard IIs
usage, My thoughts are minutes, and with sighes they jar (5.5.51). In the third
category, Craig added three links to Shakespeare not noticed by Stevenson (The
Shakespeare
29
Shakespeare Additions 170). As it happens, Stevenson (Shakespeares Additions 83

4) has the second and third of these parallels. Hieronimos collocation, describing a
lie, j As massie as the earth (Add. 4.96) recurs in Much Ado as, as massie as his
club (3.3.1378), while the phrase our grandam earth (Add. 4.19) occurs in 1
Henry IV (3.1.33). The collocation undelved mynes (Add. 4.86) is echoed, in slightly
different terms in Hamlet: I will delve one yard belowe their mines (3.4.208; Q2).
While Craigs use of the Chadwyck-Healey database to check Stevensons claims
was laudable, he complained of difficulty in using its search functions, a disadvantage
to be added to its other limitations.12 The plagiarism software I have used, taken
in conjunction with InfoRapid, a most efficient text-retrieval program, and
Concordance, a simple but flexible concording tool, offers all kinds of possibilities
(www.inforapid.de is available free of charge and www.concordancesoftware.co.uk
is modestly priced). For an earlier essay I had made a detailed comparison of the
Additions with all the plays performed in the London theatres between 1580 and
1596, which gave strong support to Stevensons attribution to Shakespeare (Vickers,
Shakespeare and Authorship Studies). In addition to these two independent
studies, my colleague, Marcus Dahl, has made a third study, using the database he
has created, which contains over 400 plays and masques dating from the 1580s to the
1640s, and including the complete canons of Marlowe, Lyly, Peele, Kyd, Shakespeare,
Dekker, Jonson, Chapman, Middleton, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger and Shirley,
together with all the anonymously published plays. Dahl has checked the Additions
to the 1602 Quarto of The Spanish Tragedy against every play in this corpus, using a
newly developed method of making rare collocation searches and analysing the
results. The first sequence of matching was done automatically, producing a huge
number of shared phrases (in the domain of langue), each one listed separately
according to the texts in which it occurs. An inspection of this list then isolated
limited, potentially unique occurrences (in the domain of parole), each of which was
examined manually. (The method is described in Appendix 1.) The results showed
that, apart from Shakespeare and Jonson, none of the other possible authors
working in the London theatres in the late 1590s were serious candidates. Since
Jonsons writing career only began with Every Man in his Humour (1598; Q 1601), it
is not surprising that the vast majority of the Jonson matches are from plays written
and performed after 1600 (see Dahl and Vickers, forthcoming). The results for
Shakespeare, however, presented in Appendix 2, provide overwhelming evidence for
his having written these five enlarged scenes in The Spanish Tragedy. As every reader
can see, the uniquely Shakespearian matches amount to 116 in the 320 lines of the
Additions, a rate of one every 2.5 lines. In the longest, and most memorable scene,
that with the Painter (specially advertised on the title page of the 1602 quarto) the
frequency drops slightly, to 65 matches in 168 lines, or one every 2.6 lines. There is no
other conceivable explanation: Shakespeare wrote these scenes.
The cumulative evidence speaks for itself, but some particular elements stand out.
In collocation analyses, the trigram is taken as the basic unit defining recurring
phrases. As research has shown, three consecutive words give a reliable indicator
of the existence of a repeated phrase, whether shared or unique to one writer.
The occurrence of longer consecutive sequences is an even stronger indicator, since a
run of four words is statistically rarer, one of five is even rarer, and one of six is rarer
still. The uniquely Shakespearian matches listed in Appendix 2 include 20 matches
longer than three words. Some are discontinuous, as linguists describe them, where a
30
B. Vickers
trigram has an additional matching word outside the basic sequence. For instance,
No. 74 in that table includes the trigram will [noun] that I, combined with this
and a verb plus auxiliary (should set, shal do). No. 85 has the trigram Nor I,
nor together with two additional words, but and one (in the match with The
Winters Tale). There are, by my count, 14 instances of four consecutive matching
collocations in this table, such as within this houre that (10); I am not mad (59)
a collocation Shakespeare used eight times; wouldest thou have that (76); May it
be done? (93), and eight others. Some of these four word matches are discontinuous,
such as this (No. 15), between the Additions and The Rape of Lucrece:
Gird in my wast of griefe with thy large darknesse (Add. 150)

And girdle with embracing flames the wast j of Collatines fair loue (Lucr. 67)
Formally speaking, that match consists of a verb phrase, gird(le) with, and its
complement (large darknesse; embracing flames), and a noun phrase in a
genitive construction: wast of griefe; wast j of Collatines fair loue. In order to
identify unique matches, we must sometimes take careful note of grammar and
syntax.
Other instances of discontinuous four word sequences include one additional
word, as in No. 87, a match with Much Ado:
Will range this hideous orchard up and downe . . . bring me through allie
and allye. (Add. 4.104, 1456)
Walk in the orchard . . . j As we do trace this alley up and downe. (Ado 3.1.5,16)
A four word sequence can also embrace two additional words, as in 80, a unique
match between the Additions and the quarto version of King Lear (the passage was
omitted in the Folio):
I sir, no man did hold a sonne so deere. (Add. 4.94)
I had a sonne. (Add. 4.96)
I had a sonne j . . . I loud him friend
No father his sonne deerer. (Lr 3.4.166, 1689)
Five word sequences (pentagrams) are rare in any collocation study, but the
matches between the Additions and Shakespeares plays and poems include two
instances, Nos. 60 and 107:
I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques. (Add. 4.44)
Yes, I know thee to be signior Lucentio. (TS 5.1.105)
Ide giue them all, I and my soule to boote. (Add. 5.14)
Now by my scepter, and my soul to boot. (1H4 3.2.97)
The longest matching collocation is one already noted, No. 44, which we may
now term a discontinuous hexagram:
I prie through every crevice of each wall. (Add. 4.17)
I pried me through the Crevice of a Wall. (Tit. 5.1.114)
Shakespeare
31
Although rarity can be measured in terms of a collocations length, once the

relevant data has been examined, smaller sequences turn out to be equally rare, such
as this imperative (No. 12):
Say you, say you, light: lend me a Taper, (Add. 1.43)
Give me a taper! (Oth. 1.1.141)
or this collocation of the tender and the sharp (No. 13):

