rick (12/16/82)
I just got thru reading a newspaper article about a guy in Edinburgh that claims to have discovered that a play from Shakespeare's time previously thought to have been written by almost anybody *but* Shakespeare, was in fact written by Shakespeare. He did this by analyzing the writing style of the play using a computer algorithm that is supposed to derive a "fingerprint" of the author and showing that the subject play had Shakespeare's "fingerprint"s all over it. The paper made a big deal of the fact that this (if true) would be the first play added to the Bard's portfolio in modern times. This sort of stuff is not new. So why am I wasting you good people's time with it. Well, I have a question: Has anybody ever done one of these analyses on the speeches of the individual speakers in a play? Does the "fingerprint" of the playwrite show thru, regardless of which character he is writing for, or do the "personalities" of the individual characters dominate so that each has its own fingerprint. A play would be an excellent test vehicle, because it is easy (read possible for a computer) to distinguish the speeches of each individual speaker in a play, but it would be harder (read impossible for a computer) to do that for a novel. If you know of any such sytudies, please reply by mail to me and I will summarize for the net. Rick Thomas houx*!u1100s!rick pyuxbb!u1100s!rick