This book introduces a new method for determining the authorship of Renaissance plays. Based on the rapid rate of change in English grammar in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, socio-historical linguistic evidence allows us to distinguish the hands of Renaissance playwrights within play texts. The present study focuses on Shakespeare, his collaborations with Fletcher and Middleton, and the apocryphal plays. Among the plays examined are Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Macbeth, Pericles, and Sir Thomas More. Using graphs to present statistical data in a readily...

A comparative reference guide to Shakespeare's grammar, based on a complete revision of an extremely elderly but still much-cited volume, Abbott's Shakespearean Grammar, first published in 1869 and still regarded by default as an essential component of Shakespeare research. This volume meets the identified need for an authoritative and systematic grammar of Shakespeare which takes account both of current linguistic developments and of the current state of knowledge about Early Modern English and enable editors and readers both to understand and to contextualise Shakespeare's use and...