Possibly not since John Payne Collier's forgeries in the nineteenth century has an event done as much harm to Shakespeare scholarship as the publication of the New Oxford Shakespeare (NOS) edition in 2016-17. The edition proclaimed itself as based on "a huge body of...Cutting-edge research into attribution studies". By the conclusions it drew from that research it made changes to the Shakespeare canon on a scale not seen since the Third Folio in 1664, which wrongly ascribed several plays such as A Yorkshire Tragedy to him. Most notably, the NOS edition assigned parts of Arden of Faversham to Shakespeare and, to much publicity in newspapers around the world in 2016, named Christopher Marlowe as a co-author of the Henry VI trilogy.

In my opinion, much of the so-called cutting-edge research is pseudo-science. It uses mathematical methods, some invented by the NOS scholars, some imported from other disciplines, but without the mathematical understanding that was needed to use them soundly. It was taken seriously by many because other Shakespeare scholars lacked the mathematical knowledge and the confidence to say that the emperor has no clothes. The harm consists not just in the unwarranted changes made to Shakespeare's canon and to those of his contemporaries. The unsound mathematical methods have gained credibility by association with the Oxford University Press brand, and this may lead to more harm from their use by other scholars.

The task of challenging this bad research has fallen disproportionately to a handful of scholars: Sir Brian Vickers, Darren Freebury-Jones, Rosalind Barber, and David Auerbach. I have joined them and have published the following papers to demonstrate the unsoundness of much of that research.