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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."
And the evidence continues to mount against him. All lies!
... Shakespeare plagiarized himself? Stop the presses!
It seems that the work was co-authored by Shakespeare and another playwright of the time, Thomas Kyd.
Or Thomas Kyd plagiarized Shakespeare's work.
Game Show Host (John Cleese): Good evening and welcome to Stake Your Claim. First this evening we have Mr Norman Voles of Gravesend who claims he wrote all Shakespeare's works. Mr Voles, I understand you claim that you wrote all those plays normally attributed to Shakespeare?
Voles (Michael Palin): That is correct. I wrote all his plays and my wife and I wrote his sonnets.
Host: Mr Voles, these plays are known to have been performed in the early 17th century. How old are you, Mr Voles?
Voles: 43.
Host: Well, how is it possible for you to have written plays performed over 300 years before you were born?
Voles: Ah well. This is where my claim falls to the ground.
Host: Ah!
Voles: There's no possible way of answering that argument, I'm afraid. I was only hoping you would not make that particular point, but I can see you're more than a match for me!
Host: Mr Voles, thank you very much for coming along.
Voles: My pleasure.
Host: Next we have Mr Bill Wymiss who claims to have built the Taj Mahal.
Wymiss (Eric Idle): No.
Host: I'm sorry?
Wymiss: No. No.
Host: I thought you cla...
Wymiss: Well I did but I can see I won't last a minute with you.
Host: Next...
Wymiss: I was right!
So they've found a play that has some of Shakespeare's pet phrases in it. How do we know Shakespeare wrote it? We need to be able to reject alternatives like someone plagiarising those phrases from Shakespeare, or someone writing a deliberate homage of Shakespeare. Something similar happens in linguistics, where you're trying to tell if two languages are related but you can't tell if a pair of words are cognates or borrowed.
Host: ... we have Mrs Mittelschmerz of Dundee who cla... Mrs Mittelschmerz, what is your claim?
Mittelschmerz (Graham Chapman in drag): That I can burrow through an elephant.
Host: (Pause) Now you've changed your claim, haven't you. You know we haven't got an elephant.
Mittelschmerz: (Insincerely) Oh, haven't you? Oh dear!
Host: You're not fooling anybody, Mrs Mittelschmerz. In your letter you quite clearly claimed that ... er ... you could be thrown off the top of Beachy Head into the English Channel and then be buried.
Mittelschmerz: No, you can't read my writing.
Host: It's typed.
Mittelschmerz: It says 'elephant'.
Host: Mrs Mittelschmerz, this is an entertainment show, and I'm not prepared to simply sit here bickering. Take her away, Heinz!
Mittelschmerz: Here, no, leave me alone! (Sound of wind and sea).
Mittelschmerz: Oooaaahh! (SPLOSH)
In Soviet Russia, Shakespeare misspells THEE!
10 little-endian boys went out to dine, a big-endian carp ate one, and then there were -246.
The work done *suggests* that Shakespeare collaborated with Kyd on the work but it's not the slam dunk that the title would have you believe.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Back in college I briefly took a creative writing course which was filled with snobs clutching their leatherbound Infinite Jest copies who used words like "perspectival" and "serendipitous."
During one of the meetings the lecture focused on poetic expression with an emphasis on sonnets. Homework consisted of writing an abab, cdcd, efef, gg sonnet and reading it outloud to the circle of douchebags who then offered their opinions about the piece. Being an industrious person, I applied my murky understanding of F/OSS principles to the fine craft of poetic expression and forked one of Shakespeare's obscure sonnets, changing some archaic words into more modern form.
I got a round of faint applause then dropped the class 2 weeks later.
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 software is for detecting plagiarism. In the situation it is designed for, one person uses another person's work but tries not to reveal the fact. The program catches this by noting that the pieces of writing are too similar. If it's well-designed, then it is good at this task, so it should be reasonably sensitive to similarity.
The "authentication" scenario described in TFA is very different. Assume the play is fake (written by someone pretending to be Shakespeare). Then it is not a case of one person using another person's work and trying to conceal that, but rather one person imitating another person's work. If the program is sensitive to similarity, it might be easy to fool into giving a false positive. We really don't know. In order to tell, we would have to ask some people to deliberately write fake Shakespearean works and see how the program scores those.
Until we have more data on how the software performs at THIS task, rather than the plagiarism-detection task, I'll still be skeptical about the provenance of Edward III.
Another use would be to apply the algorithms to religious books to reveal which parts were really inspired by a divinity, and which parts were simply invented by some random, power hungry, con man, to control his peers.
They could call it Bl@sphemy.
Shakespeare, huh. That guys works are full of clichés.
Keep Doing Good.
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.
For example, these matching strings could just as well be common turns of phrase of the day. There doesn't seem to be any indication that the software was re-configured for common expressions of old English.
This is gibberish. The software isn't configured for common expressions of modern English, either. If you understand what it's doing, you should understand why no such configuration is necessary, as long as the two works being compared are contemporaneous. (Or heck, even if they aren't -- correlation should go down in that case, a high score is even more indicative when comparing non-contemporaneous authors.)
The study would be more plausible if works by two different authors IN ENGLAND IN THE YEAR 1600 contained 20 or so matching strings. But since that control group is missing -- so is the validity of the conclusion.
This is just misinformed. They've compared works by both the same author and different authors in England around 1600. It turns out it's just as true then as it is today that works by different authors contain significantly smaller sets of common wording. Indeed, this technique is used to identify which 60% of the play was written by Kyd (by comparing with his other work) and which 40% comes from The Bard. Comparing known works of either Kyd or The Bard with other works by the same author produce the same high correspondence, and comparing known works between the two different authors produces the same low correspondence.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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
Why the pedantry? Because, if you didn't know that, you really shouldn't be pontificating on linguistics or linguistic analysis.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It seems that the work was co-authored by Shakespeare and another playwright of the time, Thomas Kyd.
When working together, they were known by the name "Kyd Shakez."
... and then they built the supercollider.
About six years ago, the Royal Shakespeare Company presented a performance of Edward III and attributed it to Shakespeare. It's accepted that Shakespeare didn't write every word of every plays in his canon (for example, he didn't write most of Pericles and Henry VIII) but there was obviously enough evidence for most Shakespeare scholars to accept that he wrote a substantial part of it. This latest piece of research is just a further piece of evidence, but it's nothing radically new.
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.
So the software was designed to detect bodies of work that contain phrases from other works. ANd it finds a work that is a composite of Shakespear and Kyd. isn't it more likely that someone back then was plagarizing from Shakespear and Kyd? As opposed to them collaborating?
For example if I turned in a term paper and the plagarism software detected phrases from cory doctrow and thomas pynchon, the conclusion my instructor would leap to is obvioulsy that the three of us collaborated on the term paper right? not! Why should this be different for this Play?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
for example, he didn't write most of Pericles and Henry VIII...
As to the latter, he might not have wanted to claim too much ownership to that play, given its first performance only 10 years after the death of Elizabeth, Henry's daughter. Dangerous ground indeed, given the treatment meted out by the Queen's secret police to other playwrights of the time.
In fact, the first performance of that play happened to be the same night the Globe Theatre burnt down. Good fodder for conspiracy theories there...