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Note: This is not about the "anti-stratfordian" conspiracy theories. It is about the well known fact that certain of Shakespeare plays was written in collaborat
by goto11 7y ago
Note: This is not about the "anti-stratfordian" conspiracy theories. It is about the well known fact that certain of Shakespeare plays was written in collaboration with other playwrights.
Scholars have discussed at length exactly what scenes are written by who. In recent years computer-based text analysis have been used to discern between different authors based on word frequencies and other quantitative characteristics.
This article posits that quantitative textual analysis is basically pseudo-science. It provides the example that two different quantitative analyses yields different attributions of scenes for Henry VI. So at least one has to be wrong, but possibly the whole approach is flawed.
- duxup 7y agoA sort of aside: I'm no expert here, but every time I've run into the whole question of who authored Shakespeare's work the basis seems to be "I don't think this nobody could have read it, and if we assume he didn't all these other ransom theories sort of make sense!". That is to say ... there's not much there to support much in the way of conculsions at all. So I guess this makes sense that some weird math also doesn't help.
- goto11 7y agoThe "anti-Statfordian" theory say that William Shakespeare (who we know existed) didn't actually write any of the plays, but acted as a front for some other author. If this mysterious real author wrote all of the texts attributed to Shakespeare, there is really no way to prove or disprove this through any form of textual analysis. But as noted, this is not the question the article at hand is concerned about. No legitimate scholars are taking that theory seriously anyway.
- mannykannot 7y agoI think it is worth adding that the author is not making a simple "machines can never understand Shakespeare" claim, but that the techniques used here are being interpreted beyond what they can achieve. At one point he writes "it may well be that computerized textual analysis will ultimately go beyond treating word frequencies in isolation and will be able to cope with the full range of language. But that time has not come..." The article also quotes Pervez Rizvi, a software engineer who has collaborated with the author in using computers where appropriate, who makes several trenchant criticisms of Taylor's interpretation of computer-generated evidence. Any editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare may make changes without needing the consensus of the others. It now seems to be experiencing some of the problems arising in Wikipedia from that policy.