When I taught Freshman English, it was often comically obvious when a student plagiarized. Not 'cause I'm necessarily Mr. X-Ray Eyes or anything–I simply had people start everything in class by putting pen to paper, turn it in as a first draft and then revise. So when somebody turned in a second draft that read completely differently in its style, well, something was clearly rotten in Denmark. Hardly rocket science, though the students often seemed to think so.
These days, apparently, software helps profs with the endless and annoying (to put it kindly) problem of ethics-compromised students. But now that software has turned up what might be a Shakespeare collaboration with a playwright named Thomas Kyd. It also might well be that Thomas Kyd was a monster plagiarizer, since the software turns up phrases that are similar to other works by an author.
There is also the fond hope that such things as plagiarism programs can finally lay to rest if Shakespeare was Shakespeare, Edward de Vere was Shakespeare, or Will.i.am was Shakespeare, because that ongoing battle, for reasons I'm not entirely certain I understand, bugs me to no end. I believe someone or other wrote the plays we now know as the oeuvre attached to the name William Shakespeare. I'm content to find those plays brilliant and insightful, read them and enjoy them. Whether William Shakespeare or "William Shakespeare" wrote them doesn't particularly concern me–that doesn't affect my enjoyment one bit.
I think what bugs me is that, unless someone turns up film of Edward de Vere caught unawares sitting at a typrewriter and clicking out "William Shakespeare" at the bottom of the last page of Hamlet, the crowd engaged in this nearly impossible attribution tango won't be convinced. And if that film did turn up, some wag would say it wasn't real anyhow…
