The older that I get, the more that I am convinced that the purest of all the Sciences is Mathematics; that the universe itself is underpinned by certain immutable rules; and that even the existence of matter and space and time and here and now itself, is actually just a series of vibrations which are also governed by those same laws of Mathematics on some deep deep deep and unobservable level.
However when it comes to things which are observable and where data exists (data is beautiful), things can be calculated and explanations given based upon that observable data. As someone who works in a job where simple arithmetic is king, and as someone who doesn't actually live in the real world, I can tell you that data is enough to explain all kinds of lovely things. The maths simply doesn't lie. What does lie, are the people who generate the numbers, and they do so with the stories which they tell.
While watching a video from Rob Words on Youtube¹, which was trying to work out how many words that William Shakespeare actually gave to the English language, immediately my mind raced to find the explanation of the unaddressed question of if he actually wrote all of those plays and sonnets. This is quite apart from the fact that the biggest reason why his corpus of work has survived where other people's has not, is due the to the fact that Shakespeare operated on the south side of the River Thames and the Great Fire Of London, which was the hottest event of 1666 and 50 years after The Bard died, mostly burnt out quarters of the old city on the north side of the river. Shakespeare's stuff survived because it didn't burn in a fire.
Nevertheless, the question of if he actually wrote all of those plays and sonnets is partly one of asking if it is at all possible; the answer to that can be found in the data.
"Alexander joins forces with James Madison and John Jay to write a series of essays Defending the new United States Constitution, entitled The Federalist Papers.
The plan was to write a total of twenty-five essays with the work divided evenly among the three men.
In the end, they wrote eighty-five essays in the span of six months.
John Jay got sick after writing five.
James Madison wrote twenty-nine.
Hamilton wrote the other FIFTY-ONE!
"How do you write like you're running out time?
Write day and night like you're running out time?"
- Non-Stop, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda (2016)².
How many layers would we like to cut through in this meta-onion? LOTS. The actual number of essays that Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers was unknown until textual analysis could be completed with computers in the 1960s. Again, the data already existed; there just needed to be the means to calculate it.
The PDF of The Federalist Papers which I am working with, contains all 85 essays plus a foreword plus discussions on how they relate to the US Constitution. The PDF contains more words than are contained within the 85 essays; so is an over-estimation. This is excellent for our purposes.
There are 189,274 words in the document.
189,274 / 85 = 2227 rounded up to the nearest number.
Using me as the guinea pig, and a comparable example of an essay writer, doing a countback of all the words in this blog, lands in Horse 3286 and the word "is". If Hamilton wrote 2227 words per essay, and I wrote 1503 words per essay, then we can assume that Mr Miranda's question posed "How do you write like you're running out time?" is answered "pretty easily". If I can put out an equivalent number of words to the entire Federalist Papers, working alone and in my spare time, every year for more than 20 years, then Hamilton could have easily done this in a semi-professional capacity.
Turning our attention to The Bard of Avon, we can do a similar word count to find out what he wrote. Again, the PDF of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare which I am working with, contains too many words.
There are 884,647 words in the document.
When we consider that the entire corpus of Shakespeare was written between 1589 and 1613, that gives us a 24 year period.
884,647 / 24 = 36,860 words per year.
Now, I already know that at my slower rate of writing, which has consistently been 154 essays per year and at 1503 words per essay, that gives us 231,462 words per year. When you consider that I do not do this in a professional capacity and that Shakespeare's job literally depended upon him writing plays to be produced and tickets sold, then my output at a rate which is 6 times as fast, makes Shakespeare's entire body of work not only possible but very easily so.
I have written more than five times the number of words that Shakespeare did, in a non-professional capacity and in a timeframe which is four years shorter. Could Shakespeare have written all of those plays and sonnets, at a rate of less than 20% as fast as rank amateur? Very yes.
Also, when you consider that something like National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) encourages people to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November, at the rate of 1667 words per day, then someone beavering away could have written the entire works of Shakespeare in a year and a half. This is not just in the realm of possibility, but probably an actuality for professional writers and novelists. Think about "War And Peace" by Leo Tolstoy, "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo, and "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, and you find large works of more than half a million words; which are all more than 50% of Shakespeare's entire output in 24 years.'
Shakespeare absolutely could have written all
¹Rob Words - Shakespeare: https://youtu.be/z_UtRe9DgvE?si=Va1TZNkhfUvwhbw2
²Non-Stop - Hamilton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPgE7PNzXag