Shakespeare's Errant Texts

Lene B. Petersen's work centres on Shakespearean textual studies, corpus linguistics/authorship and attribution studies and Renaissance theatre history. She has also written on traditional folk ballads and their transmission.

Foreword; Prologue; Part I. Oral-Memorial Transmission and the Formation of Shakespeare's Texts: 1. The Elizabethan dramatic industry and industrious Shakespeare; 2. Decomposing the text: oral transmission and the theory of the Zielform; 3. The popular play and the popular ballad: evidence of 'Quarto mechanics' in the multiple texts of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; Conclusion Part I; Part II. Recomposing the Author: Some Tools for Positioning the Role of the Playwright in Dramatic Transmission: 4. Introduction to quantitative textual analysis: computational stylistics, cognition and the missing author; 5. Stylometry and textual multiplicity I: contextual stylistics and the case of Titus Andronicus; 6. Stylometry and textual multiplicity II: testing the grading between authorship and 'orality' in the scenes of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet; Conclusion Part II: evaluating the experiment; Epilogue; Appendix I. Scenic units in Q1 Hamlet/Der Bestrafte Brudermord and Romeo and Juliet/Romio und Julietta; Appendix II. 'Meet it is I set it downe': verbal evidence of Quarto mechanics in the short versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; Appendix III. Chapter 4: table of results for 257-Plays DA, using 50 principal components; Appendix IV. Examples of principal component screen plots for three-text Hamlet by scenes and three-text Romeo and Juliet by scenes only; Bibliography.