Stylometry and Spanish Golden Age Theatre: An Evaluation of Authorship Attribution in a Control Group of One Hundred Undisputed Plays

The aim of this study is to perform an evaluation of one hundred Spanish Golden Age theatre plays of undisputed authorship using the R package stylo, the stylometric analysis tool developed by Eder, Rybicki, and Kestemont (2016). In this paper we will determine which algorithms obtain best results on authorial classification (method, MFW, culling, and word n-grams). We will also evaluate the text length at which stylometry begins to be an effective diagnostic tool for authorship attribution in our corpus. This cross-validation evaluation can serve future analysis of similar corpora and will show the possibilities of applying stylometry to Spanish Golden Age theatre, which presents many cases of dubious authorship.