Marston's "What You Will" and Shakespeare

The connection between What You Will and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is well-established. They were both written around the same time (likely in 1600), and Twelfth Night is actually subtitled "What You Will"; it's the only Shakespeare play with a subtitle:

In addition, in February 1602 Twelfth Night was performed at the Middle Temple, where Marston was a member, according to this diary entry by John Manningham:

In 1607, publisher Thomas Thorpe teamed up with printer George Eld to publish John Marston's play What You Will. Two years later they published Shakespeare's Sonnets. 

My Shakespeare Affinity Test detects an extremely strong intertextual relationship between What You Will and the works of Shakespeare. In fact, it scores higher on my test than many Shakespeare plays (marked below in orange, #18):

What does this mean? What You Will has many words in it that appear in other Shakespeare plays but aren't that common in the entire database of 500+  plays. This is a completely objective test and it really singles out What You Will as unusually Shakespeare-like. The play is relatively short and very "dense" in the sense that there a very large number of unique words compared to the length of the play.

What is going on here? I believe this is due, in part, to Marston consciously and purposely using some unusual words from Shakespeare. That is what the Shakespeare Affinity Test is counting, after all: the number of unusual words in a play that occur in First Folio plays. There is also likely some influence going the other way; Shakespeare adopting some of Marston's words later on. And the two authors were likely pulling from common sources as well.

Examining the Whole Play

To get a better sense of what might be going on, I have reproduced the modern-spelling version of What You Will from EarlyPrint.org (under their CC license), and I have marked in red the "hits" from the Shakespeare Affinity Test. I have also marked in dark blue some sections that specifically seem to reference Shakespeare.

Note, just because a word is marked in red doesn't mean it is a borrowing from Shakespeare or vice versa. In some cases Marston and Shakespeare are just both using an uncommon word, and in some cases there is likely an intertextual connection. The threshold for "unusual" is completely arbitrary, and I could produce a version of this with more or fewer words marked in red just by changing that threshold. In other words, don't over-interpret a word being in red.

If you read through this, you will note that the Quadratus character seems to be satirizing Shakespeare. Here is one of the most interesting examples, where Quadratus specifically quotes Shakespeare "a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse". He also says this "Away Idolater, why you Don Kynsayder" which is a jab at Marston himself:

Quadratus.
signior Laverdure, by the heart of an honest man, this jebusite, this confusion to him, this worse than I dare to name, abuseth thee most incomprehensibly; is this your protest of most obsequious vassalage, protest to strain your utmost sum, your most—
Lam.
So Phoebus warm my brain, I'll rhyme thee dead,
Look for the Satire, if all the sour juice
Of a tart brain, can souse thy estimate,
I'll pickle thee.
Quadratus.
Ha he mount Chirall on the wings of fame.
A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,Image 010-a eeboLook thee I speak play scraps. Bydet I'll down
Sing, sing, or stay we'll quaff or any thing
Rivo, Saint Mark, let's talk as loss as air
Unwind youths colours, display ourselves
So that you envy-starved Cur may yelp 

And spend his chaps at our fantasticness.
Sym.
O Lord Quadratus.
Quadratus.
Away Idolater, why you Don Kynsayder
Thou Canker eaten rusty cur, thou snaffleTo freer spirits.
Thinkest thou a libertine, am ungiu'd breast
scorns not the shackles of thy envious clogs
You will traduce us unto public scorn.

And this very interesting reference to Sonnets:

Quadratus.Light Angels, prithee leave them, withdraw a little and hear a Sonnet prithee, hear a Sonnet.

Quadratus also says "Rivo" several times, for instance:

Qua.
Feed and be fat my fair Calipolis,
Rivo here's good juice, fresh Burrage boy?

The above quote is also a reference to Henry IV, Part II:

Then feed and be fat, my fair Calipolis.
Come, give's some sack.

And "Rivo" likely comes from Henry IV, Part I:

I prithee, call in Falstaff: I'll play Percy, and
that damned brawn shall play Dame Mortimer his
wife. 'Rivo!' says the drunkard. Call in ribs, call in tallow.

