Why Moli`ere most likely did write his plays
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
As for Shakespeare, a hard-fought debate has emerged about Moli`ere, a supposedly uneducated actor who, according to some, could not have written the masterpieces attributed to him. In the past decades, the century-old thesis according to which Pierre Corneille would be their actual author has become popular, mostly because of new works in computational linguistics. These results are reassessed here through state-of-the-art attribution methods. We study a corpus of comedies in verse by major authors of Moli`ere and Corneille's time. Analysis of lexicon, rhymes, word forms, affixes, morphosyntactic sequences, and function words do not give any clue that another author among the major playwrights of the time would have written the plays signed under the name Moli`ere.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2020.
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 1; 2023: 2; 2024: 1; 2025: 1; 2026: 3.
9 papers.
- 2023Computational thematics: Comparing algorithms for clustering the genres of literary fictioncited by 5
- 2021Corpus and Models for Lemmatisation and POS-tagging of Old Frenchcited by 3
- 2022Computational analyses of the topics, sentiments, literariness, creativity and beauty of texts in a large Corpus of English Literaturecited by 2
- 2023Who could be behind QAnon? Authorship attribution with supervised machine-learningcited by 2
- 2024HALvest-Contrastive: Retrieval-Like Authorship Attribution with Patch-Level Late Interactioncited by 1
- 2026Under-resourced studies of under-resourced languages: lemmatization and POS-tagging with LLM annotators for historical Armenian, Georgian, Greek and Syriaccited by 1
- 2025It takes a village to write a book: Mapping anonymous contributions in Stephen Langton's Quaestiones Theologiaecited by 0
- 2026Rank-Turbulence Delta and Interpretable Approaches to Stylometric Delta Metricscited by 0
- 2026Where Does Authorship Signal Emerge in Encoder-Based Language Models?cited by 0
- 2026Where Does Authorship Signal Emerge in Encoder-Based Language Models?19 May 2026
- 2026Rank-Turbulence Delta and Interpretable Approaches to Stylometric Delta Metrics21 Apr 2026
- 2026Under-resourced studies of under-resourced languages: lemmatization and POS-tagging with LLM annotators for historical Armenian, Georgian, Greek and Syriac17 Feb 2026
- 2025It takes a village to write a book: Mapping anonymous contributions in Stephen Langton's Quaestiones Theologiae18 Aug 2025
- 2024HALvest-Contrastive: Retrieval-Like Authorship Attribution with Patch-Level Late Interaction30 Jul 2024
- 2023Computational thematics: Comparing algorithms for clustering the genres of literary fiction18 May 2023
- 2023Who could be behind QAnon? Authorship attribution with supervised machine-learning3 Mar 2023
- 2022Computational analyses of the topics, sentiments, literariness, creativity and beauty of texts in a large Corpus of English Literature12 Jan 2022
- 2021Corpus and Models for Lemmatisation and POS-tagging of Old French23 Sep 2021