(Michael Natale’s article appeared in Popular Mechanics, AOL, 4/4.)
This story is a collaboration with Biography.com
William Shakespeare is undeniably one of the most famous writers in human history. The 39 shows attributed to the “Bard of Avon” have been performed, adapted, and studied innumerable times in the centuries since they debuted, and his 154 sonnets are some of the most quoted poems in the world.
The very name Shakespeare has become synonymous with the dramatic arts. But for a segment of the literary community some might call “conspiracy theorists,” it shouldn’t be.
Not because they believe the plays themselves, like Hamlet and Julius Caesar, are incorrectly placed within the literary canon. Rather, they think they’re simply incorrectly labeled; specifically, on the author page.
This contingency, known as the Anti-Stratfordians (in reference to Shakespeare’s home of Stratford-upon-Avon), argue that The Bard’s lack of education and modest upbringing don’t square with the vast vocabulary on display in Shakespeare’s celebrated plays. “They note that both of Shakespeare’s parents were likely illiterate,” Biography.com states in further explaining the stance of the Anti-Stratfordians, “and it seems as if his surviving children were as well, leading to skepticism that a noted man of letters would neglect the education of his own children.”
The Anti-Stratfordians also claim that “none of the letters and business documents that survive give any hint of Shakespeare as an author,” and raise questions like “Why was there no public mourning for him when he died?”
But these claims can all be refuted to one degree or another by those who believe in Shakespeare’s authorship. Shakespeare’s modest background? It’s ultimately not dissimilar to that of Christopher Marlowe, a peer of Shakespeare’s whose authorship of celebrated plays like Doctor Faustus has never been in doubt. In response to the claim of a lack of contemporary records, Biography.com notes that “Tudor officials responsible for ascertaining authorship of plays attributed several works to Shakespeare.” And the claim of a lack of mourning is undercut by no less than Jacobean author Ben Jonson, whose esteemed poem “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, William Shakespeare” reads:
“To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much”
These debates of authorship tend to treat inference as evidence, and as such, can never really be conclusive. But a new study published by Oxford University Press offers new insight into the authorship debate. And it does so by taking the human element out entirely.
The study from Zeev Volkovich and Renata Avros, titled “Comprehension of the Shakespeare authorship question through deep impostors approach,” decided to see if a deep neural network could do what centuries of scholars could not: conclusively identify works attributed to, but not written by, William Shakespeare.
The duo refer to their methodology for the analysis as “Deep Imposter”:
“The approach uses a set of known impostor texts to analyze the origin of a target text collection. Both the target texts and impostors are divided into an equal number of word segments. A deep neural network, either a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) or a pre-trained BERT transformer, is then trained and fine-tuned to differentiate between impostor segments.”
After a process which converted these text segments into numerical signals, the tested texts were clustered into two groups, which can be simplified into a score of 1 or 2. Those texts in cluster 1 would be those determined to be “imposter texts” not composed by the author in question.
When Shakespeare’s works were run through the aforementioned CNN neural network, a staggering fifteen titles were placed into cluster 1. Those included not just the usual suspects of “Shakespeare Apocrypha” (works with no clear author sometimes attributed to Shakespeare) like A Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Faversham, but also some of the most beloved staples of the Shakespeare canon like The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
