Word: iii
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...Brian Vickers, a literature professor at the University of London, came to his conclusion after using plagiarism-detection software - as well as his own expertise - to compare writing patterns between Edward III and Shakespeare's body of work. Plagiarism software isn't new; college professors have been using it to catch cheats for more than a decade. It is, however, growing increasingly sophisticated, enabling a scholar like Vickers to investigate the provenance of unattributed works of literature. With a program called Pl@giarism, Vickers detected 200 strings of three or more words in Edward III that matched phrases in Shakespeare...
...blood" and even the whole phrase "lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." Other matching strings are less compelling, but are nevertheless an essential part of distinguishing the author's linguistic fingerprint, says Vickers. The professor also matched more than 200 strings of words between Edward III and Kyd's earlier works - at this point in his career, he had only three plays to his name. According to Vickers, Kyd should get top billing on the play - about 60% of Edward III was likely written by him; the remaining 40% by Shakespeare. Using the plagiarism software, Vickers has also...
...would the Bard, at this stage in his career - age 32 and well established by the time Edward III was published in 1596 - need to collaborate on a play? Simply because, as literature scholars have documented, the London theaters of the day were competing for audiences and had to churn out material as quickly as possible to stay ahead of one another. To do so, they often used groups of authors to write playbooks in a matter of weeks, paying each author by the scene. The theater companies would then often advertise themselves, rather than the authors, on the published...
...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...
...many of the literature world's greatest authorship questions. But don't try this at home - this isn't something just anyone can do. Vickers has spent more than four decades studying Shakespeare, and he's devoted countless hours over the past two years reaching his verdict on Edward III. "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...