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Plagiarism-Detection Software Confirms Shakespeare Play
mi tips us that software intended to help essay graders detect plagiarism has been used to attribute to Shakespeare — with high probability — a hitherto unattributed play, 'The Reign of Edward III.' It seems that the work was co-authored by Shakespeare and another playwright of the time, Thomas Kyd. "With a program called Pl@giarism, Vickers detected 200 strings of three or more words in 'Edward III' that matched phrases in Shakespeare's other works. Usually, works by two different authors will only have about 20 matching strings."
The article mentions the fact that there was very high competitive pressure on writers to compose plays very quickly so I wonder if there actually was plagiarism going on here. How hard would it have been for one of these writers to get at least a fairly crude copy of Shakespeare's work and utilise various elements of Shakespeare's previous plays? Can anyone enlighten us as to the probability of this being the case or for that matter how common plagiarism actually was at the time?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
This play has been widely attributed to Shakespeare by Shakespeare scholars for some time. It already appears in the Oxford Complete Works, the New Cambridge Shakespeare, and (my favorite) the Riverside Shakespeare.
Nothing is ever definitive in this line of work, so it's interesting to have the software weigh in on it. But I don't think any scholars would be changing their minds if it didn't.
Yeah I get that - like the blood stains all over the front of my car *suggest* I was the one who ran over my neighbours dog... Hey it could have been anybody's dog!
For anyone interested I'd suggest M. Wood's documentary, "In Search of Shakespeare". The four part documentary won't answer any of the more delicious and silly questions about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays but it will give as good an historical insight as is easily available. Thomas Kyd is best known for his play The Spanish Tragedy worth reading for the style. Christopher Marlowe and Kyd were the new kids on the block before Shakespeare made his mark. A famous critique of Shakespeare, mentioned in Wood's documentary attacks Shakespeare as unschooled and not an equal to "university wits" like Marlowe. The problem with attribution is that, likely, all authors of that period plagiarized, (by our standards) , one another. Shakespeare started out as an actor with a traveling company IIRC, the King's Men, who were basically a troupe of government propagandists. Theatre was a relatively new phenomenon and was used in the Elizabethan era as a propaganda tool during the conversion of England from Catholic to Protestantism. Shakespeare stole many of the best plots he studied as an actor with the King's Men. While Shakespeare was known to have co-authored plays with others, the missing play based on the first part of Cervantes Don Quxiote is the most notable example, I know of no evidence, though evidence of any kind is scant, that Shakespeare and Kyd worked together. Kyd and Marlowe were implicated as Catholic agents and Marlowe was likely murdered because he was catholic. IMHO neither Marlowe or Kyd can hold a candle to Shakespeare.
ideopath @ play
Get a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto
http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt
Rate the entire work, and each numbered paragraph, for reading level using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Readability Formula
http://www.readabilityformulas.com/flesch-grade-level-readability-formula.php
Split the work into 2 parts, one with paragraph reading level ratings greater than the overall score, one with the scores less than overall.
Apply plagiarism testing software to compare these two halves and see whether it says they were written by the same or by different persons.
Before the creation of plagiarism testing software, we still had several different reading level testing programs available. I did this test using three different programs. They said that at least two people wrote the work. Ted Kaczynski was never considered to have Multiple Personality Disorder, so if the results (still) say two people wrote it, each with their own style, then it's highly unlikely Kaczynski wrote it by himself.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Of course, any product that has had @ in the name at any point in the last, oh, decade or so can not by any means be taken seriously.
I can't help but think that while people who are genuinely interested in the history of the Bible might find it fascinating, there's a certain amount of "be careful what you ask for, you just might get it". Particularly among any that are interested in the history of the Bible because of their own religious beliefs rather than just an academic interest in a very old book.
You don't think it possible that they might want to know whether their beliefs are well founded?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Most people with such beliefs don't need confirmation from some "outside source" as to whether their beliefs are well founded. That's why they call if faith.
I think you will find that if someone did "confirm" that many biblical works were plagiarized or whatever, that believers would not care. In their minds, the Bible (or whatever particular work they believe in) is the "word of God" and it doesn't matter who put it to paper. They will accept that one person could have been inspired to write several different things and won't care.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
You don't think it possible that they might want to know whether their beliefs are well founded?
Of course not. If they did, they would base their beliefs on rational empricism, not a logically inconsistent fantasy whose primary source is a collection of scriptures full of falsehoods, violence and vindictiveness (as well as some beautiful poetry and a smidgen of worthy moral advice that doesn't come close to redeeming the whole.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Would be interesting to see if a computer comes up with the same JEDP authors though.
The authorship question aside, it's doubtful that this kind of analysis would catch the more interesting bits of plagerism in the Bible. The lifting of the Flood story from the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim, and the bits of Gilgamesh that are spliced into Eclesiastes, for example.
Although in the latter case Siduri's advice to Gilgamesh (go home and enjoy your life taking joy in your spouse and children, quit trying to live forever) is virtually identical to what the Teacher writes (can't recall the exact reference--somewhere in chapter 4, I think) the differences in language probably make this kind of semantics-free analysis less than useful.
And of course, most of the source material that the Bible was plagerized from is lost to us, which limits the applications of this technique to that problem as well. This is unfortunate, as an understanding of the works that the Bible authors plagiarized would help us understand the place of the Bible in the history of literature and give more clues as to the culture that produced it.
Why, for example, was the Sumerian flood story plagiarized, and not the quest for imortality? Why was Siduri's advice plagiarized and not Gilgamesh's lament on the death of Enkidu, or Enkidu's lament in the underworld?
This kind of analysis is extremely valuable in understanding the context in which a particular literary work was created: we know that Shakespeare and his contemporaries borrowed plots and characters from each other all the time, repeating the same basic stories with variations, like film remakes in the modern world (Henry V is a good example of Shakespeare transforming a story that had been covered before into something new and wonderful, despite the many borrowed scenes). What an author chose to plagiarize out of the many source works available tells us a lot about his time and place and how he saw the world. We can't do that with the Bible, because so many of the source works it was plagiarized from have been lost to us.
The Book of Mormon, now... it would definitely be worth applying this kind of analysis to that...
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.