The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays (Ongoing)

folk, educational · 3:06

Listen on 93

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Did the Bard of Avon truly pen those plays
Or was it Bacon, Marlowe in disguise
For centuries the scholars raised debates
But algorithms opened up our eyes
They count the words that authors use unseen
The "ands" and "ofs" in patterns crystal clear
What human minds could never hope to glean
Machines detected in each written sphere

[Chorus]
Stylometry reads between the lines
Function words reveal the author's mind
Principal components help us see
Shakespeare's true identity
Neural networks parse each phrase
Solving mysteries of the plays
The data speaks what critics couldn't find

[Verse 2]
They measured sentence length and syntax flow
Vocabulary richness, word frequency
Hundreds of variables in one big show
Reduced to dimensions we can clearly see
When plotted out, Will Shakespeare stands apart
From Bacon, Marlowe, and de Vere's style
Each author has a literary heart
That beats in patterns, mile after mile

[Chorus]
Stylometry reads between the lines
Function words reveal the author's mind
Principal components help us see
Shakespeare's true identity
Neural networks parse each phrase
Solving mysteries of the plays
The data speaks what critics couldn't find

[Bridge]
But wait, the algorithms found much more
Some plays showed signatures of two or three
Henry Sixth and Titus bore
Collaborative authorship we see
Middleton helped craft parts of Macbeth
Fletcher joined for Henry Number Eight
Machine learning shows us what's beneath
The surface of each literary fate

[Chorus]
Stylometry reads between the lines
Function words reveal the author's mind
Principal components help us see
Shakespeare's true identity
Neural networks parse each phrase
Solving mysteries of the plays
The data speaks what critics couldn't find

[Outro]
So Shakespeare wrote what Shakespeare wrote it's true
But sometimes friends would lend a helping hand
The mystery solved by algorithms new
Computer science helps us understand

← The I-65 Killer | The Voynich Manuscript (Partially Solved) →