Ward E. Y. Elliott

And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants.

The Shakespeare Clinic has developed 51 computer tests of Shakespeare play authorship and 14 of poem authorship, and applied them to 37 claimed “true Shakespeares,” to 27 plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, and to several poems of unknown or disputed authorship. No claimant, and none of the apocryphal plays or poems, matched Shakespeare. Two plays and one poem from the Shakespeare Canon,Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, Part 3, and “A Lovers Complaint,” do not match the others.

A Touchstone for the Bard

We introduce an authorship identification test, called modal analysis, based on a new statistic derived from the Karhunen-Loeve transform. Application to the poems of the Shakespearean canon and to other contemporary poetry strongly supports the case for disqualification of most major claimants. Results also cast doubt that the recently discovered poems, Shall I Die and Elegy, were written by William Shakespeare, but do suggest that eight unascribed poems of The Passionate Pilgrim may have been his work.

So Many Hardballs, So Few Over the Plate

Fosterss critique of our work is overdrawn, has left our findings 99.9% intact.

Who Was Shakespeare

HUSL 6313 Shakespeare (3 semester hours) Study of the dramatic and/or poetic writings of William Shakespeare. (May be repeated for credit as topics vary to a maximum of 6 credit hours.) (3-0) T

Smoking guns and silver bullets : Could John Ford have written the Funeral Elegy?

American authorities, persuaded by Donald Fosters stylometric evidence, believe that Funeral Elegy by W.S. (FE) is at least possibly, and perhaps indisputably by Shakespeare. British authorities disagree sharply. Brian Vickers, Richard Kennedy, and Gilles Monsarrat argue that John Ford wrote the Elegy. We examine both ascriptions by applying to Fords poems the same kind of common-authorship, exclusionary-evidence tests that we previously applied to Shakespeares poems and play verse. We conclude that the odds are strongly against the Americans. If W.S. is either Ford or Shakespeare, Ford seems by far the more likely candidate. Counting firm rejections only, the Elegy fails sixteen of thirty-three Shakespeare tests and only one of twenty-nine Ford tests. If the distinguishing traits of both authors are Poisson-distributed - as some seem to be - the odds that the Elegys scores could have arisen by chance from one corpus or the other are about 3,000 times better for Ford than they are for Shakespeare.

JUDITH MERKLE RILEY

Judith Merkle Riley, longtime professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and bestselling novelist under her married name, Judith Merkle Riley, died at her home in Claremont, California, on September 12, 2010, of cancer. She was 68.

Why the EPA should stop ignoring population growth

The air in the Los Angeles Basin is still the worst in the US. The Coalition for Clean Air and Group Against Smog Pollution (GASP) successfully sued the Federal Environmental Protection Agency to force it to produce a Federal Implementation Plan (FIP) by California. In 1994 the EPA drew up a draft FIP that called for stringent limits on diesel trucks trains ships and airplanes. However the FIP like the state and local plans before it took population growth for granted and contained not a word about stopping it or even slowing it down. GASPs testimony warned that the omission could be ruinously costly to the people of the Los Angeles Basin. Population growth will add over 300 tons a day of smog-precursor reactive organic gases to the 2010 baseline in a basin whose safe carrying capacity is closer to 200 tons a day. Immigration is ultimately responsible for about three-fourths of the growth of Californias population between 1970 and 1990; it is responsible for 85% of the states projected growth. During most of this century the population of the Basin has grown at the phenomenal rate of around 2% a year. It is true that the EPA likewise has no direct jurisdiction to stop or stem the flow. Nevertheless it does not make much sense to ask people in the Basin to spend

Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots: C-Prompted Doubts about Ascribing A Funeral Elegy and A Lover's Complaint to Shakespeare

100 billion for smog controls over 20 years and drastically alter their life styles to mitigate the effects of growth without first asking whether perhaps

Two tough nuts to crack: did Shakespeare write the ‘Shakespeare’ portions of Sir Thomas More and Edward III? Part I

250 million a year for better enforcement could greatly reduce the growth. Illegal immigration figures so largely in smog problems and most of the public including most of the Latino public wants to stop it so at least discussing it as a factor in smog production is an appropriate first step.