Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama

Hugh Craig, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, has published on authorship attribution problems, mainly in Shakespeare, and on wider stylistic questions. He has ongoing collaborations in bioinformatics and speech pathology, resulting in articles in some leading science journals. He is on the Authorship Attribution Board for the New Oxford Shakespeare and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Brett Greatley-Hirsch is University Academic Fellow in Textual Studies and Digital Editing at the University of Leeds. He is Coordinating Editor of Digital Renaissance Editions, and co-editor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association. Before moving to the UK, he served as Vice President of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association.

• 1. Methods; 2. Prose and verse: sometimes 'transparent', sometimes meeting with 'a jolt'; 3. Sisters under the skin: character and style; 4. Stage properties: bed, blood, and beyond; 5. 'Novelty carries it away': cultural drift; 6. Authorship, company style, and horror vacui; 7. Restoration plays and 'the giant race, before the flood'.

'This is an outstanding book of major importance to the field of Shakespeare studies specifically and to the wider field of literary studies in general. As well as conveying new knowledge of exceptional interest, it is written in a style that makes it comprehensible by a wide, non-specialist readership. I anticipate that it will generate intense interest, not least because it debunks a series of current myths about authorship and the style of drama in Shakespeare's time, and introduces new methods of literary criticism.' Gabriel Egan, De Montfort University