The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.0913  Tuesday, 17 May 2005

From:           Bill Arnold <
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Date:           Wednesday, 11 May 2005 19:35:55 -0700 (PDT)
Subject:        Shakespeare's Mythical Monkey Authors

In the May/June 2005 *Poets & Writers* magazine, page 15, Kevin Canfield
writes in part about the myth of a bunch of monkeys capable of writing
Shakespeare's plays randomly on keyboards.  He cites online
http://www.aardasnails.com where we will find the results.  Canfield,
after looking at Brit Nick Hoggard's computer results, concludes,

"So, how much Shakespeare can monkeys write?  The answer, it turns out,
is not much.  Over the course of billions of cyber-years-the simulator
runs at a highly accelerated rate in the hopes that it 'creates
interesting results in our life-times' --the cyber-monkeys' best showing
is a match of 23 words from *Timon of Athens.*

Bill Arnold
http://www.cwru.edu/affil/edis/scholars/arnold.htm

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