Abstract

In my previous article entitled Hierarchical and Non- Hierarchical Linear and Non-Linear Clustering Methods to Shakespeare Authorship Question I used Mean Proximity as a linear hierarchical clustering method and Principal Components Analysis as a non-hierarchical linear clustering method Self-Organizing Map U-matrix and Voronoi Map as non-linear clustering methods to examine various works and plays assumed to have been written by Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon Christopher Marlowe John Fletcher and Thomas Kyd to determine which of them wrote some of Shakespeare s disputed plays based on similarities in the use of function words word-bi grams and character-tri grams The article showed that Shakespeare is not the author of all the disputed plays traditionally attributed to him according to the validated cluster analytic results and the stylistic criteria used The article also indicated that the author did not consider it fair to include Edward de Vere the strongest candidate in the Shakespeare authorship debate and compare his poemsto Shakespeare s disputed plays because poetry tends to have a particular style and a different structure than plays and additional test was promised The present article provides that test In this article I examined the 154 sonnets traditionally attributed to Shakespeare and 38 surviving poems attributed to Edward de Vere The purpose is to give a hypothesis whether de Vere has an identifiable self-similarity and a measure of how far from similar to Shakespeare based on the use of function words word bi-grams character bi-grams and character tri-grams applying four different clustering methods four hierarchical linear methods using Euclidean distance Single Average Complete and Ward non-hierarchical linear multidimensional Scaling MDS and Kernel K-means clustering and Voronoi mapas non-linear methods The cophenetic correlation coefficient is used to select the best result obtained from a set of