 Playwright William Shakespeare
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Nov. 14, 2003 — How much of Shakespeare's work was really his own? And how much was he influenced by other writers? Literature experts said computers will yield the answers to these age-old questions.
Associate Professor Hugh Craig of the University of Newcastle in Australia and Arthur Kinney of the University of Massachusetts in the United States are about to spend two years analyzing the Bard's work using a method called "computational stylistics."
This involves using a computer to analyze large slabs of different texts to look for similarities or differences in the way words like "and," "the" and "but" are used.
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Craig, who is director of the university's Center for Literary and Linguistic Computing, said researchers could work out who wrote mystery texts by comparing patterns of word use with patterns in texts of known authorship. He said the method depended on comparing patterns of at least 30 common words.
"You otherwise hardly notice such words but with a computer you can detect patterns of usage and they become important," he told ABC Science Online. "You find that individuals have their own kind of profile."
The most straightforward problem that Craig and Kinney will try and solve is whether certain plays — such as Edward III — were written by Shakespeare or not.
Another problem is the question of who wrote what in two plays said to be collaborations between Shakespeare and John Fletcher — Henry the VIII and The Two Nobel Kinsmen. For this, the researchers will compare the text of half a dozen plays of the time believed to have been written by Shakespeare and some texts known to have been written by Fletcher.
"The first step will be to ask if we can tell Shakespeare and Fletcher apart," Craig said. He added the ultimate aim will be to test the theory that the two wrote separate scenes in the play.
The researchers will also be trying to find out whether the two started writing like each other as a result of the collaboration.
The researchers will also use patterns of rare words to solve other questions relating to how Shakespeare was influenced by the French philosopher Montaigne.
"We know he read [a particular text of Montaigne's] because in some later place he quotes verbatim from it. We don't know exactly when he read it and it's quite important how early he read it," he said. "You would expect that anyone who read something — some of the rare words would pop into whatever they wrote next."
The application of computation stylistics to questions of authorship in relation to Shakespeare is not new. However, argues Craig, his institution pioneered the method — through the work of Craig's predecessor Professor John Burrows.
"[Burrows] was really the first to work out that in fact computers allow you to count enough of these things so you can find out there are actually very interesting patterns in the usage of all these very common words."
Before Burrows' pioneering work, it was assumed that people who spoke good English used common words at a standard rate and it was presumed that looking at patterns of word use would not work, Craig said.
Computational stylistics has become accurate with the advent of Internet sites that now hold large slabs of easily downloadable texts, he said, adding that a slab of at least 2,000 words was needed for proper analysis.
Apart from the study of individual styles of authors, the approach can be used to study the style of groups of people: different generations, nationalities or different genders.
Going in the other direction, there has even been some talk of applying computational stylistics to Virginia Woolf's work. Did she, for example, change her writing style during an episode of mental illness?
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