Stylometric analysis of French plays of the 17th century

Abstract

The automatic assignment of a text to one or more predefined categories presents multiple applications. In this context, the current study focuses on author attribution in which the true author of a doubtful text must be identified. This analysis focuses on the style of sixty-six French comedies in verse written by seventeen supposed authors during the 17th century. The hypothesis we want to verify assumes that the real author is the name appearing on the cover (called the signature hypothesis). In order to validate the reliability of two attribution procedures, we used two additional corpora based on 200 extracts of novels written in French, with thirty authors and 140 Italian novels authored by forty persons. After this verification, we propose an improvement of the Delta method as well as a new analysis grid for this model. Finally, we applied these approaches to our French comedy corpus. The results demonstrate that the signature hypothesis must be discarded. Moreover, these works present similar styles, making any attribution difficult to support with a high degree of certainty.