words are the heartbeat of language ... or something like that

[truepenny]

matociquala pointed me to this story about a program, originally designed to predict heart-attacks, which is apparently doing very well at determining authorship of various early modern English plays.

There's something so sfnal about this that it just fills me with giddy delight.

(But please ignore the crack about "most Shakespeare scholars" down near the end of the article. Shakespeare scholars have been using computer programs to argue about authorship for decades.)

Comments

[pameladean]

Oh, that is so cool! Thank you both.

I cannot but note that any time anybody with any kind of sane methodical approach, whether it is Caroline Spurgeon and her image clusters or more or less sophisticated computer programs, has looked at the works of Shakespeare and of Marlowe, they always come to the conclusion that they are two different writers. And yet the delusion that they are the same persists, as do other even dopier delusions. I once read a hilarious article about how the need to believe that Shakespeare was someone else was actually a form of the Freudian Family Romance Fantasy, and I am more and more inclined to believe it, impeded only by my disinclination to believe Freud about anything at all whatsoever.

Pamela

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Freud isn't always wrong--that's what makes him so exasperating. I think it helps to read his works as a record of his psycho-analysis of himself, only the one thing he never diagnosed was his extreme narcissistic solipsism. You can tell that women weren't real people to him, and I wonder (not having done so myself) if careful reading of his work with men would reveal the same thing, only less obvious because, as they were all products of the same gender-role training and the same era, what was happening in Freud's head matched up better with what was happening in most men's heads.

The closer he gets to the genitals, the less reliable he becomes. "The Uncanny" is actually brilliant and quite helpful--except when it turns out that everything is about castration. Only in your head, Frood-dude.

But even Freud isn't as cracked as the Baconians, Oxfordians, and Marlovians. matociquala also pointed out a page (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/4081/Shakespeare.html) that has a brilliant, catty, and fed-up refutation of the Oxfordian claim, with some digs at the Baconians and the Marlovians thrown in for good measure. It's very fun. I can understand wanting Marlowe to be Shakespeare, because it would mean he didn't die in a tavern-brawl in Deptford, but, guys, he just isn't. Or if he is, he had some serious disassociative personality issues. Because those are two completely different poets, and it shows in everything they wrote.

I do not understand the Baconians and Oxfordians, nor am I sure I would want to.