A Critical Review of Word-links as a Method for Investigating Shakespearean Chronology and Authorship
M. W. A. Smith · Literary and Linguistic Computing · 1986
Eliot Slater has developed a statistical method to place Shakespearean works of uncertain date into the correct region of the chronological list of his compositions and to confirm, or otherwise, suspicions of Shakespearean authorship of some anonymous plays The theoretical basis of his approach is derived and reveals that meaningful statistical significance cannot be claimed for the results. Nevertheless, Slater's technique does appear to be capable of providing qualitative evidence for the broad period of Shakespeare's career in which an undated work was written. However, until the method has been tested on works by a variety of contemporaneous authors, its properties for attribution remain to be demonstrated