Plagiarism-Detection Software Confirms Shakespeare Play

mi tips us that software intended to help essay graders detect plagiarism has been used to attribute to Shakespeare — with high probability — a hitherto unattributed play, 'The Reign of Edward III.' It seems that the work was co-authored by Shakespeare and another playwright of the time, Thomas Kyd. "With a program called Pl@giarism, Vickers detected 200 strings of three or more words in 'Edward III' that matched phrases in Shakespeare's other works. Usually, works by two different authors will only have about 20 matching strings."

Or...

[Tubal-Cain]

It seems that the work was co-authored by Shakespeare and another playwright of the time, Thomas Kyd.

Or Thomas Kyd plagiarized Shakespeare's work.

Homage?

[davidbofinger]

So they've found a play that has some of Shakespeare's pet phrases in it. How do we know Shakespeare wrote it? We need to be able to reject alternatives like someone plagiarising those phrases from Shakespeare, or someone writing a deliberate homage of Shakespeare. Something similar happens in linguistics, where you're trying to tell if two languages are related but you can't tell if a pair of words are cognates or borrowed.

!confirmed

[wizardforce]

The work done *suggests* that Shakespeare collaborated with Kyd on the work but it's not the slam dunk that the title would have you believe.

Not what the software was designed for

[Anonymous Coward]

This software is for detecting plagiarism. In the situation it is designed for, one person uses another person's work but tries not to reveal the fact. The program catches this by noting that the pieces of writing are too similar. If it's well-designed, then it is good at this task, so it should be reasonably sensitive to similarity.

The "authentication" scenario described in TFA is very different. Assume the play is fake (written by someone pretending to be Shakespeare). Then it is not a case of one person using another person's work and trying to conceal that, but rather one person imitating another person's work. If the program is sensitive to similarity, it might be easy to fool into giving a false positive. We really don't know. In order to tell, we would have to ask some people to deliberately write fake Shakespearean works and see how the program scores those.

Until we have more data on how the software performs at THIS task, rather than the plagiarism-detection task, I'll still be skeptical about the provenance of Edward III.

Re:So what they're saying is that...

[Plunky]

So actually I think Shakespeare's plays were never copyrighted in the first place.

Sir, I must point out inconsistencies in your argument. It seems that we have two choices:

• His works were in fact copyrighted and he lived well from the proceeds.
• His works were not copyrighted and he starved to death at an early age.

But records exist that indicate otherwise in both cases. So, my contention is that the records are clearly falsified and we should err on the side of caution. I myself am owner of a corporation that is willing to step up and maintain the legacy of Shakespeare by collecting the royalties for when he returns(1) to claim them. I myself would take no salary for this, only a small(2) annual dividend(3) in order to ensure that the corporation can continue to protect this valuable intellectual property for the forseeable(4) future.

1. religious freedom cannot deny reincarnation
2. to maintain myself in the minimum style that the guardian of such a legacy deserves
3. no income tax to be paid on dividends naturally
4. lets just call it forever less a day to simplify the accounting

Re:Now Try This

[YourExperiment]

I don't see any validity in applying the formula to individual paragraphs.

If I were to say "The cat sat on the mat", this would score pretty low on the scale, but there is no better way to express the cat's location to you. If I were to go on to say "thus was my ailurophilia originally instantiated" this sentence would score considerably higher. However I don't see that this provides any evidence that I didn't write both sentences.

Re:I plagiarized Shakespeare too!

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yup, using speech as a social status marker is what aristocrats use to make sure that everyone around knows what they are. Yearning for aristocratic status causes people to behave as douchebags of the highest order, the poor souls.

Re:I plagiarized Shakespeare too!

[glwtta]

Yup, using speech as a social status marker is what aristocrats use to make sure that everyone around knows what they are.

So true. On the other hand, some people take an interest in the language they speak every day.

Go figure.

isn't there a simpler explanation?

[goombah99]

So the software was designed to detect bodies of work that contain phrases from other works. ANd it finds a work that is a composite of Shakespear and Kyd. isn't it more likely that someone back then was plagarizing from Shakespear and Kyd? As opposed to them collaborating?

For example if I turned in a term paper and the plagarism software detected phrases from cory doctrow and thomas pynchon, the conclusion my instructor would leap to is obvioulsy that the three of us collaborated on the term paper right? not! Why should this be different for this Play?

Re:isn't there a simpler explanation?

[MBGMorden]

I think the idea would be that if it picked up their writing "style" they could then locate the piece that you plagiarized from.

In the case mentioned, it doesn't seem like there's an original source that was copied. It's an original work, but has the basic style indicative of Shakespeare. If someone plagiarized him then we'd have to assume that whatever they copied from was lost. It's an easier to accept notion that Shakespeare simply wrote this piece himself.