A Disputed Authorship Study of Two Plays Attributed to Tirso de Molina

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Abstract
The legend of Don Juan, the Spanish womaniser, is well known. The origins may be traced to 17th century Spanish Play El Burlador de Sevilla. This play and another religious play of the same stature and quality. El Condenado for Desconfiado, were the subject of an authorship analysis carried out at the University of Birmingham. Sixteen different computer analyses and a further eight clustering methods were applied The above analyses may be partitioned into six main streams of research: 1. Sentential analyses — i.e. sentence lengths and counts and its graphical representation, the use of Spanish versification etc. 2. Word length analyses and its graphical representation. 3. Running words analysis and the analysis of the textual units including the repetition ratio analysis. 4. Word frequencies analysis — comparison of frequency wordlists with the Juilland dictionary patterns of Spanish plays corpus in order to establish individuality. 5. The use of words — co-occurrence technique concordance and condensed collocation analyses resulted in study environment of word ASI. The reverse alphabetical wordlists aided the verb conjugation analyses, pronoun analyses were carried out etc. 6. Cluster analysis — 8 Spanish plays of similar content, quality, length and age were subjected to 8 different clustering techniques, using four different data preparation techniques. The results of this study have taken us a step nearer to establishing the authorship of these two important plays as well as established a new way of dating plays by Tirso de Molina.

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