Or so that’s the claim of Bri­an Vick­ers, a pro­fes­sor at the Insti­tute of Eng­lish Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don. Accord­ing to a short piece in The New York Times, a soft­ware pack­age called Pl@giarism, usu­al­ly used to detect cheat­ing stu­dents, demon­strates that “The Reign of King Edward III,” a play pub­lished anony­mous­ly in 1596, has ele­ments of Shake­speare’s lin­guis­tic fin­ger­print. In short, phras­es used in the play match phras­es found in ear­li­er Shake­speare plays at least 200 times. Inter­est­ing­ly, the soft­ware also iden­ti­fies phras­es match­ing the lin­guis­tic fin­ger­print of anoth­er play­wright, Thomas Kyd, sug­gest­ing that Shake­speare did­n’t write the Edward play (or oth­er plays?) alone. The Times of Lon­don has more on these new claims.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Shake­speare on the iPhone

Goethe and Shake­speare on Google

What Did Shake­speare Real­ly Look Like

This morn­ing, the Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture was award­ed to the Roman­ian author, Her­ta Muller. There’s a good chance that you’re not famil­iar with her work. So let me steer you to this pro­file in the Tele­graph. You can also read this excerpt­ed inter­view that goes back to 1999. If I come across any media fea­tur­ing Muller (so far, not much is com­ing up), I will post it as the day goes on.