Regarding this question, Was Shakespeare Marlowe? What does stylometry say? , I asked it because I noticed from a review of old stylometries (done by Peter Farey) that unlike most conspiracy theories, the idea that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare is strongly supported by the only scientific method to distinguish authors reliably, which is stylometry.
I asked about it here to test this website's scientific honesty--- I know that the stylometries can't distinguish Marlowe from Shakespeare, but I also know that this is politically impossible to say, because the mainstream literary crowd can't accept this.
To my surprise, I got an answer that gave a paper which claimed to distinguish Marlowe from Shakespeare, and I actually believed that I was wrong (for a few hours), that Shakespeare was actually stylometrically different from Marlowe. Then I read the paper.
The paper's conclusions nonewithstanding, the methods and results of the comparison give such stunningly strong evidence that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare that I am now dead certain that they are the same. These guys' program identified all of Marlowe's work by function words and vocabulary as Shakespeare with the exception of Tambourlaine and the Massacre at Paris! Further, the only reason Tambourlaine wasn't identified is that they compared Tambourlaine I and Tambourlaine II.
Their method is made to look less accurate than it is, by two other failures that they include in the analysis. The two other plays that they misidentify as by a different author than the canonical author are both of long-disputed authorship, and I am sure that their program gets it right--- they are not by the author that they are traditionally attributed to. A quick search will reveal that there is no real historical evidence for the attribution of these plays, which were both published anonymously, and their author was guessed by a process of elimination.
So their method doesn't fail on any plays, and it only fails to distinguish Marlowe from Shakespeare, this is true of Mendenhall's letter-distribution stylometry, and, as others have noted, of every stylometry that claims to distinguish Marlowe from Shakespeare. Considering how much time has been spent looking for a definitive stylometric separation between these two authors, the failure is ridiculous.
Looking at the stylometries a year or two ago, I became a Marlovian, meaning I thought it was likely that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare. I didn't care about the historical evidence, or about the conspiracy aspects (although these are interesting, and the ideas are supportable by historical evidence, these sorts of things can't really be supported by any quantifiable scientific evidence). My main focus was on the stylometry.
I use this question as a test of this site--- in those handful of cases where the science and the dogma conflict, can you actually write the conclusion that the science supports, even when this is a fringe opinion in the relevant (nonscience) field? This question is a perfect test case.
What do you do when the science and dogma conflict? If this website was around in 1500, could it support Copernicus? Is it original research to analyze the failure of stylometry to separate Marlowe and Shakespeare?
This is important for the usefulness of this site. I was told I would be banned from this site for rudeness, as is usual for impolitic characters like myself, so I might not be around for much longer. But I hope this site can be useful.