>>Your work regarding phonemes is what sold me. I call that solid evidence.
The important thing is that it’s looking at unconscious characteristics. No poet is going to be running around looking for a favored phoneme pair to put in their next line.
I was equally excited by what we tried to do next. Mac got one paper out of it, then had to go back to the Shakespeare book he got out a few years ago with a committee. I was frustrated at trying to figure out how you knew a poem in a newspaper was by Henry, if it wasn’t in his early mss book. So I wanted a black box where you put in a poem and out the other side it said if it was likely to be by Henry.
So Mac figured out that we could modify our procedures and I gathered a set of anonymous newspaper writers as a substitute for Moore, as well as a set of known ones to use to countercheck. Then we ran a whole bunch of tests, including the phoneme pairs, to see if a poem was more likely by Henry than by anyone else. NBC fell out to be more likely by Henry than by any random writer. So that was Mac’s paper. But it was fascinating looking at the data on poems we KNEW were Henry’s and poems we were unsure about.
Was that black box approach used to settle the Shakespeare/Marlowe controversy?
Perhaps you could take your discussion to a non-Q thread, please, or to PM.