Uneasy Rhetoric

Via this entry in fieldmethods.net

Not Molière! Ah, Nothing Is Sacred (NYTimes article, requires login).

I hadn’t realized that the authorship debate rages on in France. I never knew the Molière’s identity was in doubt. Here we have a statistician trying to insinuate that two stylisticly dissimilar playwrights are the same person because they use a very similar vocablulary.

Vocabulary analysis can only tell part of the story because vocabulary is only one kind of paint an author uses. Authors who are very similar in vocabulary could use wildly different styles, literary references, plot devices, topic areas, and so on. Writing is far more complicated than the sum of its words.

The end of the article mentions Shakespeare, long considered by some to be a fiction. I agree with those who say that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Frankly, given that these playwrights, Molière, Corneille, and Shakespeare, have been dead for 400 years, who cares?