Did William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd Write Edward III?
This addresses a historical literary problem for scholars by potentially reattributing authorship of a significant play, though it is incremental as it builds on existing authorship debates.
The study tackled the authorship attribution of the anonymous play 'The Reign of King Edward III' using a neurolinguistics approach, finding that up to 14 scenes can be allocated to Thomas Kyd and questioning scenes traditionally attributed to Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare is believed to be a significant author in the anonymous play, The Reign of King Edward III, published in 1596. However, recently, Thomas Kyd, has been suggested as the primary author. Using a neurolinguistics approach to authorship identification we use a four-feature technique, RPAS, to convert the 19 scenes in Edward III into a multi-dimensional vector. Three complementary analytical techniques are applied to cluster the data and reduce single technique bias before an alternate method, seriation, is used to measure the distances between clusters and test the strength of the connections. We find the multivariate techniques robust and are able to allocate up to 14 scenes to Thomas Kyd, and further question if scenes long believed to be Shakespeare's are not his.