Journal Article

Cyril Tourneur and The Honest Man’s Fortune

Jackson, MacDonald P.

2019

Overview

First is listed, in bold, the \"target play\" (the play under investigation). The two plays that share with Peele's David and Bathsheba more weighted unique 3-grams than does his Edward the First are Gervase Markham and William Sampson's Herod and Antipater (1622), written a quarter of a century after Peele's death in 1596, and Marlowe's 2 Tamburlaine (in second place, with a score of 4.78). Since Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris enters David and Bathsheba's top dozen matches (in twelfth with a score of 2.72), Marlowe's showing equals Peele's, and in fact 1 Tamburlaine scores only fractionally lower than The Massacre at Paris. Most significantly for the present purpose, Field's A Woman is a Weathercock is only the thirtieth play on the ranked list of weighted unique 4-gram matches to Amends for Ladies, and Amends for Ladies is only the fifty-third play on the ranked list of weighted unique 4-gram matches to A Woman is a Weathercock. [...]in terms of word-tokens, the first four scenes of The Honest Man's Fortune constitute only about 22 per cent of the play, so that unique 4-gram matches with it are likely to be too few to create reliable evidence. [...]exploration of Rizvi's valuable website shows that \"weighted unique n-grams\" using maximal counts of all unique matches, whatever their length, bolster our conclusions.

• Publisher: Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp DBA Associated University Presses,Associated University Presses
• Subject: Arranged marriage / Authorship / Beaumont, Francis (1584-1616) / Fletcher, John (1579-1625) / British & Irish literature / Collaboration / Criticism and interpretation / Dramatists / English literature / Literary canon / Literary devices / Literary influences / Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593) / Middleton, Thomas (1570-1627) / N-Gram language models / Playwrights / Scholars / Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) / Tourneur, Cyril / Tourneur, Cyril (1575?-1626) / Websites / Writers