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Studies in Attribution
Concordances and magnetic tape files will obviously facilitate the gathering of internal evidence for the solution of canonical problems. They will enable one to find parallels more rapidly and to make various special checks. Professor R. C. Bald, for example, observes that Hand D in The Booke of Sir Thomas More makes likely a "graphic confusion between x and y" and that such a confusion seems to have occurred in Troilus and Cressida v.i.16, where "the Quarto reads 'box' [and] the Folio corrects to 'boy.'"[22] J. Dover Wilson has collected similar examples of misreadings which could easily have resulted if a good quarto was printed from copy in a hand such as D's.[23] If all of the Shakespeare quartos and the First Folio were recorded on magnetic tape, one could ask a computer to sort out all words that ended in x and y and other easily confused characters. Or one could ask it to search tapes of other Elizabethan dramatists for complete lists of linguistic preferences such as Professor Hoy used to determine the shares of various collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon. Freed from the tedium of amassing examples, scholars could devote their higher energies to the interpretation of evidence retrieved and classified by machines.[24]
Again, the more concordances there are, the easier it will be to make negative checks — to show that a seemingly unusual parallel occurs in many writers and is not therefore probative of a particular author's claim to an anonymous work. One hopes that the use of parallels, whether for purposes of proof or disproof, will cease to be fragmentary and unsystematic. If we had reliable information about the average frequencies of certain locutions in the vocabularies of educated men using certain forms of discourse at a certain time, the coincidence of many above- or below-average occurrences of even common phrases
Unfortunately, however, electronic computers and their printed products will probably fail to discourage some scholars from playing the game of parallels badly. Those who in the past have been intent on parading insignificant agreements between two texts as strong arguments for common authorship have seldom taken the trouble to make negative checks in available concordances. Will a special pleader in a hurry pause to reflect merely because aids to reflection are more abundant? "It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect," Francis Bacon warns us (Novum Organum, I, xlvi), "to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed towards both alike." "Indeed," he adds, "in the establishment of any true axiom, the negative instance is the more forcible of the two." Computers will not do away with the Idols of the Tribe; to guard against such illusions is the province of education in the spirit of scholarly and scientific argument. With the spread of that spirit, one may hope with Bacon (I, cxxx) "that the art of discovery may advance as discoveries advance."
Meanwhile, one trusts that more and more scholars will find ways to advance Elizabethan studies by enlisting the aid of electronic dataprocessing machines. The chief barrier to such an effort is likely to be a lingering suspicion that these machines are somehow baleful, that they somehow constitute a threat to the humanist's distinctive values. But such fears are groundless; they can only be damaging to the progress of Elizabethan and indeed of all humane studies. It is surely inhumane to scorn mechanical aids which by releasing from soul-killing drudgery that most remarkable of all instruments, the brain, free it for its proper function — the enlargement of man's intellectual and spiritual realms through the use of creative intelligence. It may be appropriate to conclude with a striking Elizabethan example of humanist initiative and persistence in making available a novel means for the
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