From Atoms to Waves: Rhythmic Stylometry for Authorship Studies of Early Modern Spanish Theatre

Each comedy from the Spanish Early Modern period can be decomposed into hundreds of rhythmic patterns—one for each verse—whose overlapping creates a characteristic authorial fingerprint. Stylometric techniques can be employed to compare these patterns, formed by the concatenation of stressed and unstressed syllables, in order to establish authorial inferences. In this exploratory work, we designed an experiment comprising a corpus of one hundred securely attributed plays by nine different authors, conducting a series of tests to determine whether these rhythmic patterns can discriminate the authorship of a theatrical piece. The results, although inferior to those obtained through traditional lexical stylometry, show promise as an alternative path for authorial investigation.