Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays?

actor from the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon should metamorphose into so extraordinary a dramatist? For some, the answer is obvious: Shakespeare was a genius whose gift is no more suspicious than that of the physicist Albert Einstein, the German salesman's son who devised the theory of relativity. But others have insisted that a mere school leaver simply could not have penned such sophisticated works. They believe that Shakespeare was a pseudonym for someone with far more impressive qualifications who wrote the plays that still play to packed theatres today. But after long and largely fruitless debate, researchers are now turning to scientific methods to resolve the controversies surrounding Shakespeare. Ways of identifying the literary fingerprint of writers are currently being developed using computers. This analysis of features of literary style is known as 'stylometry' and with it researchers can recognise the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries with impressive reliability. B The idea of using these basic scientific techniques to probe questions of authorship dates back to 1851, when the Victorian mathematician Augustus de Morgan suggested that different authors might be identified through the frequency with…