Drop all your stinges at once in my cold bosome. (Add. 1.46)
Thornes that in her bosome lodge, j To pricke and sting her. (Ham. 1.5.878)
As that instance shows, whatever matches are thrown up in the automated reading
procedure must be supplemented by visual inspection of the surrounding context.
No other drama text includes the collocation of verb and noun found in No. 26,
Hieronimos rhetorical dispraise of a son (far from his real feelings, as we know):
Being borne, it poutes, cryes, and breeds teeth. (Add. 3.11)
which finds a strange echo in Macbeths fear of the boy Fleance, who has just
escaped being murdered along with his father Banquo:
There the grown serpent lies: the worm thats fled
Hath nature that in time will venom breed,
No teeth for thpresent. (Mac. 3.4.2930)
The authentically Shakespearian nature of the Additions can be seen from the
fact that links occur between them and every play in the canon, apart from Julius
Caesar and the two Fletcher collaborations (Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen).
If we divide the canon at 1599, the approximate date of the Additions, then the 21
earlier plays, from 2 Henry VI to Henry V, account for 135 links. The 20 later plays,
from Caesar to The Tempest, account for only 57 links. In the earlier half the most
links are with Titus Andronicus (12), Romeo and Juliet (11), Richard II (11), King John
(11) and The Taming of the Shrew (10). Of the later plays, the most links occur with
Twelfth Night (8), Hamlet (7), Cymbeline (7) and Macbeth (6). We may conclude that
Shakespeares Additions to The Spanish Tragedy have more in common, in terms of
language and subject matter, with plays from the first half of his career. However, the
fact that the three independent studies united here have identified over a hundred
matches, stretching across his whole career from 1592 to 1611, amounts to decisive
evidence for his authorship. To echo (see above) Coleridges slight over-estimate,
it is very remarkable that every one of them reappears in full form and development
and tempered with mature judgment, in some of Shakespeares great pieces.
I mentioned earlier that exponents of computational stylistics believe their
method to be reliable since it traces the patterns of recurrence in function words of
which Shakespeare could not have been conscious, and thus could not be imitated
by other writers. As recent authorities have shown, satisfying that criterion was not
sufficient to make the study of isolated single words a reliable authorship indicator.
32
B. Vickers
But the method used here, respecting the texts verbal fabric, certainly fulfils that
criterion, since Shakespeare could not possibly have been aware of the idiosyncratic
lexicon of collocations that constituted his phraseognomy, as we may call it, and
which distinguished his language from that of his contemporaries. The use of
collocation studies for authorship attribution purposes is in its infancy, but it should
soon be possible to define a dramatists characteristic lexicon of phrases in ways that
will enable scholars to pronounce on the authorship of anonymous and co-authored
plays with more certainty than ever before. It seems not too immodest to suggest that
a new era in attribution studies has begun.
Notes
1. For all Foakes references, I expand Henslowes contractions, and modernize u/v, j/i forms.
2. All quotations are from this edition, modernizing u/v, and i/j, and removing italics for
proper names. Lineation has been adjusted to that given by Philip Edwards in his Revels
edition (12235).
3. For Simpson as author of this essay see Butler.
4. The book being lost must refer to the disturbance caused by the closing of the
theatres between March 1603 and the spring of 1604, due to the Queens illness, followed
by the plague, during which time the boys troupe was suspended, and had no control over
their literary property. They were re-formed in February 1604 as Children of the Queens
Revels (xlixlv, 13 n.).
5. Shakespeare may have recalled a passage in Nashes The Unfortunate Traveller
(London, 1594) describing a ruthless bandit as having overhanging gloomie ey-browes
(McKerrow 2: 290).
6. Computational stylistics cannot pretend to reveal any essences, only a highly pragmatic
differentiation of one thing from another. Bring in a third entity and things change
appreciably (Craig, Style, Statistics).
7. See Bhttp://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk. For a helpful account of the creation and use of
linguistic corpora, see Kennedy (1387).
8. There has to be a grave-sounding word for discussing the phraseology of phraseology,
and I offer the one in my title [Phraseognomy], which arrives with impeccable etymological credentials, if little evidence of usage (Sinclair with Carter 177).
9. Craig and Kinneys Preface to The 1602 Additions states that Warren Stevensons 2008
monograph (Shakespeares Additions) came to our attention after this book was in
production. We regret not being able to make use of Stevensons amplified case for
Shakespeares authorship of the Additions here (xviii). However, one of the parallels that
Craig accepted in 2009 was only published in Stevensons monograph of the previous year
(57): see the passages cited above with the shared idea of one mans hand leand on
anothers head (The Rape of Lucrece 1415; Add. 4.125). As Craig confirmed in 2009, a
search of English Verse Drama [1995] turns up no other comparable combination of
hand, leaning, and head (The 1602 Additions 169).
10. The Chadwyck-Healey database was incorporated into Literature OnLine (or LION),
now available from ProQuest, with enhanced search facilities. An alternative, albeit
incomplete resource is Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBOTCP), which offers fresh keyboardings of the early editions from the old University
Microfilm versions of STC.
11. Craig notes the parallel with the mechanicals in A Midsummer Nights Dream checking
in the calendar, but only in a footnote, explaining that The play is in prose as well as
verse, so is not included in English Verse Drama, which is our benchmark corpus to
establish the rarity or otherwise of collocations shared between Shakespeare and the
Additions (The Shakespeare Additions 169, n.). This remarkable omission is one of
several bad decisions that have reduced the value of this database. In both their drama and
English Verse databases Chadwyck-Healey also chose to omit all the prefatory material in
printed books, deleting much of historical importance.
Shakespeare
33
12. Craig used the methodology advocated by MacDonald Jackson (114) but complained
that it is cumbersome, unable to identify a complete list of the phrases contained in the
five Additions, for instance, and indeterminate, for no single, hard-and-fast principle
can establish the degree of closeness or the rarity of a so-called parallel (The
Shakespeare Additions 1677). These difficulties can be overcome by using software
programs that read already existing texts and identify matching collocations, rather
than having to design word searches in advance.
References
Baldwin, T.W. On the Chronology of Thomas Kyds Plays. MLN 40 (1925); revised in
Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeares Plays 15921594. Urbana, IL, 1959.
17799.
Barton, Annae. Ben Jonson, Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Boas, F.S., ed. The Works of Thomas Kyd. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901; 1955.
Butler, Martin. The Making of the Oxford Ben Jonson. Review of English Studies 62 (2011):
73857.
Byrne, M. St. Clare. Bibliographical Clues in Collaborate Plays. Library 4th ser. 13 (1932):
2148.
Chambers, E.K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. 1923. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009.
****. William Shakespeare. A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1930.
Craig, D. Hugh. Authorial Styles and the Frequencies of Very Common Words: Jonson,
Shakespeare, and the Additions to The Spanish Tragedy. Style 26 (1992): 199220.
****. The 1602 Additions to The Spanish Tragedy. Shakespeare, Computers, and the
Mystery of Authorship. Ed. H. Craig and A. Kinney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
16280.
****. Style, Statistics, and New Models Of Authorship. Early Modern Literary Studies,
15.1 (200910): para. 40. 16 Sept. 2011 Bhttp://purl.oclc.org./emls/15-1/craistyl.htm.
Dahl, Marcus, and Brian Vickers. The 1602 Additions to The Spanish Tragedy: Shakespeare
versus Jonson. Early Modern Literary Studies (forthcoming).
