William Shakespeare is hailed as The Reign of King Edward III's co-author

THE 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism.

THE 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism.

Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare's early works proves conclusively the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day.

The professor used software called Pl@giarism, developed by the University of Maastricht to detect cheating students, to compare language used in Edward III - published anonymously in 1596, when Shakespeare was 32 - with other plays of the period.

He discovered that playwrights often use the same patterns of speech, meaning that they have a linguistic fingerprint. The program identifies phrases of three words or more in an author's known work and searches for them in unattributed plays.

When Edward III was tested against Shakespeare's works published before 1596 there were 200 matches.

Sir Brian said: "There might be 10 to 20 common phrases between two plays by different authors. The computer is picking out three-word sequences that could just be chunks of grammar. But when you get metaphors or unusual parts of speech, it is different."

The Shakespeare matches came from four scenes, about 40 per cent of the play. The remaining scenes had about 200 matches with works by Kyd, best known for The Spanish Tragedy, a play known to have influenced Shakespeare.

The suggestion that Shakespeare had a hand in Edward III has been debated for about 150 years but has found favour only recently. "When you have 200 (matches) you can be pretty sure," Sir Brian said. "Everyone can see that certain scenes are very Shakespearean, but no one could see why there were verses that are definitely not his. There is a real difference in quality between the two authors."

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust chairman Stanley Wells said: "I am sceptical, frankly, that we have yet reached a stage where these computer-assisted investigations can prove authorship."

The Times