Abstract

The relationship between Shakespeare’s First Folio and early printings, published in his lifetime, has been a matter of dispute for centuries. A computer program that I have developed visualizes the fluctuating quality of textual correspondences between Folio texts, Henry the Sixth, Part Two and Three, and texts that have been suspected as memorial reconstructions of the Folio, The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York. The memorial reconstruction hypothesis assumes increased similarity between the two texts when an alleged actor–reporter is on the stage or speaking and vice versa. The visualization of similarity between two texts, based on the Dice similarity metric, does not show a strong association between the fluctuation of similarity and actor–reporter factors, which challenges the memorial reconstruction hypothesis on statistical grounds. In addition, the distribution of line-by-line similarity scores suggests scene division is a considerable explanatory factor for fluctuating similarity, which is not inexplicable, considering the practice of collaborative writing in the early modern playhouse.

中文翻译：

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可视化莎士比亚可疑文本的文本相似性：对亨利六世戏剧的考察

摘要

莎士比亚的第一对开本与他生前出版的早期印刷品之间的关系，几个世纪以来一直存在争议。我开发的一个计算机程序可视化了对开本、亨利六世、第二和第三部分以及被怀疑是对开本、争论的第一部分和真实悲剧的纪念重建的文本之间的文本对应的波动质量约克公爵理查德. 纪念重建假设假设当所谓的演员-记者在舞台上或说话时，两个文本之间的相似性会增加，反之亦然。基于 Dice 相似性度量的两个文本之间相似性的可视化并未显示相似性波动与演员 - 记者因素之间的强烈关联，这在统计上挑战了纪念重建假设。此外，逐行相似度得分的分布表明场景划分是波动相似度的一个重要解释因素，考虑到早期现代剧场中的协作写作实践，这并非莫名其妙。