ABSTRACT
The history of authorship attribution is itself an account of the development of tools, ones which have been specifically designed to expose the contents of a textual carcass long since abandoned. The kind of evidence that is external relates to the environment in which the work was created. Extensions of the hapax term are ‘dis-legomenon’, ‘tris-legomenon’, and ‘tetra-legomenon’, which, respectively, refer to two, three, and four occurrences of a word in a canon. It is astonishing that in modern times, stylometric practitioners still take certain scenes of a Wiliam Shakespeare play—usually those that have not been otherwise attributed—and claim them to be a pure representation of Shakespeare of Stratford’s writing. Robert Moritz pointed out that Lucius Sherman had even conducted a similar study of his own, examining prose from both Shakespeare’s and Francis Bacon’s works.
