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."

Comments

hmmm

[wizardforce]

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?

Re:hmmm

[jfengel]

Getting access to the play was easy: admission was a penny. They most certainly did go to each other's works and steal phrases from each other. Shakespeare clearly cribbed from Marlowe, among others.

They stole stories from each other all the time. Stories were considered common property. Trying to protect them would seem as absurd as many Slashdotters consider software patents.

But they were fairly protective of the play as a whole. There was just one master copy, and each actor would get a copy literally of his lines, plus the cue that came before each. Saved copying expenses (it's not like they had a xerox) and also protected the plays. And those cue sheets were treated as secrets.

Eventually the play would be published (and performed without royalties), but Edward III was published fairly early in Shakespeare's career, and it would be hard to gather up enough material from the previously printed plays to make up a new one attributable to Shakespeare.

Attribution is more art than science, and attempts to do it with software are pretty controversial. Just because this software agrees with the experts this time doesn't fill me with confidence about the software.

I've looked at it myself, and it definitely fits in with Shakespeare's other early history plays. But it's not his best work. It has a few genuinely good scenes, and it deserves to be studied with the rest of the canon, but it's not exactly Hamlet or Richard III. I doubt most people will ever see it.

Now Try This

[DynaSoar]

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.

Any product with @ in the name...

[rmc]

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.

Re:Divine inspiration

[digitig]

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?