SOURCE: “Chettle's Forgery of the Groatsworth of Wit and the ‘Shake-scene’ Passage.” Shakespeare Newsletter 20, no. 6 (December 1970): 42.

[In the following essay, the anonymous critic analyzes the evidence that Greene's Groatsworth of Wit is a forgery perpetrated by Chettle.]

Last April 1969 what may turn out to be one of the three most significant contributions to Shakespearean scholarship in this century was published as Final Report: Project No. 7-0-036: Grant No. OEG-1-7-070036-4593 (U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, Bureau of Research, April, 1969) A Computer-Aided Technique for Stylistic Discrimination—The Authorship of Greene's Groatsworth of Wit.

In 1909 Dr. Charles William Wallace and his wife discovered the Bellot-Mountjoy papers, 26 depositions including one from Shakespeare containing his signature. This was accomplished by personal examination, eventually, of over 5,000,000 documents in the Public Record Office in London. In the next year, Wm. J. Neidig proved conclusively that the Pavier Quartos bore false dates as early as 1600, though they were actually printed in 1619. This was exposed by photography—the superimposition of negatives of the title pages. The latest contribution, is that by Prof. Warren B. Austin of Stephen F. Austin State College at Nacogdoches, Texas, who has just “proved” that the famous pamphlet in which Robert Greene attacked Shakespeare as “an upstart Crow … an absolute Johannes fac totum, in his own conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey,” is a forgery perpetrated by Henry Chettle. Though completed over a year ago no public announcement of the proof by internal evidence has ever been made.

ELECTRONIC PROOF: IS IT CREDIBLE?

The theory of Henry Chettle's hand in the Groatsworth is so old that Chettle had to defend himself against it even in 1592. Few people have defended the theory in modern times and two of the most important Greene and Chettle scholars (Chauncey E. Sanders and Rene Pruvost) have said that they did not believe it was “possible to determine the question of authorship by stylistic evidence.” They did not, however, reckon with the marvels of electronic data processing and computational stylistics. When they wrote in 1933 and 1938 there was no thought of key punched concordances and magnetic tapes for IBM 7094 computers on which hundreds of thousands of lines and words could be stored for high speed retrieval. By such means, proof can be adduced through a total evaluation rather than through remembered examples.

But today electronic means have been used, and by them, unless there are some strangely unforeseen loopholes in the theories, the internal evidence reveals that Chettle was indeed the author of the suspected work. The two styles of work are indicated by “lexical preferences,” and “morphological and syntactical variables.”

THE HYPOTHESES

The evidence is based on indisputable hypotheses: 1) an author has and exhibits in his writing individual linguistic preferences, 2) the data can be collected and evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, 3) the data will not change regardless of date of composition and change of subject matter, 4) such data is “largely unconscious,” habitual, and for the most part inimitable, and 5) evidence so cumulative in its effect based on measurably distinct and characteristic usages is probably irrefutable. If all of these criteria are acceptable and can be substantiated by further internal and external evidence, then we must accept the fact that Chettle was indeed the forger or that for this one time Greene discarded his own style and absorbed that of Henry Chettle,—which is hardly likely.

GATHERING THE PROOF

The proof was obtained in the following manner. Five of Greene's works totaling 104,596 words and all three of Chettle's works totaling 43,190 words were electronically concorded, a verbal index made, and an order of frequency list produced. Hand work included the clearing up of alternative spellings (then-than, lest-least, lose-loose), writing out “and” for ampersand, “feign”-pretend and “fain”-happy or willing had to be separated for they were sometimes interchangably spelled, etc. Because there is no list of word frequency tables for the period as a whole, the work of each man could only be compared with the other. To reduce the probability of error which might be caused because three of Greene's works consisted of repentance pamphlets, words like “elder,” “younger,” and “repent,” were eliminated. Also eliminated were male and female personal pronouns because these depended on possible preponderances caused by the accident of discussing male or female characters only. “You” and “ye” were eliminated except that each writer's preference for one or the other was noted. Extreme care was exercised in making the vocabulary of discriminant or marker words with no ratio lower than 1.5 acceptable.

CONCLUSIONS

To make a long story short and to condense the conclusions which took about three years to produce, virtually every factor tested by Professor Austin and his assistants revealed that Chettle and not Greene was the author of A Groatsworth of Wit. The results, objectively obtained and qualitatively analyzed seem to leave room for no other alternative. There are 46 tables in the typescript book and virtually every one of them points to Chettle as the author. Some examples follow:

Table 20 summarizes the usage of prefixes ad, be, in, etc. and suffixes, able, less, ly, ness, etc. Greene's ratio was 27.85, while Chettle's was 48.42, and the Groatsworth 46.72.

