Versification and Authorship Attribution

To recognize the authorship of poetic texts, contemporary stylometry offers a number of methods based on the analysis of a wide range of textual features (e.g. word frequency, frequency of character n-grams). One essential aspect of these texts remains aside, however, and that is their versological aspect. This book therefore uses three corpora of poetic texts (Czech, German and Spanish) to analyse to what extent versological characteristics can be used as an indicator of authorship. Versological characteristics are further used to resolve two cases of disputed authorship (the verse drama The Two Noble Kinsmen and poems attributed to Gavriil Batěnkov).