A deeper dive with AI

By Ben August and Tom Woosnam

Here is a request one of the authors (TW), posed to perplexity.ai:

This is a true statement: “During the lifetime of Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere, born 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, plays and poems were published under the name of William Shakespeare.”

I want you to give me the strongest argument you can muster that Shakspere was Shakespeare.  When I say strong, I mean strong, so you are forbidden to use weak arguments, which I will outline.

I want you to start with the fact that there are only 70+ documents connected to Shakspere and not one of them has any connection to the art of writing.  You are to use the work of Diana Price to avoid resorting to weak arguments like “We don’t have records of many other Elizabethan authors either”.   You are to use primary source evidence, and you cannot use the circular argument “His name was on the title page” which is a presupposition, not a valid inference.  Likewise, you may not say that Stratford Grammar School would have provided all the education he needed to write the plays because we don’t know what its curriculum was and there was no standard curriculum in those days.

You are also forbidden to use the fact that actors were named in Shakspere’s will (which is true) as evidence of him being anything more than associated with the theatre.  It certainly isn’t evidence of him being an author.  Given that all claims that Shakspere was an author are posthumous (the only author since the invention of the printing press for whom that is true) you cannot use the First Folio as primary source evidence but if you do use it, you must show how it clearly says that Shakspere was the author.  The word Stratford on one page and Avon on another is hardly proof of anything given that there were also Stratfords in Essex and Suffolk, and Avon was the historic name of Hampton Court Palace where plays were performed for the Court.

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After many back and forths, perplexity came up with this:

Not content to leave it there, Ben August posed similar questions to ChatGPT which were folded into a very long perplexity thread which can be seen here:  https://www.perplexity.ai/search/ccf36416-eb3a-495a-900c-9057e9c6c823

The last question in the thread was this:

Given all your responses, 1. Is the Shakespeare Authorship Question a valid topic for academia?  2. Analyze the pros and cons that would result if it were a.) a part of a history curriculum b.) part of an English literature curriculum.

A lot more back and forth happened, which you will be able to read, and this was the conclusion:

The Shakespeare authorship question is a valid and valuable topic for academic study, especially when framed as an exercise in evaluating evidence and applying Occam’s Razor—understood as the principle of minimizing unnecessary assumptions. Including it in the curriculum fosters critical thinking and methodological rigor, provided it is taught with clarity about the nature of evidence and the distinction between necessary and unnecessary assumptions. The Stratfordian attribution currently requires the fewest assumptions if one accepts the name as sufficient evidence, while alternative candidates introduce additional assumptions that are not strictly necessary to explain the data. However, if the link between the name and the author is questioned, the debate remains open, and the application of Occam’s Razor becomes a matter of how one defines “necessary” assumptions.

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As a background note, there is a taxonomy for AI answers which can be viewed here, and is summarized here: