
Disputed Shakespeare Play Is 'Proven' Genuine - ColinWright
http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/books/disputed-shakespeare-play-is-proven-genuine
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benbreen
Here's a longer description of the research methodology:

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/13/shakespeare...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/13/shakespeare-
unmasked-by-pronouns.html)

As much as I would like this to be true, I'm extremely skeptical of any claims
to have "proven" something via a method like text analysis. There's just too
much room for selection bias (i.e., did they apply their methodology to every
play written between 1550 and 1620 to see how many false positives it resulted
in? What if the use of function words in the Shakespeare corpus was less
distinctive than they imagine?) Though to be fair, I think that language like
"proven" is being added by journalists interpreting the study rather than the
authors themselves. It's certainly an interesting lead for future research
into the provenance of the play, at any rate.

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somebodyother
Exactly, it's not like they were scoring William Shakespeare versus every
other (possibly unknown) playwright alive at the time, nor do they have the
training data they'd need for it.

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huxley
It's fascinating to think of Shakespeare reading Don Quixote and adapting a
story from it for one of his later plays.

I knew that Shakespeare and Cervantes had died within 10 days of each other
but was surprised to find out that Cervantes lived to 68 while Shakespeare was
only 52.

