The approaches to Shakespeare’s style

The paper proposes an original technique for representation and analysis of style. Style is defined as repeated collocations in the author’s works as a whole. This technique is applied to the corpus of Shakespeare’s plays. Two vocabularies of collocations resulted from the texts included in the First Folio. These vocabularies include all collocations up to a minimum (the presence in at least two plays in the corpus) and maximum (the presence in all 36 plays) of repeated units. The first list includes over 130,000 units, the second list includes 218 units. The comparison of these vocabularies with individual works of Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s contemporaries and other authors who wrote in English let the authors draw some conclusions on attribution of individual works and pieces of these works, in particular to confirm the phenomena of co-authorship of some of Shakespeare’s plays.