Pretenders Sound Wrong Chords : Shakespeare: We’re pretty certain who the Bard wasn’t, though not who he was.

William Shakspere of Stratford (who never spelled his name Shakespeare) and William Shakespeare, the poet and playwright--could they possibly have been the same person? Shakespeare was versant with Latin, Greek and French, with a vocabulary twice the size of Milton’s. The recorded Shakspere seems provincial and barely literate. He left no letters, no manuscripts, no records of literary transactions, only records of births, deaths, marriages, deals for grain, claret and malt, and a will leaving his second-best bed to his wife. No one in his lifetime seems to have referred to him as the author.

It’s an issue often scorned by literature professors, but intensely debated among intelligent amateurs. Thousands of books and articles have been written on Shakspere’s unfitness to play the part of Shakespeare, and on others deemed better-suited for the role: Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, members of the (Sir Philip) Sidney Circle, the Earl of Oxford and others. “The Reader’s Encyclopedia of Shakespeare” lists 58 claimants to full or partial authorship of Shakespeare’s works.

Of these 58 candidates, 27 left enough writing--specifically poems--to compare with Shakespeare. For three years, undergraduates at the Claremont Colleges have been conducting a Shakespeare Clinic, using computers to determine whether any of the 27 contenders, who include the most-mentioned names, actually match Shakespeare in stylistic peculiarities. The conclusion: They don’t.

Of dozens of tests tried, the most precise were a battery of five conventional tests and a powerful new one, modal analysis. Both test systems seem to disqualify every poet tested.

Modal analysis uses a pattern-recognition technique borrowed from radar signal-processing. It looks for structural peculiarities in the way an author uses, or avoids using, certain words together. It differs from conventional language analysis in much the same that studying musical chords differs from adding up the notes. It found that Shakespeare consistently used some favorite “chords” heavily and others lightly. The other authors tested had their own favorite chords, different from Shakespeare’s. For some, such as John Milton and Edmund Spenser, these peculiarities seem to have persisted from their earliest to their latest works. Nobody matched Shakespeare.

The five conventional tests were: hyphenated compound words and relative clauses per thousand; percentage of open- and feminine-ended lines; and grade level of writing, as measured by word- and sentence-length. In “the evil that men do,” that men do is a relative clause. An open line is a line not ended with punctuation. A feminine ending ends a line on an unstressed syllable, with a word such as “gotten.”

Shakespeare used compound words and open and feminine endings more frequently than most of his contemporaries, and relative clauses less frequently.

Every author tested failed at least one of the conventional tests (which had a 95% confidence level, meaning a discrepancy from Shakespeare’s mean would arise by chance only one time in 20). Some failed four or five. These are not perfect tests like fingerprints. Much punctuation was supplied by editors, not necessarily authors, and some peculiarities like percentage of open and feminine endings increased sharply over Shakespeare’s life. And even a perfect match cannot prove common authorship. But broad mismatch is strong evidence against common authorship. If you and Cinderella both have a size 5 slipper, it does not prove you are Cinderella--but if you are a size 8, your claim is in trouble.

Our conclusion: Shakespeare’s poems fit comfortably and consistently within a profile, and others’ poems do not. If Shakespeare’s works were written by a committee, it was an uncommonly consistent committee. If they were written by any of the individuals we tested, it was an uncommonly inconsistent individual.

We have not diminished the discrepancies between what we know of Shakspere and what we know of Shakespeare. But we now know that Shakspeare’s chief rivals have their own grave discrepancies. If only by elimination, that should be a present for William Shakspere on his 427th birthday this month.

Does all this make any difference? Literature Department people say no, but authenticity matters. If it’s important to know whether “Polish Rider” is Rembrandt’s or someone else’s work, or “Shall I Die?” is Shakespeare’s or someone else’s, it’s also important to know whether the Sonnets are Shakspeare’s or someone else’s.