Edwards, Philip, ed. The Spanish Tragedy. Revels ed. 1959. Manchester: Manchester UP,
1986.
Erne, Lukas. Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd. Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2001.
Firth, J.R. Modes of Meaning. Essays in Studies, reprinted in and cited from Firth, Papers
in Linguistics 193451. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1957. 190215.
Foakes, R.A., ed. Henslowes Diary. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008.
Freeman, Arthur. Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967.
Greg, W.W., ed. The Spanish Tragedy with Additions 1602. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1925;
Malone Society Reprints.
Herford, C.H., Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, eds. Ben Jonson. 11 vols. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 192552.
Hunter, George K., ed. Antonio and Mellida. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska and
London: Edward Arnold, 1965.
****, ed. The Malcontent. Revels ed. Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 1975.
Jackson, MacDonald. Determining Authorship: A New Technique. Research Opportunities
in Renaissance Drama 41 (2002): 114.
Juola, Patrick. Authorship Attribution. Foundation and Trends in Information Retrieval 1.3
(2006): 233334.
Kathman, David. Inn-Yard Playhouses. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre.
Ed. Richard Dutton. Oxford, Oxford UP, 2009. 15367.
Kennedy, Graeme. An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. London and New York: Longman,
1998.
Knutson, Roslyn. Influence of the Repertory System on the Revival and Revision of The
Spanish Tragedy and Dr Faustus. English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 25774.
34
B. Vickers
Lancashire, Ian. Chaucers Repetends from The General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales.
The Centre and the Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John
Leyerle. Ed. R.A. Taylor, James F. Burke, Paricia J. Eberle, Ian Lancashire, and Brian
Merrilees. Kalamazoo MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992. 31565.
****. Cognitive Stylistics and the Literary Imagination. A Companion to the Digital
Humanities. Ed. S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, and J. Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
397414.
****. Phrasal Repetends in Literary Stylistics: Shakespeares Hamlet III.1. Research in
Humanities Computing 4: Selected Papers from the ALLC/ACH conference, Christ Church,
Oxford, April 1992. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 3468.
****. Probing Shakespeares Idiolect in Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.129. University of
Toronto Quarterly 68 (1999): 72867.
Leishmann, J.B., ed. The Three Parnassus Plays (15981601). London: Nicholson and
Watson, 1949.
Levin, Harry. An Echo from The Spanish Tragedy. Modern Language Notes 64 (1949):
297302.
McKerrow, R.B., ed. Rev. ed. F.P. Wilson. The Works of Thomas Nashe. 5 vols. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1966.
Manley, Lawrence. Why Did London Inns Function as Theaters? The Huntington Library
Quarterly 271 (2008): 18197.
Reavley Gair, W., ed. Antonios Revenge. Revels ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1978; 1999.
Riggs, David. Ben Jonson: A Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.
Rowan, D.F. The Staging of The Spanish Tragedy. The Elizabethan Theatre, 5. Ed. G.R.
Hibbard. Toronto and London: Macmillan, 1975. 11223.
Rybicki, Jan, and Maciej Eder. Deeper Delta Across Genres and Languages: Do We Really
Need the Most Frequent Words? Literary and Linguistic Computing 26.3 (2011). 31521.
Scha fer, Ju rgen. Documentation in the OED: Shakespeare and Nashe as Test Cases. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1980.
Schick, Joseph, ed. The Spanish Tragedy. London: J.M. Dent, 1898.
Schu cking, L.L. Die Zusa tze zur Spanish Tragedy. Berichte uber die Verhandlungen der
Sa
chsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig (Philologisch-historische Klasse) 90.2.
Leipzig 1938.
Sinclair, John. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
Sinclair, John (with Ronald Carter), ed. Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse.
London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Stevenson, Warren. Shakespeares Additions to Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tragedy: A Fresh
Look at the Evidence Regarding the 1602 Additions. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter:
Edward Mellen, 2008.
****. Shakespeares Hand in The Spanish Tragedy 1602. Diss., McGill U, 1954.
****. Shakespeares Hand in The Spanish Tragedy 1602. Studies in English Literature,
15001900 8 (1968): 30721.
Van Heyningen, C. The Additions to Kyds Spanish Tragedy. Theoria 17 (Pietermaritzburg:
Natal UP, 1961): 3853.
Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twenty-First Century.
Shakespeare Quarterly 62.1 (2011): 10642.
Woodring, Carl, ed. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 14. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990.
Wray, Alison. Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Appendix 1
A methodological note on collocation matching in large databases
Let us assume that we are studying the target text (X), which we suspect may have been
written by author A. The first step would be to run the Pl@giarism program on Author
Shakespeare
35
Canon A, including Text X. If the author canon consists of five plays, say, the program will
automatically test plays A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5 against Text X and against each other. This
creates a lengthy list of all the resulting trigram matches between the six plays analysed.
Then, using the Pl@giarism filter function, we extract the exclusive matches with Text X
(A1X, A2X, and so on), and save them. We then merge all the trigram matches into one
complete list of matches and check that list for alternative spellings, to cover all possible
variants. Thus, if a particular trigram reads If ye haue we would add the forms If yee haue
and perhaps If ye/yee have, as well as If you haue, if you have, and so on.
In the next three steps we make use of a program specially written for us by Crispin
Hambidge, of the Environmental Services Agency, Bristol. The first, Remove Duplicates,
eliminates phrases duplicated in the target text/canon search (since this included both A1X
and XA1). Then, using Hambidges Phrase ID program, we allocate an individual
identity (ID) number to each trigram. Finally, using Hambidges Phrase Search 3.3
program, we run the complete list of Text X/Canon A matches through our complete database
of over 400 early modern plays, in order to compare frequencies of the matching trigrams
elsewhere in texts by other authors.
We then convert the results of the Phrase Search 3.3 program to a Microsoft Access
database, in which results can be ordered and viewed according to various organizational
principles, including number of occurrences, author, alphabetic sequence,and so forth. By
reviewing this Access Table we collect only those phrases which occur in Text X and Canon A.
The resulting rare phrases can then be marked up in Text X in a chosen colour.
We then repeat the whole process for all the competing author canons which were
produced in the same time frame as Text X, or have been suggested as possible author
candidates for the text. Although the dating of early modern plays is notoriously difficult, we
have been privileged to make use of the extensive ongoing reference work produced by Martin
Wiggins, British Drama, 15331642: A Catalogue, c.9 volumes (Oxford, 2011 ), which is a
considerable improvement on Harbage and Schoenbaums Annals of English Drama.
We mark up the results for each author canon test on Text X, using different colours, thus
showing at a glance all the rare matches between every competing author canon and our target
text. These matches can then be viewed in context, counted in terms of their author canons
respective canon size, and studied with regard to date of occurrence, place in the text and so on.
Our method so far is based on the study of rare trigrams. It will shortly be complemented
by one which will include all the non-rare data (namely, those matches which are found in
other author canons, but in variant numbers).
Appendix 2
Shakespeares Additions to Q4 The Spanish Tragedy (1602), checked against over 400 plays and
masques, 1587 1642: list of all matches
Matches marked with an asterisk were identified by Warren Stevenson in Shakespeares

