Perhaps it is the duty of Shakespeareans to suffer through periodic bouts of attribution anxiety. In the case of the Addition to The Book of Sir Thomas More such anxiety has fostered eighty years of dispute. The reason is simple. As Arthur F. Kinney notes in his ‘Text, Context, and Authorship of The Booke of Sir Thomas More’ (in which, incidentally, he argues against Shakespeare as Hand-D): ‘In all of Tudor Drama there is no more vexing text than the one ascribed on a vellum wrapper as The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore. There is none more important, either – since if we have any fragment of drama actually in Shakespeare's hand, this is it.’ These then are the stakes. To live up to them, the study of attribution requires precise methods of inquiry, which utilize but are independent of other critical approaches and their concomitant if elegantly buried hopes for a given outcome. Computational stylistics is such a method.

Computational stylistics provides a reading of text, and of authorial distinction, at a molecular level. It takes seriously the distinguishing force of both syntax (thus the importance of function words to the methodology) and vocabulary. It rouses assumptions from slumber and instantiates the possibility of deeper precision. In the case of Hand-D, computational stylistics crosses the threshold from conjecture, albeit rigorous, to probability, albeit not certain, by establishing and assuring not only a validity but a reliability unavailable to both trained literary sensibility and honed literary instinct.