October 12, 2009
The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism.
Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes that a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare’s early works proves conclusively that the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day.
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The article in ‘The Times’ by Jack Malvern (Oct 12 2009) says that the computer program cited by Sir Brian Vickers shows that c40% of ‘The reign of King Edward 111′ was written by Shakespeare and that c60% was written by Thomas Kyd.
This sends me back to a publication by Eric Sams: ‘Shakespeare’s Edward 111′ (Yale, 1996). Anyone researching the Shakespeare authorship of this play proposition should examine Sams’s detailed arguments. Sams proposed that this play was Shakespeare’s own entirely and was not a collaboration. Kyd is not poresented as a co-author; he has only three minor citations in the text.
The line “lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” occurs in Act 11 Sc 1, and in Acts 11 and 111 there are many lines reminiscent of acknowledged Shakespearean text.“
Now that Sir Brian Vickers has given credence to the software program ‘Pl@giarism’ might one ask him to turn his attention to the handwritten poem contained in the Salusbury volume, in Christ Church, Oxford, and apply the program to this text? Prof David Crystal (see his website) has applied linguistic methods to this work and concluded that there is a good chance that it was authored by Shakespeare.