SOURCE: Austin, Warren B. “Technique of the Chettle-Greene Forgery: Supplementary Material on the Authorship of the Groatsworth of Wit.” Shakespeare Newsletter 20, no. 6 (December 1970): 43.

In the following essay, Austin offers linguistic evidence for the hypothesis that Chettle forged Greene's Groatsworth of Wit.

Since completing the computer-aided linguistic analysis, I have succeeded in reconstructing Chettle's procedure in fabricating the Groatsworth of Wit. For the most part, he used Greene's genuine books of the same genre (prodigal son tales), patterning his forgery on episodes and passages in Greene's Mourning Garment, Never Too Late, and the sequel to the latter, Francesco's Fortunes; but he used at least four other identifiable sources of which the most important was Thomas Nashe's prefatory epistle to Greene's Menaphon. Some passages in A Groatsworth of Wit, including the diatribe against the actors and the actor-playwright Shakespeare, are largely pastiches by Chettle from these sources. This is the...