Table 21 on reflexive pronouns indicated that Greene's ratio was 2.32, Chettle's 3.79, and Groatsworth 3.82.

Table 29 on Parentheses indicated that Greene's ratio was.86, Chettle's 3.69, and Groatsworth 4.81.

Table 42 summarizes 11 tables on Inversions of word order: Greene's ratio was 1.338, Chettle's 4.475, and Groatsworth 4.384. In these and in the three tables printed below, the statistics compiled indicate that the ratios of virtually all usages in the Groatsworth of Wit are unlike those of Greene and similar to Chettle's.

THE “SHAKE-SCENE” LETTER

Because Greene's Letter “To those Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plays” (pp. 43-47 of the G. B. Harrison reprint) was thought to be solely Greene's though incorporated in Chettle's forgery, those 1127 words were subjected to special analysis. The results are equally striking and confirm the total study and the supplementary works used as controls. The evidence in eleven of these thirteen variables again indicates Chettle's authorship.

Table 44 Comparison with Greene and Chettle Linguistic Preferences
	Green-favored words	Chettle-favored words	Hi-Frqncy words (Greene-fvrd)	Hi-Frqncy words (Chettle-fvrd)	Uncmn words
Greene	8.44	2.22	95.73	__ __	0
Chettle	0.98	9.43	__ __	21.73	6
Letter	0.89	12.42	58.56	24.84	4

Table 45
	Prefixes	Suffixes	Participial Compounds (all categories)	Compounds (Noun and Participle)
Greene	18.76	9.09	0.39	.09
Chettle	31.26	17.56	1.43	.39
Letter	32.81	9.72	2.66	.89

Table 46
Greene	2.32	0.86	1.45	0.47
Chettle	3.79	3.64	4.74	2.59
Letter	2.66	4.81	4.44	3.54

SOME BACKGROUND

Greene was a notorious figure in his time. It was a tour de force on the part of Chettle to have the Groatsworth of Wit ready for the Stationers' Register entry on September 20, 1592, seventeen days after the death of Greene on September 3. In Chettle's Kind-Hart's Dream, published before the year 1592 was over, he wrote in the introductory epistle “To the Gentlemen Readers” that he had recopied the “ill written” manuscript for the printer but added nothing. Only in the letter which mentions “Shake-scene” did he leave anything out. Perhaps the omitted remarks would have hurt others. In Chettle's own epistle he regrets the offense against one of the authors, presumably Shakespeare, and is “sorry, as if the original fault had been his own,” a nice irony since it now seems certain that the entire work is his.

A NEW WORK COMING

Professor Austin submitted his report to the Office of Education to justify his government grant, but there has been no previous announcement of his work, except a four column article in SNL (September, 1966) which I condensed from the 32 page description of the project Professor Austin had submitted. Dr. Austin has now completed about 200 pages of a complete book on the subject which will incorporate the contents of the government report supplemented with a full account of the external evidence which he hopes will offer the final corroboration. The internal evidence is clear enough. The external evidence will show the means, method, background, and wherefore of the forgery.

By letter and phone conversation as well as in the Report, Prof. Austin reiterates his belief that the Chettle evidence in A Groatsworth of Wit cannot be the result of interpolations by Chettle in an already completed though ill-written manuscript by Greene.

UNCHECKED POSSIBILITIES

It would have been interesting to check the lengths of sentences as a stylistic factor though vagaries of punctuation might have nullified such a factor. Syllables per word has also been used as a factor for author determination but it has not been applied in this study. A further check might be made of the kinds of imagery used by each author.

Meanwhile so far as those completed tests indicate, Chettle may well be the author and the way is clear for a new interpretation of the meaning of the “Johannes fac totum … Shake-scene” passage. Whether by Greene or Chettle, it still indicates that Shakespeare was a new star on the horizon whether as actor, reviser, or author, and probably as a combination of all of them.

LARGER IMPLICATIONS

The larger implications are that the way is now open to corroborate in the same manner what seems to have been proved already: the validity of Shakespeare's hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, the authorship of the Henry VI trilogy and other disputed and apocryphal works. This I have already suggested, and before too many years it may be done.