Ros Barber

Goldsmiths, University of London · Department of English and Comparative Literature

In ‘Christopher Marlowe: Hype and Hoax’(2018), Hartmut Ilsemann implies that his application of the Rolling Delta feature of R Stylo is sufficiently robust that a century and a half of traditional scholarship should be overturned, and Marlowe stripped of the majority of his canon, including Doctor Faustus and Edward II. The article concludes that ‘...

Long-standing claims that Shakespeare used Warwickshire dialect words and phrases have been shown to be false. Searches of digitized texts on Early English Books Online reveal that most of the words and phrases claimed as Warwickshire dialect were used by Elizabethan and Jacobean writers with no connection to Warwickshire and published in books Sha...

Literary biographers, novelists, and filmmakers have routinely described Marlowe as a rash and hotheaded young man, an assessment that many scholars appear to accept without question. Roy Kendall, for example, in his biography of Richard Baines, confidently refers to-violent characters such as Christopher Marlowe, yet the playwright was considerabl...

The Word Adjacency Network method underpinning the New Oxford Shakespeare’s attribution of the Henry VI plays to Christopher Marlowe as co-author has not been independently tested and is only now being subjected to critiques. The response of Segarra et al. (2019) to criticism by Pervez Rizvi (2018) barely alleviates concerns. This article demonstra...

In 2016, the editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare announced that certain Shakespeare plays could be attributed to co-authors, and certain anonymous plays to Shakespeare, on the basis of non-traditional attribution methods known collectively as computational stylistics, or stylometry. This article investigates the efficacy of a key algorithm used t...

In 2016, the editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare announced that certain Shakespeare plays could be attributed to co-authors, and certain anonymous plays to Shakespeare, on the basis of non-traditional attribution methods known collectively as computational stylistics, or stylometry. This article investigates the efficacy of a key algorithm used t...

The late Elizabethan age was a dangerous time for writers, being effectively a totalitarian regime. This paper explores evidence that Shakespeare felt himself silenced by the regime.

The New Oxford Shakespeare's attribution of parts of Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 2 to Christopher Marlowe, however contentious the methods might be, follows a long history of scholars attributing the play's forerunner, The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster to Marlowe. Signs of Marlowe's involvement ne...

The article investigates whether Shakespeare used Warwickshire, Cotswold or Midlands dialect, focusing on the sources of recent claims by Bate, Kathman and Wood, most of which derive from early dialect dictionaries compiled by 18th and 19th century antiquarians. It determines that all of these claims – frequently used as a defence against the Shake...

In Everard Guilpin’s Skialetheia (1598) there are several epigrams about a poet called Fuscus. John Payne Collier identified Fuscus as John Marston in 1868, before information was discovered that rules him out. Information pertaining to a humiliating incident at the Middle Temple's Candlemas Revels in 1597/8 now allows us to identify Fuscus as the...

A reference to 'honey-stalks' in Titus Andronicus has been glossed as Warwickshire dialect for white clover by Shakespeare's editors since the 18th century, but evidence from husbandry books of the period suggest it is a compound nonce word for vegetation saturated with honey dew.

This paper explores historical precedents for the characters of Bardolph and Poins in Shakespeare's Henry IV. The names Bardolph and Pointz were intimately connected with Hoo in Kent; specifically the area immediately adjacent to Cooling Castle, the seat of Sir John Oldcastle: the original name of the character we now know as Falstaff.

The creation of a literary biography requires an awareness both of how we construct what we believe we ‘know’ about a writer, and how the stories we adopt change our reading of their works. Research into the sources used to construct Marlowe's and Shakespeare's biographies supports the conclusion that when writers can no longer create their own sto...

Beliefs acquired from authoritative sources and maintained over time, tend to achieve the status of truths. As a result, though there are many possible ways of interpreting historical data, consensus beliefs are so powerful a determinant of interpretive outcomes that new interpretations of historical evidence will tend to be rare. In addition, any...