Computer Reads Shakespeare, Dismisses Authorship Candidate

Put a bunch of partisans in the great debate about who really wrote the works of William Shakespeare in a room with a couple of know-it-all computer experts and you’re liable to have a disagreement on your hands.

So the heads of the Shakespeare Oxford Society--a group dedicated to the notion that the plays and poems of William Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford--decided a few weeks ago to cancel Ward Elliott’s and Robert Valenza’s invitations to their annual meeting.

The two, who lead a program at Claremont McKenna College to use computers to try to answer the Shakespearean “authorship question,” showed up anyway in Pasadena on Saturday. Armed with graphs and sheets of numbers, Elliott and Valenza took over a small conference room and trotted out their findings.

De Vere, an erudite 16th Century nobleman who dabbled in theater and poetry, probably wasn’t the real Bard, they concluded.

“In terms of the internal evidence, his candidacy looks a little weak,” said Elliott, himself a member of the society.

A small group of “Oxfordians,” less than a third of the 70 society members who came from as far as Louisiana and New York to attend the weekend conference, glowered at the two.

“Was nobody in your program from the field of literature?” snapped society President Elisabeth Sears, a retired English teacher from Massachusetts.

No, conceded Elliott, the 3-year-old Claremont program had been staffed largely by economics, political science and computer science majors.

Using student volunteers, millions of words of Elizabethan texts have been fed into computers to compare various authors’ sentence formats, punctuation, poetic devices and other stylistic characteristics. In the process, said Elliott, 24 of 58 claimants to the bardship title--including such leading candidates as Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson--have been largely knocked out of the box.

The Oxfordians were glacially unimpressed. “You know, computers can be valuable, but it depends what you feed into computers,” said Sears.

Oxfordians are a passionately committed group. They have lectured, turned out books and magazine articles and individually spread the word about the cause. “It’s not just a matter of reading the books and liking them,” said Gilbert Clark, a South Carolina English teacher. “There’s something about those of us in the brotherhood. When we become convinced, we become proselytes.”

The notion that someone other than Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet,” “Macbeth” and the rest has nagged scholars for 200 years. The author of all those plays and poems, critics say, must have had detailed knowledge of court affairs, falconry, heraldry, Italian landscapes, three or four foreign languages, ancient history and dozens of other subjects--a level of education that, in Elizabethan times, strongly suggested someone of noble birth.

The “man from Stratford,” as Oxfordians often refer disdainfully to William Shakespeare, was the son of an illiterate glover who grew up in a provincial backwater village.

There are intriguing connections between the life of de Vere--who was portrayed at the conference by actor Michael Williams, in doublet and ruffled collar--and the plays, Oxfordian researchers say.

Papers presented at the weekend conference purported to find, for example, a hidden message in Shakespeare’s early comedy “Love’s Labor’s Lost” from de Vere to a former romantic interest and incontrovertible proof that the author of such plays as “The Merchant of Venice” must have travelled in Italy (as de Vere had and the man from Stratford had not).

Did the Claremont computers destroy their faith?

For Elliott, the son of the late William Y. Elliott, a renowned Harvard government professor and an early Oxfordian, they have. “If I could use a time machine to search for Shakespeare, the first place I’d go would be Stratford,” he said. “A year ago, I wouldn’t have said that.”

But others dismissed the computer studies as aimless “word counting.” The Bard was too changeable to be pinned down stylistically, said Ruth Loyd Miller, a Louisiana lawyer and author who has become one of the principal Oxfordian researchers. “I think Shakespeare used words in context,” she said. “What text are you going to put in (the computer) that’s really Shakespeare?”

Natasha Miller, a screenwriter from Pasadena, said that the search would continue. “I think if we found out tomorrow that Edward de Vere was the true author,” said Miller, “it would take a lot of fun out of people’s lives.”