Suggested Initial Reading

• Gabriel Egan "Folio Provenance" In Emma Smith (editor) _The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016): 68-85. A short account of which plays were first printed in the 1623 Folio collection of 36 plays and which had been previously printed in single-play quarto versions, and for the latter what is the relationship between these competing early editions.

• Gabriel Egan _The Struggle for Shakespeare's Text_ (2010). This gives an account of the debates that scholars have had since the early 20th century about the provenances of the different early editions of Shakespeare. The focus is on what editors making editions for modern readers thought they ought to do about the differences between the early editions, but the book is also a useful account of what those differences actually consist of, and the terminology (such as 'good quarto' and 'bad quarto') that is used about them. Also, the appendix "Table of Shakespeare Editions up to 1623" may be useful to help make sense of debates about the the earle editions.

• Craig and Kinney _Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship_ (2009). The first monograph that uses computational methods that I think are good ones to make claims about who wrote what in Shakespeare. Craig currently has a grant to do the same research we're doing on our project, and we we'll be coordinating our labours with his to avoid duplication and to help one another out.

• Lene Peterson _Shakespeare's Errant texts: Textual Form and Linguistic style in Shakespearean 'Bad' Quartos and Co-Authored Plays_ (2010). A negative example of how badly what we want to do has been done in the past.

• Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (editors) _The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion_. The most recent (published this week) scholarship on who wrote what in Shakespeare. As well as contributions using the various kinds of function word counting that John Burrows invented (techniques called Delta, Zeta, and Iota), there are contributions that use a method of simply manually searching (using digital textual corpora) across all the works of a certain period for all the trigrams that occur in a work one wants to attribute the authorship of, and seeing which other authors use those trigrams the most. The corpus mostly used for this is called Literature Online and the technique for counting the matches was developed by MacDonald P. Jackson. I'd be very interested in your evaluation of Craig & Burrows's approach versus Jackson's.

• Santiago Segarra, Mark Eisen, Gabriel Egan, and Alejando Ribeiro "Attributing the Authorship of the _Henry VI_ Plays by Word Adjacency" _Shakespeare Quarterly_ 67 (2016): 232-256. A wholly new way of making use of function words that counts not simply their frequency but their proximities one to another. I am currently collaborating with this same team (they are all at University of Pennsylvania) to see if the technique developed for this article can help with the problems on our present project.

• Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery_ William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion_ (1987). Not to be read: a reference work that usefully gives for each play our state of knowledge about the various early editions, how they relate to the various manuscripts that must have existed in order for each play to be performed, and how they relate one to another (that is, which is merely a reprint of another). Remarkably, this is still the 'bible' 30 years after if was written: we haven't really discovered anything significant about these relationships so you can take what is said here as gospel unless I mention otherwise.Italic