Additions to Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tragedy. A Fresh Look at the Evidence Regarding the
1602 Additions (see References). The remainder were independently made by Marcus Dahl and
Brian Vickers, who also added further examples, here marked (*), to some of Stevensons
matches.
Exact verbal matches are printed in bold face; words fulfilling the same semantic or
syntactic function are italicized.
36
1
3*
4
5
6*
7
8*
9*
10
11*
12
13*
14*
15*
16
17*
18*
19(*)
B. Vickers
True, all Spaine takes note of it,
Pray you take note of it
my Neece shall take note of it
These three yeares I haue taken note of it
That is the very note of it
The greatest note of it is his melancholy
must not soyle j The precious note of it with a base slave
True, all Spaine takes note of it. j Besides, he
But being maskd, he was not sure of it. j Besides she
The French (my lord) mens mouth are full of it. j Besides
Which doe assure me he cannot be short lived
Such short-liud wits do wither as they grow
O short-liud pride. Not faire? alacke for woe
Jaques, runne to the Duke of Castiles presently
Go tell the Prince, runne to the Capulets
Jaques, runne to the Duke of Castile presently, j And bid my sonne
I will away towards Barnet presently, j And bid thee battle
I and his mother have had strange dreames to night
Strange dreame that gives a dead man leave to thinke
Doe ye heare me, sir?
Do but heare me sir
Nay blush not, man
Nay blush not, Cleopatra, I approve
Ha, ha, Saint James! but this doth make me laugh
Nay by Saint Jamy, I hold you a penny
I would haue sworne my selfe within this houre, j That
Such a deale of wonder is broken out within this houre that
It was a man, sure, that was hanged up here
A youth, one that they hanged up in his fathers Garden
That those which flye before the battell ends,
May be hangd up for example at their doores
Say you, say you, light: lend me a Taper,
Give me a taper!
Drop all your stinges at once in my cold bosome
Thornes that in her bosome lodge, j To pricke and sting her
Drop all your stinges at once in my cold bosome
Throw in the frozen bosomes of our part
Even now the frozen bosome of the North
Gird in my wast of griefe with thy large darknesse
And girdle with embracing flames the wast j of Collatines fairloue
Thexpence of Spirit in a waste of shame
I reserve your favour for a greater honor
You breake a greater honor than yourself
And for an earnest of a greater Honor
This is a very toy, my Lord, a toy
A toy my Liedge, a toy: your grace needes not
This is a very toy, my Lord, a toy . . .
It is an idle thing
And Critticke Tymon laugh at idle toyes
You are ydle shallowe things
I ha beene too slacke, tootardie*, too remise**
He meanes, my Lord, that we are too remisse
Add. 1.9
MM 5.1.80
TN 3.2.36
Ham. 5.1.139
Wiv. 1.1.168
Ado 3.2.54
Cym. 2.3.122
Add. 1.910
TGV 1.3.20
Jn. 4.2.162
Add. 1.13
LLL 2.1.54
LLL 4.1.15
Add. 1.17
Rom. 5.3.177
Add. 1.17
3H6 5.1.11011
Add. 1.19
Rom. 5.1.7
Add. 1.20
Jn. 4.3.119
Add. 1.24
Ant. 5.2.149
Add. 1.25
TS 3.2.85
Add. 1.289
WT 5.2.234
Add. 1.40
Add. 5.40
2H6 4.2.17980
Add. 1.43
Oth. 1.1.141
Add. 1.46
Ham. 1.5.878
Add. 1.46
2H6 5.2.35
Rom. 1.4.102
Add. 1.50
Lucr. 67
Sonn. 129.1
Add. 2.2
E3 2.1.261 (WS)
Mac. 1.3.104
Add. 2.3
LLL 4.3.201
Add. 2.3.6
LLL 4.3.168
TN 3.4.123
Add. 2.7
R2 3.2.33
Shakespeare
20*
21(*)
22(*)
23*
24
25*
26*
27*
28
29
30
31
32
33*
34*
37
Rom. 2.6.15
Too swift arrives as tardie as too slow
TC 4.4.141
The Prince must thinke me tardy and remisse
*Of 9 instances before 1596, 6 are in W.S.
**5 instances in W.S.
Add. 2.810
In troth, my Lord, it is a thing of nothing
The murder of a Sonne, or so
A thing of nothing, my Lord!
Ham. 4.2.2830
The king is a thing
A thing, my Lord!
Of nothing
Add. 3.4
My sonne, and whatsa sonne?
TS 2.1.197
Why, whatsa mouable?
Rom. 2.2.40, 43
Whats Montague? . . . Whats in a name?
TN 1.2.35
Whats shee?
TN 1.5.130
Whats a drunken man like, foole?
Ham. 2.2.259
Whats Hecuba to him?
Mac. 5.3.3
Whats the Boy Malcolme?
Ant. 3.2.10
Whats Anthony?
Add. 3.46
Whats a sonne? . . . A lumpe bred up in darknesse
2H6 5.1.15
Hence heape of wrath, foule indigested lumpe**
3H6 5.6.51
To wit, an indigested and deformed lumpe**
R3 1.2.57
Blush, blush, thou lumpe** of fowle deformitie
[**Richard, Duke of Gloucester]
Add. 3.7
To ballace these light creatures we call Women
Thats the way: for women are light at midnight
MM 5.1.279
And at nine months ende, creeps fourth to light. j What is
Add. 3.89
Who being set in darke seemes therefore light. j What is
E3 2.1.144 (WS)
Add. 3.910
What is there yet in a sonne,
To make a father dote, rave, or rune mad?
I am afraid my daughter will runne madde
1H4 3.1.1434
So much she doteth on her Mortimer
Add. 3.11
[A son] Being borne, it poutes, cryes, and breeds teeth
[On the boy Fleance] the worme thats fled j Hath Nature that in Mac. 3.4.2830
time will Venom breed, j No teeth for thpresent
Or melt in passion ore a frisking kid
Add. 3.15
Melted with tendernesse, and milde compassion
R3 4.3.7
Add. 3.18
Should move a man as much as doth a sonne. j For one
3H6 5.5.90
By this, (I hope) she hath a sonne for me
Lr. 1.1.1415
and had indeed (sir) a sonne for her cradle
For one of these, in very little time, j Will grow
Add. 3.19
A little time will melt her frozen thoughts
TGV 3.2.9
A little time (my Lord) will kill that griefe
TGV 3.2.15
Strikes care upon their heads with his mad ryots
Add. 3.24
To cross their armes & hang their heads with mine
Lucr. 844
Strikes care upon their heads with his mad ryots
Add. 3.24
And with his mad attendant and himselfe
Err. 5.1.150
Grew out of reach of these insatiate humours
Add. 3.29
I Madam from the reach of these my hands
Rom. 3.5.85
When his strong arme unhorst j The proud Prince Balthasar
Add. 3.36
He would unhorse the lustiest Challenger
R2 5.3.19
Well, heaven is heaven still
Add. 3.402
And there is Nemesis, and Furies,
38
35*
36*
37*
38(*)
39(*)
40*
41*
42*
43
44*
45
46*
47*
B. Vickers
And things called whippes
Have you not Beadles in your Towne,
And Things calld whippes?
I, I, I; and then time steales on, j And steales, and steales
Which mellowd by the stealing howres of time
That time comes stealingon by night and day
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and to morrow,
Creepes in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last Syllable of Recorded time
till violence leapes foorth
Like thunder wrapped in a ball of fire
And so doth bring confusion to them all
With no lesse terror then the Elements
Of Fire and Water, when their thundring shock
At meeting teares the cloudie Cheekes of Heaven
Like thunder wrapped in a ball of fire
And now insteed of bulletts wrapt in fire
Save those that watch for rapeand bloody murder
Where bloody Murther or detested Rape
Lo by thy side where rape and murder stands
So thou destroy Rapine and Murder there
Rape and murder, therefore called so
Rapine and murder you are welcome too
Nay, nay, let rape and murder stay with me
Wrath, enuy, treason, rape, and murthers rages
His hart in quiet like a desperate man
To enter in the thoughts of desperate men
Good gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man
As doth the furie of two desperate men
He speakes as if Horatio stood by him,
Then starting in a rage, falls on the earth
How much I had to doe to calme his rage?
Now feare I this will giue it start againe
So that with extreame griefe and cutting sorrow
Or I with greefe and extreame Age shall perish
Extremitie of griefes would make men mad
Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, j Burst smilingly
There is not left in him one ynch of man:
Ay, euery inch a King
For euery inch of woman in the world
not left in him one ynch of man: j See where he comes.
this way man, j See where the Huntsmen stand
I prie through every creviceof each wall
I pried me through the Creviceof a Wall
Looke on each tree, and search through every brake, j Beat at the
bushes
Ile leade you about a Round j Through bogge,
through bush, through brake, through bryer
Beate at the bushes, stampe our grandam earth,
At your Birth, j Our Grandam Earth, having this distemperature
Beate at the bushes, stampe our grandam earth,
Diue in the water, and stare vp to heaven
Nay, looke not big, nor stampe, nor stare, nor fret
2H6 2.1.1334
Add. 3.456
R3 3.7.167
Err. 4.2.60
Mac. 5.5.1921
Add. 3.468
R2 3.3 557
Add. 3.47
Jn. 2.1.227
Add. 4.4
Tit. 5.2.37
Tit. 5.2.45
Tit. 5.2.59
Tit. 5.2.62
Tit. 5.2.83
Tit. 5.2.134
Lucr. 909
Add. 4.8
Rom. 5.1.36
Rom. 5.3.59
Jn. 3.1.32
Add. 4.1112
Ham. 4.7.1923
Add. 4.14
R3 4.4.186
Tit. 4.1.19
Lr. 5.3.198
Add. 4.15
Lr. 4.6.107
WT 2.1.137
Add. 4.1516
3H6 4.5.15
Add. 4.17
Tit. 5.1.114
Add. 4.1819
MND 3.1.10910
Add. 4.19
1H4 3.1.323
Add. 4.1920
TS 3.2.228
Shakespeare
48*
49
50
51
52(*)
53*
54*
55*
56*
57
58*
59(*)
Diue in the water, and stare vp to heauen

