Three Kinds of Analysis

About This Page

A recurring objection to this site's method runs as follows: the Shakespeare Authorship Question is a literary and historical matter, and applying criteria drawn from scientific reasoning to it is a category error. On this view the criteria should come from the discipline that owns the question, which is literary criticism.

Answering it means settling what kind of question the SAQ is, and that decides which methods can answer it.

What separates the three kinds

Scientific analysis, in its proper sense, requires controlled conditions. A hypothesis is formulated, an experiment is designed that could falsify it, the experiment is repeated by independent parties, and results are expressed with quantified uncertainty. The strength of scientific inference comes from two features that are very hard to fake: replication (the same result obtained by different people under the same conditions) and randomisation (variation that cannot be attributed to the researcher's choices). Science is the right tool when you can set up controlled conditions and when the phenomenon you are investigating is repeatable.

Historical analysis works differently. The historian faces a world of singular events, things that happened once, in specific places, at specific times, and left traces in documents that may be incomplete, damaged, forged, or lost. No historian can replicate the Battle of Agincourt. What they can do is gather all available evidence, test each piece for authenticity and provenance, check whether independent sources corroborate each other without having been in contact, and see whether a coherent account emerges that resists alternative explanations. The strength of historical inference comes from convergence (multiple independent threads pointing to the same conclusion) and from the elimination of competing hypotheses.

Literary analysis is different again. Its primary object is the text itself. Close reading identifies patterns of language, imagery, and structure. Source studies trace what the author read and how they transformed it. Stylistic analysis characterises an author's distinctive habits. Literary analysis is the right tool for questions of meaning and form: what a text does and how it does it. It is a less reliable tool for questions of historical identity, because the same text can often be interpreted as consistent with more than one biographical account.

Which tool fits which question

"Who wrote the works of Shakespeare?" is a historical question. It asks about a specific person, a real individual who was alive during a specific period, whose life left traces in parish records, legal documents, letters, and account books. That person either visited Italy or did not; either had access to a particular library or did not; either corresponded with specific courtiers or did not. These are factual questions about a historical individual, and the evidence that can settle them is the evidence that historians use: primary sources, biographical records, documentary corroboration.

Literary analysis did much to identify what we should be looking for. Scholars working on textual questions noticed the precision of the Italian topography, the depth of the legal vocabulary, the accuracy of the falconry terminology, and the echoes of Florio’s translation of Montaigne. Some of these observations came before anyone doubted the attribution: Edward Capell traced Gonzalo’s commonwealth speech in The Tempest to Florio’s Montaigne in 1781. These literary observations define the profile of the author. Who fits that profile is a separate question, and historical evidence answers it.

Scientific tools have applications at the edges of the problem. Forensic document examination is the right method for evaluating the Hand D attribution in Sir Thomas More. Computational stylometry can, in principle, test whether the writing habits of a known author match those of the canon, though the reliability of stylometric methods under Early Modern drama conditions is contested, and this site excludes them on those grounds. If a primary source document ever surfaced connecting a specific individual to the authorship directly, dating and provenance analysis would be the relevant scientific tools for evaluating it.

What this site actually does

The framework used here is historical in method. The evidence is drawn from primary sources: biographical records, correspondence, dedications, archival documents. The standard for a positive score is documentation, something that survives in a form that can be examined, sourced, and challenged.

From scientific thinking the site borrows the logic of pre-registration. Criteria are fixed before any candidate is examined. This guards against a familiar failure in advocacy-driven inquiry: selecting evidence that fits a preferred conclusion and calling that a method. A court does the same when it agrees on the rules of evidence before any testimony is heard, and the practice is equally at home in historical method.

The convergence framework borrows a second idea from scientific epistemology: that independent threads of evidence pointing to the same conclusion are stronger than any single thread, in proportion to their methodological diversity. The idea has a name in the philosophy of science, William Whewell’s “consilience of inductions” (Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840), and historians reason the same way when they check whether independent sources corroborate one another. Treating convergence as proof would be unusual in science, and the site does not do so: a high convergence score means a candidate fits the available evidence better than others, and stops short of establishing authorship.

The objection and what it usually means

When someone argues that scientific analysis is inappropriate for the SAQ, they are sometimes making a methodological point about the limits of quantification applied to humanistic questions. The site meets that concern in three ways: the scores are marked approximate, scoring judgements are explained in tooltips so they can be challenged, and the framework explicitly disclaims the kind of precision that would only be available if the evidence were quantitative.

At other times the objection holds that literary-critical consensus should settle the question. The implied standard is: "Shakespeare scholars say Shakspere wrote the plays, and that is what literary scholarship has established." The difficulty is that this states a conclusion and offers no method for reaching it. Literary criticism inherited the Stratford attribution from a tradition that long predates any systematic scrutiny of the biographical record. When that scrutiny was eventually applied (notably by Diana Price) it found that the evidentiary basis for the attribution was weaker than for any other writer in her survey of twenty-four Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. Consensus can crystallise around an assumption as easily as around a finding, so it cannot stand in for evidence.

This objection can come from any direction, including from advocates whose candidate scores well under the very framework they are questioning. Objecting to systematic analysis while keeping its favourable conclusions amounts to wanting the result without the method.

The appropriate response to "which method works here?" is to ask what kind of question you are trying to answer. If the question is what the works mean, literary analysis is the right tool. If the question is who wrote them, historical analysis is required. If specific evidence warrants it, scientific tools (forensic examination, computational analysis) can be brought in for particular sub-questions where they are reliable. This site applies historical method to a historical question, uses literary scholarship to characterise what that question requires of any answer, and borrows the epistemological habits of scientific inquiry (pre-registration, convergence, approximate scoring) to make the analysis as transparent and challengeable as possible.

A note on stylometrics

Stylometrics needs separate treatment: it is the one scientific tool that has been seriously applied to the SAQ, and this site excludes it. The exclusion, which implies no objection to quantitative methods in principle, rests on a specific objection to the reliability of the Zeta-test methodology under the conditions of Early Modern drama, where collaboration between authors was routine, where manuscript transmission introduced scribal variation, and where genre constraints produce systematic linguistic differences that stylometric models struggle to separate from authorial signal. A method is only as good as its signal-to-noise ratio under the actual conditions of the data. Excluding stylometrics on those grounds applies a scientific standard. The full case is made on the Stylometric Evidence page.