A touchstone for the bard

Abstract

We introduce an authorship identification test, called modal analysis, based on a new statistic derived from the Karhunen-Loeve transform. Application to the poems of the Shakespearean canon and to other contemporary poetry strongly supports the case for disqualification of most major claimants. Results also cast doubt that the recently discovered poems, Shall I Die and Elegy, were written by William Shakespeare, but do suggest that eight unascribed poems of The Passionate Pilgrim may have been his work.

And then there were none: Winnowing the Shakespeare claimants

“…(Elliott and Valenza, 1991, 1991a, 1991bValenza, 1990) These teams focused wholly on poet claimants and came up with six tests, three of them brand new, which seemed to say "could be" to Shakespeare and "couldn't be" to at least some others. None of the tests was perfect enough, like fingerprints, to say "must be Shakespeare;" that is, to prove authorship from a single match, or even from a set of matches.…”

“…Since 1987 a Shakespeare Clinic of Claremont Colleges undergraduates has been using computers to explore both sets of Shakespeare authorship questions (Elliott and Valenza, 1991;Shakespeare Clinic, 1995). Its assignment, from the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable, of Santa Monica, California (a group addressed to the big authorship questions, but not committed to any particular claimant), was to shorten the Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare list of 58 "credible" Shakespeare claimants (Table 1) to a more manageable number.…”

Stylometric Techniques for Multiple Author Clustering

“…The analysis would suggest that the five authors, Barnfield, Delaney, Griffin, Marlowe, and Raleigh were not acknowledged, and several poems may well be collaborative works between Shakespeare and others but this also was common [54]. It is also possible that several poems (7,14,18,19) are not early work or collaborations, but other writer's poems not studied here. This failing to acknowledge all author's poems would seem, at least by today's standards, to be an injustice.…”

“…At around noise levels of 500, poems 15 and 16 switch positions, but then revert back with further noise. At noise levels 800 and above, the Barnfield -Griffin cluster (7,11,19, and 21) move internally within the cluster but no poems leave. At noise levels 800 and higher the Shakespeare -Marlowe cluster (1, 2, 3, 12, 14, 18, and 20) move internally, and at no point does poem 20 moves out of the cluster and join with poem 17.…”

“…She also adds there is some doubt surrounding the authorship of the Barnfield and Griffin poems. Reference [6] disputes Shakespeare's authorship, while [7] suggest eight, not 12 of the anonymous poems are Shakespeare's. However, [2] suggest poems 7, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 19 use a similar six-line stanza format to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and poems 4, 6, and 9 are about Venus and Adonis and have Shakespearian similarities, but [5] says poems 7 and 13 resemble Robert Greene's poems.…”