Using a software called Pl@giarism, a literature professor was able to detect traces of Shakespeare in an unattributed play from the 1500s titled, "The Reign of Edward III".
The software compares writing patterns between two or more works and produces a list of phrases common to them. It's usually used to check the originality of a student's work. Sir Brian Vickers, from University of London, used it in examining the play and found 200 matches between Edward III and Shakespeare's other works.
"With this method we see the way authors use and reuse the same phrases and metaphors, like chunks of fabric in a weave," says Vickers.
And it looks like this play is a collaboration between Shakespeare and another playwright, Thomas Kyd. There's also a match of 200 phrases between this play and his works.
"In Edward III, it's quite a typical arrangement; Shakespeare writes three scenes near the beginning and one later on, presumably to guarantee some kind of continuity," says Vickers. "It's a very good play, but it suffers from some inconsistencies - characters who appear in some of Shakespeare's scenes don't appear later on."
It took Prof. Vickers two years of research to identify the play's possible authors, even if he has the expertise and the software, it still wasn't easy. "You have to go on hunches - you can't just feed in all the numbers on every play and sit back," he says. "But what I'm hoping to do is bring about a marriage between human reading and machine reading. If you distrust computers, you won't advance at all; if you have just computers and know nothing about literature, you're likely to go wrong as well."
Sources:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1930971,00.html
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/10/21/plagiarism-software-solves-mystery-of-unknown-shakespeare-play/
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