The Boundaries of John Marston’s Dramatic Canon

[...]although the ratio for The Family of Love correlates with other Marston texts, we have found an almost identical number for "them" in Barry's Ram Alley, which has a ratio of 2:47.47 The distribution of these forms could help us to rule Marston out as an authorship candidate for certain scenes of Lust's Dominion, while our findings for The Family of Love do not rule Marston out, but do not rule Lording Barry out either. Both Haughton and Day used "tut," while it is rare in Dekker's corpus, and does not occur in his unassisted plays. [...]Dekker, Day, and Haughton might have written Lust's Dominion, while Marston probably did not contribute to it.51 Suffixes: Latinate Termination -ate Marston is notorious for his "affected diction," and his "indiscriminate use of Latinate terminations, especially words ending in -ate. Collocations We employed the anti-plagiarism software Plagiarism in order to compare the four contested plays with the undoubted Marston canon, as well as the plays of authorial candidates.58 This software can be set to highlight any specified collocation length within a pair of electronic documents, from two words upwards, and can also identify approximate matching utterances (e.g., some sequences might differ slightly in their syntactical arrangement or spelling). [...]there are also some differences: the percentage of "pauses" after positions 3 and 7 are too low for Marston. [...]the dramatist(s) responsible for this play employed "pauses" after position 6 far more frequently than Marston, whose style remains in the pre-1600 versification mode.