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Did William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd Write Edward III?

Paper · 2017 · David Kernot, Terry Bossomaier and Roger Bradbury

Summary

The anonymous Elizabethan play Edward III (printed 1596) has been partly credited to Shakespeare. Brian Vickers, working from trigram matches, argued that Thomas Kyd wrote most of it. The authors test this claim with RPAS, a stylometric signature built on neurolinguistic ideas. It has four parts: lexical Richness, gendered Personal Pronouns, Referential Activity Power (function-word based), and Sensory vocabulary split into five senses (VAHOG). Together these give nine dimensions per text.

Each of the play's 19 scenes becomes such a vector. The scenes are compared against three references: Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and Marlowe's Hero and Leander. The comparisons use visual clustering, cosine and minmax similarity, and an imposters-style check. Seriation, with a noise test, then measures how firmly the clusters hold together.

All methods agree on a "Shakespeare 5" block of scenes (3.2, 3.4, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8). Up to 14 scenes go to Kyd, including several traditionally seen as Shakespeare's. The study matters because it shows a compact, interpretable style vector cross-checked by independent methods.

Key points

  • Data:
    • Edward III and The Spanish Tragedy come from Project Gutenberg. The 1592 second quarto of The Spanish Tragedy was chosen to avoid passages Shakespeare may have added later.
    • Scenes average 1035 words, ranging from 88 to 3720.
    • Pronoun counts were normalised against an 897,000-word Shakespeare+Marlowe corpus.
  • Preprocessing: Stage directions and punctuation were removed, and the text was tagged with the Stanford POS tagger.
  • Similarity of the two references: Venus and Adonis and The Spanish Tragedy score low on similarity to each other (cosine 21.96%, minmax 18.29%). This makes them usable as contrasting poles.
  • Seriation: The R seriation package was run with six heuristics (TSP, Chen, ARSA, HC, GW, OLO). OLO gave the shortest Hamiltonian path, and the Shakespeare block stayed together after jitter noise was added.
  • Attribution result:
    • The four scenes usually given to Shakespeare (1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 4.4) land with Kyd.
    • Scenes 4.1 and 4.2 are flagged as possible collaborations.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Three independent analyses (2-D feature plots, VSM similarity, imposters) are run, and only assignments they agree on are trusted, which reduces the bias of any single method.
  • I2. A deliberately unrelated third author (Marlowe) serves as an orienting pole: in a two-author world, whatever lies far from the outsider must belong to the other author.
  • I3. Several ordering heuristics are tried and the one with the shortest path is kept; random jitter is then added to see which groupings survive.
  • I4. The authors pick an earlier edition of the reference play so that suspected contamination by the other candidate author cannot leak into the baseline.
  • I5. Sensory vocabulary is split into five modalities (visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory, gustatory) using published modality norms, giving an interpretable, explainable feature.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): This mirrors silver data agreed by several witness parsers; disagreement zones (like scenes 10/11/18) could be routed to an LLM teacher tier.
  • I2 (learn): Evaluation could include an "imposter" control corpus, checking that a model's similarity judgments move in the expected direction against a known-distant reference.
  • I3 (learn): Silver labels or self-induced repair rules could be stress-tested by perturbing inputs and keeping only conclusions that stay stable under noise.
  • I4 (learn): Curate treebanks and test sets for leakage, e.g. keep fable/tale QA test texts out of any data the parser or teachers saw.
  • I5 (world): Modality tags on WordNet-linked lemmas could enrich entity states in the world of a text (what is seen, heard, touched) without resorting to bag-of-words.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Australian National UniversityCanberra · Australia10 works · 6,215 citations

Also on the byline: Charles Sturt University · Defence Science and Technology Group.

📚 Shelves 5 Computer Science · 9,086 works Artificial Intelligence · 8,889 works Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Literature and Literary Theory · 340 works

Cite

Cite as David Kernot, Terry Bossomaier and Roger Bradbury. 2017. Did William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd Write Edward III?. arXiv:1801.04017 · International Journal on Natural Language Computing (IJNLC) Vol.6, No.6, December 2017.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5121/ijnlc.2017.6601 · arXiv 1801.04017

@misc{kernot2017did,
  title = {{Did William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd Write Edward III?}},
  author = {David Kernot, Terry Bossomaier and Roger Bradbury},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5121/ijnlc.2017.6601},
  eprint = {1801.04017},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5121/ijnlc.2017.6601}
}

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