Neville Letters: Exasperate

In a letter from 12 March 1600, Sir Henry Neville wrote to Robert Cecil:

The States have at length suspended their proceeding against the French, and have rendred the Shippes they had taken; which hath pacified the King and his Counsail, who were greatly exasperated against them. (Winwood's Memorials, 1.159)

Note the word "exasperated". It wasn't a rare word at the time, according to EEBO, but it also wasn't too widely used. Neville's correspondents, Cecil and Winwood, used it too in their letters. However, the first appearance of this word in the Shakespeare canon appears in Twelfth Night, 3.2:

She did show favour to the youth in your sight only to exasperate you, to awake your dormouse valour, to put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver.

Then in King Lear, 5.1:

If both remain alive. To take the widow
Exasperates, makes mad her sister Goneril;

And Macbeth, 3.6:

Hath so exasperate the king that he
Prepares for some attempt of war.

And Troilus and Cressida, 5.1:

No! why art thou then exasperate, thou idle
immaterial skein of sleave-silk, thou green sarcenet

This is interesting evidence of authorship. It shows a word in Neville's vocabulary that works its way into the later Shakespeare canon. One example isn't proof of anything, of course. I have several dozen of these examples accumulated, some much more interesting (like the ones in this post), but that doesn't really prove anything either.

One of my projects is to develop a scientific, verifiable, and falsifiable method to track these usages and compare them with controls. I haven't figured quite how to do that yet, but it's a very promising direction for demonstrating Neville's authorship in an objective manner.

One challenge is that the vast majority of the written texts we have from Neville are from the period 1599-1601. We have very few letters from 1588-1598 and a handful from 1602-1615.

In any case, in the absence of some kind of "smoking gun" evidence, I think this type of corpus analysis has the best chance of providing convincing evidence of Neville's authorship of the plays and poems.