An Overview of Stylometry and Its Application to the Comedia

Abstract: Developments in computational analysis, corpus construction, and text editing have opened exciting new areas of inquiry in comedia studies. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a swell of stylometric studies dedicated to comedias of unknown or disputed authorship. This essay gives an account of stylometry, or the quantitative analysis of textual evidence, and appraises it in plain, nontechnical language. Taking the perspective most germane to comedia studies, the article reviews stylometry's place in authorship studies; considers the mechanics of performing it and some of the tests and methods employed; provides a brief history of stylometry in the early modern Spanish theater context; comments on the preparation of adequate texts and corpora; and offers conclusions about the overall implications of this mode of analysis.