
The failure of a mathematical approach to Shakespeare’s authorship - Hooke
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/infecting-the-teller-essay-brian-vickers/
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goto11
Note: This is not about the "anti-stratfordian" conspiracy theories. It is
about the well known fact that certain of Shakespeare plays was written in
collaboration with other playwrights.

Scholars have discussed at length exactly what scenes are written by who. In
recent years computer-based text analysis have been used to discern between
different authors based on word frequencies and other quantitative
characteristics.

This article posits that quantitative textual analysis is basically pseudo-
science. It provides the example that two different quantitative analyses
yields different attributions of scenes for Henry VI. So at least one has to
be wrong, but possibly the whole approach is flawed.

~~~
duxup
A sort of aside: I'm no expert here, but every time I've run into the whole
question of who authored Shakespeare's work the basis seems to be "I don't
think this nobody could have read it, and if we assume he didn't all these
other ransom theories sort of make sense!".

That is to say ... there's not much there to support much in the way of
conculsions at all.

So I guess this makes sense that some weird math also doesn't help.

~~~
goto11
The "anti-Statfordian" theory say that William Shakespeare (who we know
existed) didn't actually write any of the plays, but acted as a front for some
other author. If this mysterious real author wrote _all_ of the texts
attributed to Shakespeare, there is really no way to prove or disprove this
through any form of textual analysis.

But as noted, this is not the question the article at hand is concerned about.
No legitimate scholars are taking that theory seriously anyway.

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glangdale
Do these methods have any history of, say, being able to successfully predict
things where we have a known "ground truth"? We have plenty of cases of famous
authors writing under pseudonyms for positive examples, as well as having
considerable ability to know that certain authorship is unambiguous (e.g. much
modern writing may have involved multiple drafts being retained somewhere, or
have been done with witnesses, etc). So we can probably safely say that most
of the authorship of 20th Century novels is fairly well-known give or take a
long-suffering wife or two ("who patiently typed up my genius"); do the same
methods here actually work to predict things that we already know?

Or will they, with appropriate levels of massaging, ascribe portions of
Dashiell Hammett's oeuvre to Raymond Chandler?

~~~
boldslogan
for example that j.k. rowling crime novel written under a pseudonym was
discovered by just a random astute person who commented somewhere(maybe on the
amazon reviews) that it felt like j.k. rowling wrote it.

it would be cool to try this method and see if it could detect anything.

~~~
DanBC
That's not quite how it happened. People spotted that Galbraith and Rowling
had the same agent and the same editor.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling#Cormoran_Strike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling#Cormoran_Strike)

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hnaa
Amateur Shakespearean here. I've often wondered why these statistical
approaches don't look for stylistic signatures. For instance, several plays
are linked by their use of doubles (in Hamlet, this scales from "too, too
solid flesh," up to the running joke on the interchangeability of Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern). Shakespeare also seems to be especially fond of puns on
"bear" and "born" \-- the "to be or not to be" monologue has three or four of
these. There are also ways in which scenes repeat their designs -- 1.2 of
Hamlet is similar in some ways to 3.2 of Julius Caesar, etc.

~~~
basch
I imagine two things that make simple analysis harder.

1) once an author has a sufficient library, hiring a team to emulate them is
easier (Tom Clancy, Hanz Zimmer.)

2) if in a collaboration, a partner could write a skeleton or first draft, and
the main author could edit and fill in the cracks. Conversely they could write
scattered sentences and have their partner flesh out filler.

