In my paper Why A Dog? A Late Date For The Two Gentlemen Of Verona, in the September 2007 issue of Notes and Queries, I put forward the hypothesis that Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written later than scholars had previously suspected. In particular, I challenged the notion, espoused most notably by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor in their Oxford William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, that Two Gentlemen is a very early work, perhaps even Shakespeare’s first play. Wells and Taylor proposed a date of 1590-91 for Two Gentlemen. Roger Warren, in the latest Oxford edition of the play, even speculates that it may be as early as 1587.
In the same issue of Notes and Queries as Why a Dog? there also appeared a paper by MacD. P. Jackson, A New Chronological Indicator for Shakespeare's Plays and for Hand D of Sir Thomas More, based on the work of Hartmut Ilsemann, who had noted that “in plays written up to 1599 the speech-length most frequently used was of nine words and that thereafter it fell to four words”. Ilsemann's point was a broad one - that the opening of the Globe in 1599 changed the way Shakespeare wrote - but Jackson analyses his data in more detail to show that speech-length provides a useful chronological indicator for Shakespeare's plays overall.
To illustrate this, Jackson divided Shakespeare’s plays into six groups, based on the chronological order given in the Oxford Textual Companion. He then calculated for each group the percentage of speeches 3-6 words long of all speeches 3-10 words long. The results are shown in his Table 1 below.
To illustrate this, Jackson divided Shakespeare’s plays into six groups, based on the chronological order given in the Oxford Textual Companion. He then calculated for each group the percentage of speeches 3-6 words long of all speeches 3-10 words long. The results are shown in his Table 1 below.
Table 1
(a)
|
(b)
|
(c)
|
The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Titus Andronicus
|
(1590-1 to 1592)
|
33.6
|
Richard III to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
|
(1592-3 to 1595)
|
37.4
|
King John to Much Ado About Nothing
|
(1595 to 1598)
|
46.9
|
Henry V to Troilus and Cressida
|
(1598-9 to 1602)
|
58.8
|
Measure for Measure to Macbeth
|
(1603 to 1606)
|
62.7
|
Antony and Cleopatra to Henry VIII
|
(1606 to 1613)
|
65.0
|
(a) plays in groups of six in chronological order (last group contains seven plays)
(b) dates of composition
(c) speeches of 3-6 words as percentage of all speeches of 3-10 words.
Presented in these broad groupings, speech-length data certainly does seem to provide a strong chronological indicator for Shakespeare’s plays. Jackson then goes on to look at the data for each individual play, to see how well it matches the Oxford chronology. The results are shown in his Table 2 below.
Table 2
(a)
|
(b)
|
(c)
|
(d)
|
(e)
|
1
|
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
|
8
|
46.2
|
15
|
2
|
The Taming of the Shrew
|
8
|
43.7
|
13
|
3
|
2 Henry VI
|
9
|
35.9
|
7
|
4
|
3 Henry VI
|
9
|
14.5
|
1
|
5
|
1 Henry VI
|
8
|
19.7
|
2
|
6
|
Titus Andronicus
|
9
|
26.2
|
3
|
7
|
Richard 3
|
9
|
32.2
|
5
|
8
|
Comedy of Errors
|
10
|
28.4
|
4
|
9
|
Love's Labour's Lost
|
9
|
45.4
|
14
|
10
|
Richard 2
|
9
|
37.1
|
9
|
11
|
Romeo and Juliet
|
9
|
40.5
|
10
|
12
|
A Midsummer Night's Dream
|
9
|
32.9
|
6
|
13
|
King John
|
9
|
37.0
|
8
|
14
|
The Merchant of Venice
|
8
|
42.5
|
12
|
15
|
1 Henry IV
|
6
|
49.1
|
16
|
16
|
The Merry Wives of Windsor
|
5
|
51.8
|
18
|
17
|
2 Henry IV
|
6
|
52.7
|
19
|
18
|
Much Ado About Nothing
|
8/9
|
42.0
|
11
|
19
|
Henry V
|
5
|
54.0
|
20
|
20
|
Julius Caesar
|
4
|
55.3
|
21
|
21
|
As You Like It
|
5
|
51.4
|
17
|
22
|
Hamlet
|
4
|
65.7
|
32
|
23
|
Twelfth Night
|
6
|
56.0
|
23
|
24
|
Troilus and Cressida
|
4
|
62.9
|
28
|
25
|
Measure for Measure
|
4
|
60.5
|
25
|
26
|
Othello
|
4
|
63.6
|
29
|
27
|
All’s Well That Ends Well
|
4
|
55.7
|
22
|
28
|
Timon of Athens
|
5
|
62.8
|
27
|
29
|
King Lear
|
4
|
65.1
|
30
|
30
|
Macbeth
|
4
|
69.2
|
37
|
31
|
Antony and Cleopatra
|
4
|
66.1
|
34
|
32
|
Pericles
|
4
|
57.1
|
24
|
33
|
Coriolanus
|
4
|
66.0
|
33
|
34
|
The Winter’s Tale
|
4
|
61.6
|
26
|
35
|
Cymbeline
|
4
|
68.0
|
36
|
36
|
The Tempest
|
4
|
65.4
|
31
|
37
|
Henry VIII
|
4
|
67.9
|
35
|
(a) position of play in Oxford Textual Companion’s chronological order
(b) title of play
(c) most frequently used speech length in terms of number of words in speech
(d) speeches of 3-6 words as percentage of all speeches of 3-10 words
(e) position of play in order of size of figure in previous column.
