|
Cyrus Hoy was a literary scholar of the English Renaissance stage who taught at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, and was the John B. Trevor Professor of English at the University of Rochester. He wrote and published on a wide range of topics in English literature, though he is best known for his works on William Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other figures in English Renaissance theatre.
Probably his most frequently-cited work is his study of authorship problems in the Beaumont/Fletcher plays. Titled "The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon," it was published in seven annual issues of the journal Studies in Bibliography, published by the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. Hoy identified specific linguistic markers for individual dramatists, most notably a highly distinctive pattern of preferences for John Fletcher, and then employed those markers to distinguish the respective contributions of the collaborators. Hoy's method and results have earned, if not unanimous acclaim, then at least a high level of recognition for usefulness and validity, and his study stands as a major step forward in the development of stylometric techniques of literary analysis.
|
