**A clever investigation into two unsolved mysteries of poetic
authorship.
**
The technique known as contemporary stylometry uses different methods,
including machine learning, to discover a poem's author based on
features like the frequencies of words and character n-grams. However,
there is one potential textual fingerprint stylometry tends to ignore:
versification, or the very making of language into verse. Using poetic
texts in three different languages (Czech, German, and Spanish), Petr
Plecháč asks whether versification features like rhythm patterns and
types of rhyme can help determine authorship. He then tests his findings
on two unsolved literary mysteries. In the first, Plecháč distinguishes
the parts of the Elizabethan verse play The Two Noble Kinsmen written
by William Shakespeare from those written by his coauthor, John
Fletcher. In the second, he seeks to solve a case of suspected forgery:
how authentic was a group of poems first published as the work of the
nineteenth-century Russian author Gavriil Stepanovich Batenkov? This
book of poetic investigation should appeal to literary sleuths the world
over.