Stylometrics

[Dominic Hughes]

JC: Where does the clinic get its list of claimants to test? What do
you need from a claimant in order to analyze him?

WE: We started with the "Reader’s Encyclopedia of Shakespeare” list of
58 supposed claimants and co-authors: Our clinic started by looking at
the poets on the list – those people we could get enough samples of
poetry to test. You need enough language for a reliable stylometric
test. At first, we didn’t know how much would be enough: At least 500
words seemed sufficient. Soon we realized it was much better to have
between 1,500 and 3,000 words. Best of all was to have several whole
plays.

More after the jump


JC: This is very different from previous ways of investigating
Shakespearean authorship, isn’t it? What methods were used before?

WE: The traditional methods involved studying manuscripts closely and
looking at documents and the history of the time. It also involves
using one’s intuition to see if it sounds like Shakespeare and
searching out parallels, images that are found elsewhere. There are
some brilliant people out there who can tell you all kinds of things
about watermarks or the compositors of the folios.

JC: Though your academic career has concentrated on the world of
politics, it’s clear you’ve had a lifelong interest in the bard.
Where did this come from?

WE: Partly from my father, William Y. Elliott. He was keenly
interested in the authorship question. He was an amazing guy—a Rhodes
scholar, counselor to six presidents, the grand old man of the Harvard
history department: I’d say he was probably one of the highest-ranking
doubters of his day.

JC: He was a doubter?

WE: Yes, he profoundly believed the real author of Shakespeare’s plays
was the Earl of Oxford. He didn’t mind letting you know about it.

JC: Does that mean you’re also an Oxfordian?

WE: Oh no, I’m a Stratfordian.

JC: Why are you a Stratfordian?

WE: It’s clear from the Claremont students’ work that Oxford’s poems
are in a different statistical galaxy from Shakespeare’s. The odds of
that much stylistic discrepancy arising by chance are much lower than
the odds of getting hit by lightning.

JC: And do you think the authorship question will ever be adequately
resolved for all parties?

WE: I’m not holding my breath. Both sides are too deeply entrenched.
But it was a huge step forward for James Shapiro to address the
controversy in "Contested Will." And the Oxfordians have at least
tried to rearrange the trenches a bit to shelter Oxford from his own
gross mismatches with Shakespeare. Maybe, they argue, all his own
poems were just crude learning experiences, written in his teens: The
ones he wrote later (which are credited to Shakespeare), after a
strange, unexplained silence of two or three decades, showed the
polish of a mature writer. That’s hard to believe. I don’t know any
author who could change his stylistic spots as suddenly and completely
as Oxford would have had to do to become Shakespeare on their
timetable, or whose production was as wildly erratic as Oxford’s would
have to have been under the Oxfordian scenario - and there is still
not a scrap of documentary evidence connecting Oxford or any other
claimant with the canon. But even a token defense is better than none
at all.

Full interview:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/05/shakespeares-style.html

Dom