Diue in the earth
Or diue into the bottome of the deepe
Yet cannot I behold my sonne Horatio
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more
You bid vs light them, and attend you here.
Attend you here the doore of our stern daughter j Will she not
forth?
No, no, you are deceivd! not I, you are deceivd!
No, no, you shall have it for bearing the letter
No no, you must play Pyramus, and Flute, you Thisby.
No, no, youare deceivd! not I, you are deceivd
You are deceiud, my substance is not here
You are deceiud, my child is none of his
You are deceiud my Lord, she neuer saw it
you are deceiud Sir, we kept time, we lost not
No, you are deceiud, therfore backe to Rome
Oh Sir, you are deceiud
You are deceiud, your Brother Glouster hates you.
Come you are deceiud, I thinke of no such thing
You are deceiud, for what I mean to do
You are deceiued, tis not so
Light me your torches at the mid of noone
Ratcliffe, about the mid of night come to my Tent
Light me your torches at the mid of noon, . . .
Light me your torches then. Then we burne day light
A torche for me . . . Come we burne day-light, ho!
Weeburne day-light
For I . . . did desire you j To burne this night with Torches
Let it be burnt. Night is a murderous slut,
That would not have her treasons to be seene
And yonder pale faced Hecate there, the Moone,
Doth giue consent to that is done in darknesse
O comfort-killing Night, image of Hell,
Dim register and notarie of shame,
Blacke stage for tragedies, and murthers fell,
Vast sin-concealing chaos, nourse of blame,
Blind muffled bawd
And yonder pale faced Hecate there, the Moone
Thepale-facd Moone lookes bloody on the Earth
To pluck bright Honor from the pale-facd Moone
Witchcraft celebrates j Pale Hecats Offrings
Doth give consent to that is done in darknesse
That all is done in reverend care of her
Villaine, thou liest: and thou dost nought
Villaine thou liest, for even her verie words
But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad
Peace doting wizard, peace. I am not mad
I am not mad, I know thee well enough
I am not mad, I would to heaven I were
I am not mad: too well, too well I feele
I am not mad, this haire I teare is mine
39
Add. 4.20
Tim. 4.1.2
1H4 1.3.203
Add. 4.21
Jn. 3.4.89
Add. 4.25
Cym. 2.3.378
Add. 4.26
TGV 1.1.119
MND 1.2.556
Add. 4.26
1H6 2.3.51
1H6 5.4.72
AWW 5.3.92
AYL 5.3.37
Cor. 5.2.47
MM 3.2.123
R3 1.4.232
Tro. 4.2.39
Tit. 5.2.13
LLL 5.2.541
Add. 4.28
R3 5.3.77
Add. 4.28, 31
Rom. 1.4.35, 43
Wiv. 2.1.54
Ant. 4.2.401
Add. 4.314
Lucr. 7649
Add. 4.33
R2 2.4.10
1H4 1.3.202
Mac 2.1.512
Add. 4.34
TS 4.1.204
Add. 4.42
Err. 2.2.163
Add. 4.43
Err. 4.4.58
Tit. 5.2.21
Jn. 3.3.48
Jn. 3.4.59
Jn. 3.4.45
40
60
61
62*
63
64
65
66*
67
68(*)
69*
70*
71
B. Vickers
I am not mad sir Topas
By the Lord Foole, I am not mad
I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques
Yes, I know thee to be signior Lucentio
I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques
I am not mad, I know thee well enough
Witnesse all sorrow, that I know thee well
For our proud Empresse, Mighty Tamora
Where was she [the moon] that same night,
When my Horatio was murdred?
She should have shone: search though the book!
Had the Moone shone . . .
Doth the Moone shinethat night wee play our play?
A Calender, a Calender, look in the Almanack, finde
out Moon-shine, finde out Moone-shine.
Yes, it doth shine that night.
Had the Moone shone,
When the moon shone, we did not see the candle
in my boyes face there was a kind of grace
looking on the lines j Of my boyes face
what, j What shall we say
What shall I doe? say what? What shall I doe?
Not I indeed, we are verie merrie, very merrie.
How, be merrie here, be merrie here:
Is not this the place, and this the very tree,
Where my Horatio hied, where he was murdered?
You are merrie, my lord . . ..
. . . what should a man do but be merrie? For looke you,
how cheerfully my Mother looks, and my Father dyed withins
two Houres.
Was doe not say what; let her weep it out
Well, Ile not say what I intend for thee
Therefore dare not j Say what I thinke
This was the tree, I set it of a kiernell
It was my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor
Here Lord Bassanio swear to keep this ring.
By heaven it is the same I gave the Doctor.
I had it of him: pardon Bassanio,
For by this ring the Doctor lay with me
And when our hot Spaine could not let it grow
Where Spain? I felt it hot in her breath
the hot breath of Spaine
And when our hot Spaine could not let it grow
But that the infant and the human sap j Began to wither
When I perceiue that men as plants increase,
Cheared and checkt euen by the self-same skie:
Vaunt in their youthfull sap, at height decrease
She that herself will sliuer and disbranch
From her materiall sap, perforce must wither,
And come to deadly vse.
At last it grewe and grewe, and bore and bore
At last it rains, and busy winds give oer
TN 4.2.40
TN 5.1.3734
Add. 4.44
TS 5.1.105
Add. 4.44
Tit. 5.2.21
Tit. 5.2.256
Add. 4.469
MND 3.1.515
Add. 4.48
MV 5.1.92
Add. 4.49
WT 1.2.154
Add. 4.53
Tmp. 1.2.300
Add. 4.5861
Ham. 3.2.122,
1267
Add. 4.62
Jn. 3.3.68
AWW 3.1.1314
Add. 4.63
MV 3.1.1212
MV 5.1.2569
Add. 4.64
Err. 3.2.130
Err. 3.2.136
Add. 4.645
Sonn. 15.57
Lr. 4.2.346 (Q)
Add. 4.68
Lucr. 1790
Shakespeare
72
73(*)
74
75
76
77
78*
79
80*
81
82*
83
84
85
86
87*
88
89*
90
It bore thy fruit and mine: O wicked wicked, plant

