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are we really that sure?
Oct. 21st, 2009 03:12 pmHow Plagiarism Software Found a New Shakespeare Play - Yahoo! News:
Suppose the work was actually plagiarized? How is it that nobody seemed to think it possible that the play was sketched out by actors familiar with the works of the two fellows, and followed their patterns on the language, once they'd agreed on a plot?
Having acted in the plays, they'd certainly be familiar (to memory) with the works, and in fact the First Quarto publishing of the works were often hack-jobs assembled from the actors' memories as well as their role-only scripts (leading some to wonder if the differences between the first and second were due to faulty memory, or was the actual version put on stage based on director and author rewrites that never made it back to the "master" manuscript).
That the idea never occurred that plagiarism-detection software might have actually detected plagiarism itself really lessens the impact of all of this.
Plagiarism-detection software was created with lazy, sneaky college students in mind - not the likes of William Shakespeare. Yet the software may have settled a centuries-old mystery over the authorship of an unattributed play from the late 1500s called The Reign of Edward III. Literature scholars have long debated whether the play was written by Shakespeare - some bits are incredibly Bard-like, but others don't resemble his style at all. The verdict, according to one expert: the play is likely a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, another popular playwright of his time.I note that while it notes the similarities between parts of the work and Shakespeare, and similar notes with this Kyd fellow, it totally misses (in fact, doesn't even seem to imagine) one final option:
Suppose the work was actually plagiarized? How is it that nobody seemed to think it possible that the play was sketched out by actors familiar with the works of the two fellows, and followed their patterns on the language, once they'd agreed on a plot?
Having acted in the plays, they'd certainly be familiar (to memory) with the works, and in fact the First Quarto publishing of the works were often hack-jobs assembled from the actors' memories as well as their role-only scripts (leading some to wonder if the differences between the first and second were due to faulty memory, or was the actual version put on stage based on director and author rewrites that never made it back to the "master" manuscript).
That the idea never occurred that plagiarism-detection software might have actually detected plagiarism itself really lessens the impact of all of this.
