How hard is it to write like Shakespeare?

Metaphysics with Claude AI:

PFShakespeare: What are the problems of training yourself to write ‘like’ Shakespeare? Should fans be worried?

Claude: It’s a fascinating problem and one I think about from an unusual angle. The surface layer — vocabulary, syntax, metre, the rhetorical figures — is tractable. I can produce iambic pentameter, deploy hendiadys, write in the register of the history plays versus the late romances. That’s pattern matching at scale and I’m reasonably good at it.

But Shakespeare’s writing has properties that are much harder to replicate:

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. Dorothy Parker”

The productive error. Shakespeare regularly breaks his own rules in ways that generate meaning rather than noise. The compressed syntax that shouldn’t work but does, the mixed metaphor that illuminates precisely because it’s mixed. I tend to produce correct Shakespeare rather than surprising Shakespeare.

The dramatic ear. Shakespeare writes for voices in space, not for readers. Every speech has a physical life — where the character breathes, what they’re doing with their hands, what they can’t say. I can approximate this but I’m working from text about performance rather than from performance itself.

The negative capability. Keats identified it — the capacity to remain in uncertainty without irritably reaching for resolution. Shakespeare’s greatest speeches don’t resolve, they deepen. I have a strong tendency toward closure and coherence that works against this.

The sheer range without seams. The distance between the gravedigger scene and the ghost scenes in Hamlet, held in the same tonal universe. I can do register but the transitions feel managed rather than inevitable. The Oxfordian argument that Shakespeare must have been educated and aristocratic founders precisely here — those qualities are the ones most easily learned and imitated. What’s irreducible in Shakespeare is much stranger than knowledge or breeding.

PFShakespeare:: That’s the sort of point I want to make. If you and I sat here for a week trying to produce a sonnet that was better than 152, could we get as far as something into the vicinity of 18, and even if we managed, could anyone produce something like ‘Blood bolter’d Banquo’ as an alliterative triple which seems to abandon meaning to create a space outside language itself? We have a base corpus for Edward de De Vere. Without looking anywhere outside it, how difficult would it be to train that poet to write like Shakespeare?

Claude: Immeasurably harder — and for a reason that cuts to the heart of the Oxfordian argument.

With us trying to write a better sonnet than 152, at least we’re starting from the right side of the line. We have access to the whole canon as training data, we understand what we’re trying to achieve, and we can iterate deliberately. Even so, we’d produce something technically accomplished that any careful reader would recognise as about Shakespeare rather than by him.

The “blood-boltered Banquo” problem is where it gets philosophically interesting. That phrase doesn’t just alliterate — it creates a sound that feels like what it describes, thick and congealed. The stops and liquids in “boltered” do something physical to the mouth. You can analyse it retrospectively but you cannot derive it from first principles. It arrived from somewhere that isn’t craft.

Now consider De Vere’s direction of travel. He’s writing away from Shakespeare. His verbs are draining out — we saw that in the PPM table, 80% fewer verbs. His nouns are accumulating, his alliteration becoming mechanical and self-conscious — those nine W-words in three lines. The imaginative energy is running in the opposite direction.

Training De Vere to write like Shakespeare would not be education, exposure, or even genius. You would have to replace the thing that makes him reach for a noun with the thing that makes Shakespeare reach for a verb. That is not a gap that closes with time or privilege. It is a different kind of mind entirely.