O wicked, wicked world!
For surely theres none lives but painted comfort
And with that painted hope, braves your Mightinesse
Is cold in amitie and painted peace
made this life more sweete j Then that of painted pomp
Gods will that I should set this tree
What is your will that I shal do with this?
And then they hate them that did bring them up
And Dromio my man did bring them me
O ambitious begger, wouldest thou haue that
Wouldst thou haue that j Which thou esteemst the
Ornament of Life,
Wouldest thou have that that lives not in the world?
Cure lives not j In these confusions
but the best is, he liues not in them
Stands still in Esperance, liues not in fear
Why, all the undelved mines cannot buy j An ounce of justice
But I will delve one yard belowe their mines
O, then I see j That God must right me for my murdred sonne
O then I see, you will but part with light gifts
O then I see Queen Mab hath beene with you
O then I see that Mad men have no eares
I sir, no man did hold a sonne so deere.
I had a sonne
I hada sonne j . . . I loud him friend
No father his sonne deerer
thats a lie, j As massie as the earth
where his codpiece seems as massie as his club?
did waigh j A thousand of thy sonnes
If I had a thousand Sonnes
For emulation hath a thousand Sonnes
did waigh j A thousand of thy sonnes and
thy sonnes and daughters will all be gentlemen
Alas, sir, I had no more but he
Alas, that Warwicke had no more fore-cast
Nor I, nor I: but this same one of mine
Nor I, nor any man, that but man is
Nor I, nor any j But one thats here
And this good fellow here and I
Goe on before, Ile talke with this good fellow
Will range this hideous orchard up and downe . . . bring me
through allie and allye
Walk in the orchard . . . j As we do trace this alley up and downe
Is there no trickes that comes before thine eies?
Checke at every Feather j That comes before his eye
One that comes before j To signify
canst paint me a teare, or a groane, or a sigh?
Sad sighes, deepe grones, nor silver-shedding teares
so Sighes, and Teares, and Grones j Shew Minutes, Houres and
Times
younger then I am. Do eye see sir
As good a man as he sir, who ere I am: doe yee yeelde sir,
41
Add. 4.71
Wiv. 2.1.20
Add. 4.74
Tit. 2.2.126
Jn. 3.1.105
AYL 2.1.23
Add. 4.76
Err. 3.2.169
Add. 4.78
Err. 5.1.386
Add. 4.85
Mac. 1.7.412
Add. 4.85
Rom. 4.5.656
MM 4.3.160
Lr. 4.1.2
Add. 4.867
Ham. 3.4.208
Add. 4.91
R3 3.1.118
RJ 1.4.53
RJ 3.3.61
Add. 4.94
Add. 4.96
Lr. 3.4.166,
1689 (Q)
Add. 4.956
Ado 3.3.137
Add. 4.978
2H4 4.3.122
TC 3.3.156
Add. 4.978
WT 5.2.127
Add. 4.99
3H6 5.1.42
Add. 4.100
R2 5.5.39
WT 2.3.83
Add. 4.103
R3 3.2.95
Add. 4.104, 1456
Ado 3.1.5.16
Add. 4.110
TN 3.1.645
MV 2.9.878
Add. 4.11314
TGV 2.4.131
R2 5.5.578
Add. 4. 11920
2H4 4.3.1112
42
91*
92*
93
94*
95*
96*
97
98
99*
100
101
102
103
104*
105
B. Vickers
Ide have you paint me . . . and drawe me five years
younger then I am . . . let five years goe, let them goe
So much the more our carvers excellence,
Which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her
As she lived now
My wife Isabella standing by me, with a speaking looke to my
sonne Horatio . . . and my hand leaning upon his head, thus
Here one mans hand leand on anothers head
Sir, doe you see? may it be done?
May it be done?
It is: May it be done?
the most notorious villaines that ever lived in all Spaine
What you notorious villaine, didst thou never
Tis a notorious villaine.
Let their beardes be of Judas his own collour
His very haire is of the dissembling colour.
Something browner then Iudasses.
Marrie, his kisses are Iudasses own children.
[The Painter offers to represent notorious villaines] O, let them
be worse, worse; stretch thine Arte, and . . . let their eie-browes
juttie over
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; j . . . let the brow oer whelme it,
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
Oer hang and juttie his confounded base,
Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Well, sir; then bring me foorth
Well sir, then twill be drie
the Windes blowing, the Belles towling, the Owles shriking,
the toades croking, the Minutes jerring and the Clocke striking
twelve.
My Mother weeping, my Father wayling, my Sister
crying, our Maid howling, our Catte wringing her hands . . .
the Belles towling . . . the Minutes jerring, and the Clocke striking
twelve.
My Thoughts are minutes; and with Sighes they jarre
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward Watch
I love thee not a Jarre othClock behind j What Lady she her
Lord.
And then at last, sir, starting, behold a man
Most mightie Duke, behold a man much wrongd
Make me rave, make me cry, make me mad, make me well
Such another proofe will make me cry baa
O no, there is no end: the end is death and madnesse!
There is no end, no limit, measure, bound
this would I teare and drag him up and downe
These numbers will I teare, and write in prose
were he as strong as Hector
Thou art as valorous as Hector of Troy
A second hope, as fairely built as Hector
And I take him to be valiant.
As Hector, I assure you
Nay, then I care not, come and we shall be friends
Nay then I will not, you shal have the Mustard
Add. 4.120
WT 5.3.302
Add. 4.1214
Lucr. 1415
Add. 4.125
Add. 4.143
TS 1.1.193
Add. 4.1345
TS 5.1.53
Oth. 5.2.239
Add. 4.1367
AYL 3.4.79
Add. 4.1378
H5 3.1.9, 1114
Add. 4.145
Err. 2.2.59
Add. 4.14951
TGV 2.3.68
Add. 4.14951
R2 5.5.512
WT 1.1.434
Add. 4.151
Err. 5.1.331
Add. 4.159
TGV 1.1.93
Add. 4.163
Rom. 3.2.125
Add. 4.168
LLL 4.3.55
Add. 4.174
2H4 2.4.219
TC 4.5.109
Ado 2.3.1889
Add. 5.4
TS 4.3.27
Shakespeare
106
And in that sight am growne a prowder Monarch

