Posted on 10/12/2009 10:28:02 AM PDT by BGHater
The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism.
Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes that a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare’s early works proves conclusively that the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day.
The professor used software called Pl@giarism, developed by the University of Maastricht to detect cheating students, to compare language used in Edward III — published anonymously in 1596, when Shakespeare was 32 — with other plays of the period.
He discovered that playwrights often use the same patterns of speech, meaning that they have a linguistic fingerprint. The program identifies phrases of three words or more in an author’s known work and searches for them in unattributed plays. In tests where authors are known to be different, there are up to 20 matches because some phrases are in common usage. When Edward III was tested against Shakespeare’s works published before 1596 there were 200 matches.
Sir Brian said: “There might be ten to 20 common phrases between two plays by different authors. The computer is picking out three-word sequences that could just be chunks of grammar. But when you get metaphors or unusual parts of speech, it is different.”
(Excerpt) Read more at entertainment.timesonline.co.uk ...
cc Jack Cashill
The NYT will insist that this program be run against Sarah Palin’s book — but will be aghast if anyone suggests that Obama’s book be tested.
It is well-known that Shakespeare was a Mac user.
Was the program run on Vista?
Isn’t all this information all known?
All kidding aside, I always thought Shakespeare was probably gay. Nothing against my hetro brothers but he is exquisitely sensitive...
Shrug. I dunno if this ‘proves’ anything.
ping
Of course he didn’t work alone!! He was writing for a troupe of players that he’d known for decades..anmd yes, they contributed..it was an organic creative process..all great playwrites have done this..but they are his plays..the scumbag English aristocracy has always HATED that a commoner is the greatest writer of English...Screw the Royal family and all the inbred Euro trash monarchists!!!
While they are firing up the computer, they should look at Dreams From My Father by Barack H. Obamayers.
The Teleprompter that survived (rembember, one has ceased to exist) has warned the computer not to spill the beans on Obama’s books.
The Earl of Oxford was an aristocrat.
Yes, bu he was a poor writer.
Joke, actually.
Did Billy-the-Bomber help him?
Evidence?
But if he really was a Mac user, you know, I'm just sayin’.
Every inch a wingnut. ;’)
Tomb search could end riddle of Shakespeare’s true identity [Fulke Greville]
Telegraph | Sunday, August 9th, 2009 | David Harrison
Posted on 08/31/2009 7:33:07 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
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