# Why Moli`ere most likely did write his plays

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.01595 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01595/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

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- [Rank-Turbulence Delta and Interpretable Approaches to Stylometric Delta Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19499/) (2026)
- [Where Does Authorship Signal Emerge in Encoder-Based Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19908/) (2026)

## 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.