Our party may well meet a prowder foe
107* Ide giue them all, I and my soule to boote
Now by my scepter, and my soul to boot
108
But I would see thee ride in this red poole
But I would see his own person
109* Me thinkes since I grew inward with Revenge
Hope of revenge, shall hide our inward woe.
110(*) Doe, doe, doe, and meantime Ile torture you
Do your Offices, do your offices: M. Fang, & M. Snare, do me,
do me, do me your Offices.
Do, do, thou stool for a witch. I, do, do, thou sodden witted lord.
Doe, rudenesse; doe, camel, doe, doe
111
ha, wast not so? j You had a sonne
I hope it is not so, j You cannot
112* Hee was proud and politicke
I will bee proud, I will reade polliticke Authors
113
I thinke twas so: twas I that killed him
I thinke twas Soto that your honor means
Although I thinke twas in another sense
114(*) Looke you, this same hand, twas it that stabd
His hart, doe ye see this hand
This is the handthat stabbd thy Father Yorke
And this the hand, that slew thy Brother Rutland
Stabd by the self same hand that made these wounds
115* Now do I applaud what I have acted
Now, by the honor of my Ancestry,
I doe applaud thy spirit, Valentine
116
First take my tongue, and afterward my hart
discomfort guides my tongue, j And bids me speake
Death . . . j Ties up my tongue, and will not let me speake
43
Add. 5.10
Jn. 5.1.79
Add. 5.14
1H4 3.2.97
Add. 5.15
LLL 1.1.185
Add. 5.27
TC 5.10.31
Add. 5.30
2H4 2.1.402
TC, 2.1.423, 534
Add. 5.323
LLL 5.2.48990
Add. 5.34
TN 2.5.161
Add. 5.36
TS Ind. 1.88
TS 1.1.215
Add. 5.378
3H6 2.4.67
R3 1.2.11
Add. 5.46
TGV 5.4.13940
Add. 5.49
R2 3.2.656
Rom. 4.5.32

