Word: playful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Plagiarism-detection software was created with lazy, sneaky college students in mind - not the likes of William Shakespeare. Yet the software may have settled a centuries-old mystery over the authorship of an unattributed play from the late 1500s called The Reign of Edward III. Literature scholars have long debated whether the play was written by Shakespeare - some bits are incredibly Bard-like, but others don't resemble his style at all. The verdict, according to one expert: the play is likely a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, another popular playwright of his time. (See TIME's photo-essay...
...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 attributed four more anonymous plays to Kyd. (Read "Injunction by Twitter: Stopping...
...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...
...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 at all; if you have just computers and know nothing about literature, you're likely to go wrong as well...