Wesley, Fletcher, and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit

Long regarded as a spiritual grandfather of sorts for the Pentecostal movement, John Wesley has been credited by some as paving the way for their doctrinal distinctive of Spirit baptism through his teaching on entire sanctification. Yet, Wesley’s language surrounding Spirit baptism and the meaning of Pentecost differs significantly from that of classical Pentecostalism, calling into question whether a direct line can be drawn from Wesley himself to this Pentecostal distinctive. This article makes the case that their doctrine of Spirit baptism owes much more to the theology of Wesley’s intended successor John Fletcher and the Holiness movement that followed than Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification, and that one may find in Fletcher’s theology the seeds that would culminate in this Pentecostal doctrine easier than one could in Wesley’s theology.

Desafios e Procedimentos de Tradução/Transposição Cultural: Tróilo e Créssida e Os Dois Primos Nobres

O presente artigo se vale de ilustrações extraídas de duas traduções em versoe anotadas, de peças teatrais, concluídas pelo autor no âmbito de um projeto apoiadopelo CNPq-PQ. Trata-se de Tróilo e Créssida e Os Dois Primos Nobres, a primeira de autoriade William Shakespeare, a segunda atribuída a Shakespeare e John Fletcher. Para tal,são invocados preceitos da chamada “tradução/transposição cultural” (segundo Sándore Higgins), bem como noções relativas à tradução de “itens culturais específicos”, isto é,“culture-specific items”, ou CSIs (segundo Aixelá). O artigo postula e conclui que tais preceitospodem constituir procedimentos tradutórios básicos, abrangentes, e capazes de enfrentaros notórios desafios lexicais e culturais inerentes à tradução do teatro renascentista inglês.Palavras-chave: Tróilo e Créssida. Os Dois Primos Nobres. Tradução/transposição cultural.

Versification and Authorship Attribution

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 its 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.

John Fletcher’s Collaborator on The Noble Gentleman

Although John Fletcher is recognized as one of the most influential dramatists of the early modern period, many of the theories concerning the divisions of authorship in his collaborative plays continue to present insoluble difficulties. For instance, according to the soundly based chronology developed by Martin Wiggins, many plays attributed in part to Francis Beaumont appear to have been written after Beaumont had ceased writing (c. 1613), or even after he died in 1616. A prime example would be The Noble Gentleman (1626), which E. H. C. Oliphant and Cyrus Hoy attributed in part to Beaumont. Modern scholarship holds that this was Fletcher’s last play and that it was completed by another hand after Fletcher died in 1625. This article offers the most comprehensive analysis yet undertaken of the stylistic qualities of the “non-Fletcher” portions in this play in relation to dramatists writing for the King’s Men at the time, thereby opening up several new lines of enquiry for co-authored plays of the period. Seeking to broaden our understanding of the collaborative practices in plays produced by that company in or around 1626, through a combination of literary-historical and quantitative analysis, the article puts forth a new candidate for Fletcher’s posthumous collaborator: John Ford.

Relative contributions of Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII: An analysis based on most frequent words and most frequent rhythmic patterns

The versified play Henry VIII is nowadays widely recognized to be a collaborative work not written solely by William Shakespeare. We employ combined analysis of vocabulary and versification together with machine learning techniques to determine which other authors took part in the writing of the play and what were their relative contributions. Unlike most previous studies, we go beyond the attribution of particular scenes and use the rolling attribution approach to determine the probabilities of authorship of pieces of texts, without respecting the scene boundaries. Our results highly support the canonical division of the play between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher proposed by James Spedding, but also bring new evidence supporting the modifications proposed later by Thomas Merriam.