Francis Bacon’s Contribution to Shakespeare

Name: Francis Bacon’s Contribution to Shakespeare
Brand: Taylor & Francis

Taylor & Francis

Francis Bacon's Contribution to Shakespeare advocates a paradigm shift away from a single-author theory of the Shakespeare work towards a many-hands theory. Here, the middle ground is adopted between competing so-called Stratfordian and alternative single-author conspiracy theories. In the process, arguments are advanced as to why Shakespeare\u2019s First Folio (1623) presents as an unreliable document for attribution, and why contemporary opinion characterised Shakspere [his baptised name] as an opportunist businessman who acquired the work of others. Current methods of authorship attribution are critiqued, and an entirely new Rare Collocation Profiling (RCP) method is introduced which, unlike current stylometric methods, is capable of detecting multiple contributors to a text. Using the Early English Books Online database, rare phrases and collocations in a target text are identified together with the authors who used them. This allows a DNA-type profile to be constructed for the p.