A computer program that was fed more than 3 million words by William Shakespeare and other Elizabethan authors has shown the Bard alone wrote his works, a university professor says.
In addition, the computer may have found eight poems previously unattributed to Shakespeare that may have been penned by the great playwright and poet."We are on the verge of a tremendous find; the possibility of confirming eight new short Shakespeare poems," Professor Ward Elliott told Reuters.
He said the computer, at Claremont McKenna College just outside Los Angeles, had been fed the largest collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean texts ever put into a computer.
"We've got the King James Bible, every poem written by Shakespeare and material from 30 or so claimants (to Shakespeare's works)," Elliott said.
The program, devised by Rob Valenza, professor of computer sciences at Claremont McKenna, runs a battery of eight tests on every word. The main test, known as modal analysis or the Valenza test, looks for interrelationships between words.
"Using this test alone Professor Valenza discovered tremendous consistency within Shakespeare, and tremendous powers of discrimination between Shakespeare and others," Elliott said, adding it had been powerful enough to eliminate all but two or three of the claimants.
Those authors who did pass the Valenza test were subjected to seven more tests looking for word frequency, words used to begin lines, metrical ways of ending lines, whether the line was punctuated at the end, relative clauses, compound words, hyphenated compound words and frequency of exclamation marks.
These were then compared to Shakespeare's characteristics.
The top claimants tested were the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Edward Dyer, Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh.
The results so far, Elliott said, point against the claims of almost all of the major claimants.
"Bacon, Oxford and Marlowe come out in Timbuktu on the Valenza test. We have tested maybe 18 or 20 of the major claimants and only two of them come anywhere close, Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh.
"Queen Elizabeth flunks five or six of the secondary tests, so she's out, no matter how attractive a claimant she might have been, but Raleigh only fails two tests, so there's more work to be done on him," Elliott said.
"There's also a non claimant, Fulke Greville, who came out very close to Shakespeare on the Valenza test, so we've got to run him through some of the other tests," he added.
The computer also poured cold water on three recent claimed discoveries of Shakespearean poems - "Shall I Die," discovered in 1985 by Gary Taylor, editor of the Oxford Shakepeare Series; "As This Is Endless," discovered by Shakespearean scholar David Levy in 1988, and "Elegy, by W.S.," promoted last year as one of Shakespeare's works by Donald Foster of Vassar College.
"So all of the three recent finds look a little bit less like finds, quite a bit less like finds, by the methods we are using," Elliott said.
The most exciting find, he said, came when the computer was fed "The Passionate Pilgrims," a collection of 20 poems that first appeared in 1599. Although the collection bears the signature "W. Shakespeare," only five of the poems are attributed to him in the book, and four are attributed to other poets.
The other 11 are unascribed, and most experts are doubtful they were written by the Bard. The first three unascribed poems fed into the computer "came out in Timbuktu," confirming the judgment of the experts, Elliott said.
"Then we ran the other eight . . . and they were beautifully Shakespearean, more Shakespearean by the Valenza test than 85 percent of the Shakespeare that we have. It's a potential Shakespeare find if it's confirmed by the other tests," he added.
Elliott said he was not claiming the results were conclusive, but hoped the work at Claremont McKenna would inspire interest by scholars in the field.
"Apart from Rob Valenza, we are a bunch of amateurs who are having fun," he said unabashedly, explaining that he was a professor of American constitutional law and the six students in the program were economics or math majors learning how to use computers in an interesting way.
"It's amazing how amateurs, being unconstrained by the expectations of professionals, can poke around and turn up some very, very interesting stuff," he said.
Elliott is also an avid amateur Shakespearean scholar who for the past three years has taken sabbatical leaves in order to run a Shakespeare Clinic at the college.
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An obscure personal life
William Shakespeare, hailed as one of the greatest writers in history, was born in 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon, England, and died there in 1616. During much of his adult life, however, he lived and worked in London.
Little is actually known about his personal life, except from official documents. He married Anne Hathaway. Their children included Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith.
Shakespeare earned a degree of early fame as a poet, for "Venus and Adonis," "The Rape of Lucrece" and his many sonnets. But his enduring fame is chiefly due to his work in the Elizabethan theater. For the stage he wrote such great plays as "The Taming of the Shrew," "Richard II," "Romeo and Juliet," "Julius Caesar," "Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Tempest."