On Shakespeare and Spanish Tragedy

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On Shakespeare and Spanish Tragedy

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This article was downloaded by: [189.203.237.

Identifying Shakespeare's Additions to

School of Advanced Study , London University

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Identifying Shakespeares Additions to The Spanish Tragedy (1602):

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For Marcus Dahl

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Henslowe recorded 15 further performances by Stranges Men up to 22 January

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Approach, good sir. I did send for you to draw me a device,

How doost take it: art thou not sometimes mad?

Marston echoed, or parodied, the Spanish Tragedy Additions again in Antonios

Away with that same yelping cur, away!

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Marston was recalling Hieronimos hopes for revenge, in an earlier Addition:

on Burbadge names ould Heironymo as one of his parts, and in 2 Parnassus

This final remark, made in passing, deserves serious consideration.

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suggested as long ago as 5 April 1833, in one of Coleridges remarks at table,

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I prie through every crevice of each wall,

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I prie through every crevice of each wall (Add. 4.17)

Instructing the Painter how to represent his grief, Hieronimo itemizes

As Stevenson noticed, here Shakespeare recalled a visual representation he had

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Well, heaven is heaven still.

That impotent invocation of unfulfilled justice, whether heavenly, derived from

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The Moone is downe. (2.1.2)

Such a series of matching interlinked collocations far exceeds the bounds of

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O, let them be worse, worse: stretch thine Arte,

The apparently old-fashioned method of citing parallel passages allows us to recreate

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The limitation of computational stylistics, as Craig has recently admitted, is that it

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Craig is commendably honest, but while he discusses various possible factors

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To use the familiar categories established by Saussure, the frequently repeated

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combinations of words that can be traced from play to play. Contrary to

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Shakespeare Additions 170). As it happens, Stevenson (Shakespeares Additions 83

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Gird in my wast of griefe with thy large darknesse (Add. 150)

Although rarity can be measured in terms of a collocations length, once the

or this collocation of the tender and the sharp (No. 13):

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Matches marked with an asterisk were identified by Warren Stevenson in Shakespeares

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Diue in the water, and stare vp to heauen

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Lr. 4.2.346 (Q)