In general, while the exact chronological position usually varies, each play sits within the same broad position. There are, however, two major exceptions: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew, which, as Jackson notes, “are placed much later on the ‘short-speeches’ scale than in the Oxford chronology”.
Let’s look more closely at The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Firstly, the play is clearly the biggest outlier when comparing the Oxford and speech-length based chronologies. Listed as Shakespeare’s first play in the Oxford chronology, Two Gentlemen comes up as the fifteenth play in the speech-length chronology. Secondly, its speech-length ratio of 46.2 clearly aligns it with the group ‘King John to Much Ado About Nothing (1595 to 1598)’, which has a ratio of 46.9. Lastly, under the speech-length chronology, it comes after both Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice, a more natural position for it than in the Oxford chronology, where the clear affinities between the plays need to be tortuously explained as Two Gentlemen 'anticipating' the 'later' works.
Obviously, I was very pleased to read Jackson’s results, and I was even more pleased recently to discover another study where an entirely different stylometric approach to dating Shakespeare’s plays also points in the direction of Two Gentlemen being later than usually thought. The paper is Statistical Stylometrics and the Marlowe-Shakespeare Authorship Question, by Neal Fox, Omran Ehmoda and Eugene Charniak. As the title implies, the paper is mainly concerned with a stylometric approach to determining authorship (it was joint winner of the 2011 Calvin & Rose G Hoffman Prize). However, it also looks at whether the approach can be used for dating, which is the part I will concentrate on here.
Fox, Ehmoda and Charniak divided Shakespeare's plays into two corpuses, defined as 'Early' (plays written up to and including 1601) and 'Late' (plays written after 1601). The date for each play was taken from the Third Edition of the Annals of English Drama, 975 - 1700 (Harbage, 1989). They then examined each individual play using two different approaches ('General Vocabulary' and 'Generative Model', details provided in their paper), and compared the results against the early/late corpus to which the play belonged. In the majority of cases, there was no difference. For example, Romeo and Juliet, a member of the 'Early' corpus, was also defined as 'Early' using both the General Vocabulary and Generative Model approaches. Six plays, however, diverged from the corpus of which they were a member, as shown below:
Play
|
Predicted Date:
General Vocabulary
|
Predicted Date: Generative Model
|
Corpus Date
|
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593)
|
Late
|
Early
|
Early
|
The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597)
|
Late
|
Early
|
Early
|
As You Like It (1599)
|
Late
|
Early
|
Early
|
Julius Caesar (1599)
|
Late
|
Early
|
Early
|
Hamlet (1601)
|
Late
|
Late
|
Early
|
Twelfth Night (1601)
|
Late
|
Late
|
Early
|
Fox et al describe the results for these plays as “misclassifications”, which, strictly speaking, is correct. However, apart from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, all the plays are dated near, or actually in, 1601 i.e. they are near or on the cusp of the year used to divide Shakespeare's plays into ‘early’ and ‘late’ corpuses. In some ways, this more of a vindication of the approach used than a cause to doubt it.
The only serious outlier here is Two Gentlemen. Although a member of the 'Early' corpus, the General Vocabulary test classifies it as 'Late'. To put this into perspective, remember that ‘late’ here means 1602 or later. The result is saying that Two Gentlemen has characteristics that make it more compatible with a corpus of Shakespeare’s plays written after 1601 than a corpus of those written earlier – surprising for a play the Oxford chronology lists as Shakespeare’s first play, written 1590/1!
We are left, then, with the interesting situation that since I suggested that The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written later than usually thought, two independent stylometric studies have come up with results suggesting that … The Two Gentlemen of Verona may have been written later than usually thought.
‘Curious’, isn't it?
