The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1563 Tuesday, 20 September 2005
From: Ward Elliott <
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Date: Monday, 19 Sep 2005 18:59:28 -0700
Subject: Two New Authorship Studies
Many SHAKSPERians have wanted a look at the long, documented case
statements underlying our most recent postings. Valenza and I have just
put two of our latest articles on the web: our long Tennessee Law
Review Article, "Oxford by the Numbers," and a shorter one on the
"Shakespeare" sections of Sir Thomas More and Edward III, "Two Tough
Nuts to Crack," to be published in the Shakespeare Yearbook next year.
The web addresses are:
http://govt.claremontmckenna.edu/welliott/UTConference/Oxford_by_Numbers.pdf
http://govt.claremontmckenna.edu/welliott/UTConference/2ToughNuts.pdf
"Oxford by the Numbers" gives a detailed explanation of how we calculate
the odds of Shakespeare authorship of a sample text, relative to those
of the least Shakespearean play or verse block in our core Shakespeare
baseline. It describes the distinctive features of our methodology:
quantitative evidence; clean, commonized baseline; negative evidence;
and our use of blocks and profiles. It discusses cautions about some
tests for genre, date of composition, prosody, and editing; it considers
internal consistency, replicability; correspondence with available
documents, margins of error, holding up under adverse criticism, and
presents our old, $1,000 wager. It also explains scientific notation
and tells how to calculate it with a $15 scientific calculator. Table
2.4, extracted below, gives a summary of some of our results:
Table 2.4. Shakespeare's Farthest Outlier 3,000-Word Poem Blocks
Compared with Oxford, Marlowe, and Funeral Elegy
Poem Tests Rejections Discrete Continuous
Block Composite Composite
Probability Probability
Shakespeare 14 1 3.1E-01 9.0E-02
Oxford 14 6* 7.7E-07* <1.0E-15*
Bacon 14 7* 2.3E-08* <1.0E-15*
Marlowe 1 14 3* 5.2E-03* 1.6E-02*
Marlowe 2 14 4* 3.7E-04* 3.1E-04*
Elegy 14 6* 7.7E-07* <1.0E-15*
Table 2.4. * = outside Shakespeare range. 3.1E-01 means 3.1 times ten
to the minus one = 31%.raw composite Shakespeare probability for the
Shakespeare block. 7.7E-07 means 7.7 times ten to the minus seven =
.00000077 raw composite Shakespeare probability for the Elegy. Relative
composite Shakespeare odds are computed by dividing the raw probability
score of the least probable baseline Shakespeare block (top line) by the
probabilities observed for comparison samples (next 5 lines).
The three leading Shakespeare claimants and the Funeral Elegy are all
far less likely than Shakespeare's own farthest outlier baseline blocks
to have come from Shakespeare by chance. The closest block, Marlowe 1,
is 5-60 times less probable than Shakespeare's own outliers. The most
distant block, Bacon, is between 13 million and 90 trillion times less
probable than Shakespeare's outliers. Marlowe 1 would be a much closer
call than Bacon, Oxford, or the Elegy, but Marlowe himself is hardly a
likely Shakespeare claimant, thanks to his very distant second block and
his long list of plays which don't come close to matching Shakespeare.
Neither he, nor Oxford and Bacon, nor any of the 34 other Shakespeare
"claimants" we could test are close calls.
All the claimants are on different stylistic planets from Shakespeare.
So is the author of the Funeral Elegy, which, however, fits comfortably
within our stylometric profile of John Ford.
For whole plays, some numbers of interest from "Two Tough Nuts" would be:
Play Tests Rejections Discrete Continuous
Composite Composite
Probability Probability
The Tempest 48 2 2.3E-01 3.7E-03
Sir T More 48 7* 3.3E-05* <1.0E-15*
Edward III 48 13* 4.4E-12* 2.6E-12*
Woodstock 48 20* <1.0E-15* <1.0E-15*
The Tempest falls just within the Shakespeare range and marks the outer
threshold of our core Shakespeare baseline. None of the three others
listed are on the same stylistic planet with Shakespeare, even after
appropriate cautions and discounts for genre, date, editing, and
prosody. Both versions of Woodstock's Shakespeare probability, Discrete
and Continuous, are too low to compute on a standard PC.
These are figures for whole plays and do not rule out partial
Shakespeare authorship. The "Shakespeare" parts of Sir Thomas More and
Edward III are much closer calls, but the odds in both cases still do
not favor Shakespeare. "Two Tough Nuts" also discusses which plays
which appeared during Shakespeare's lifetime raise the most interesting
questions of authorship; it also raises the ante of our wager from
$1,000 to its present amount of
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