# Relative contributions of Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII: An Analysis Based on Most Frequent Words and Most Frequent Rhythmic Patterns

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05652 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05652/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Metrical Tagging in the Wild: Building and Annotating Poetry Corpora with Rhythmic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08858/) (2021)
- [Syllabic Quantity Patterns as Rhythmic Features for Latin Authorship Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14203/) (2021)
- [Computational thematics: Comparing algorithms for clustering the genres of literary fiction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11251/) (2023)
- [T5 meets Tybalt: Author Attribution in Early Modern English Drama Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18454/) (2023)
- [Who could be behind QAnon? Authorship attribution with supervised machine-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02078/) (2023)
- [Team "better_call_claude": Style Change Detection using a Sequential Sentence Pair Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00675/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The versified play Henry VIII is nowadays widely recognized to be a collaborative work not written solely by William Shakespeare. We employ combined analysis of vocabulary and versification together with machine learning techniques to determine which authors also took part in the writing of the play and what were their relative contributions. Unlike most previous studies, we go beyond the attribution of particular scenes and use the rolling attribution approach to determine the probabilities of authorship of pieces of texts, without respecting the scene boundaries. Our results highly support the canonical division of the play between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher proposed by James Spedding, but also bring new evidence supporting the modifications proposed later by Thomas Merriam.