And another character comments on Quadratus using this word:

there's my chub my Epicure Quadratus, that rubs his guts, claps his paunch & cries Rivo, entertaining my ears perpetually with a most strong discourse of the praise of bottle ale & red Herrings

Who is Quadratus Satirizing?

The character of Quadratus is a bit of an enigma.  In the play, he says this about himself: "I am fat and therefore faithful". He is also described, as we saw above, as an "Epicure...that rubs his guts, claps his paunch & cries Rivo". One wonders what fat individual might have been the true target for Marston's satire. Much more to come on this.

[Originally I reproduced the whole play here, if you actually want that just contact me.]

Did Shakespeare write Arden of Faversham?

There's been a lot of buzz in the press lately about Arden of Faversham. Gary Taylor is claiming that Thomas Watson may have collaborated with William Shakespeare on the play. You can read his full paper here.

The evidence for Watson seems quite weak to me, but the real question is whether we have strong evidence for Shakespeare -- and co-authorship -- in the first place. Are there really two or more playwrights at work here? Was Shakespeare one of them?

Examining the rare vocabulary in the play

Running the Shakespeare Affinity Test on the play, we get a scatter plot that looks like this (click on the image to see the full plot):

Each dot is a word that occurs in a First Folio play but is relatively rare in the corpus of 500+ plays. I've marked in red an obvious cluster of "hits" which correspond to Act 3 in modern editions of the play. (see Gutenberg.org) As far as I can tell, this is roughly the section identified as being "by Shakespeare" by Taylor and others.

Any test that tries to identify the hand of Shakespeare has to rely on Shakespeare's later works. This is going to weaken the result on a very early play like Arden of Faversham. We are dealing with a span of 20 years of writing, so much of the vocabulary and unique characteristics of Shakespeare's works wouldn't be evident in 1591. We should expect fewer Shakespeare-like characteristics, even if it was indeed written by the same author.

As a whole, the play doesn't score very high on the Shakespeare Affinity Test. It scores quite a bit lower than Titus Andronicus, for instance, another early play with a low score.

Is the identification of Shakespeare plausible?

That cluster above marked in red does have a high density of "hits"; it's what one might expect from a play written by Shakespeare.

Some passages that very much read like Shakespeare. For instance:

Such deep pathaires, like to a cannon’s burst
Discharged against a ruinated wall,
Breaks my relenting heart in thousand pieces.
Ungentle Alice, thy sorrow is my sore;
Thou know’st it well, and ’tis thy policy
To forge distressful looks to wound a breast
Where lies a heart that dies when thou art sad.
It is not love that loves to anger love. 

Readers of this blog know about Cannons in the Canon,  my look at cannon imagery in the works of Shakespeare. This fits right into that pattern, even with a reference to "forging".

Is co-authorship the best explanation?

So we have a cluster of hits that really seem to indicate a decent likelihood of Shakespeare's hand in the play, but how are we to interpret that empty bits of the scatter plot? Another author is certainly one possibility, and that seems to be the consensus of scholars who attribute part of the play to Shakespeare.

However, there isn't any independent external evidence for co-authorship of the play and very limited internal evidence. Just because certain parts of the play show up as more Shakespeare-like in a test, that doesn't mean someone else wrote the other bits. The variability could be due to stylistic choices of a single author. It could also be due to sections of the play being written or revised at different times by one author.

Digital tools are limited

The digital tools we have for analyzing plays are not very robust to begin with. Plus, there are very few extant plays from the 1590-1595 period. So they are even more limited since there is so little data available for comparison. So we shouldn't rely too heavily on any digital analysis to give us firm conclusions about authorship.

Conclusion

Lexical tests on Arden of Faversham do indicate sections that seem to strongly suggest an affinity with the vocabulary used in the works of Shakespeare. However, we shouldn't over-interpret this result. Since we have so few plays from the period and such under-developed digital tools, we really should be cautious in jumping to assumptions about co-authorship without strong independent evidence.