A software program used to detect plagiarism by students was refocused in an interesting way on literary research. The program was used to verify that Shakespeare plagiarized himself, so to speak, thereby attributing the play, Edward III, to Shakespeare. It also attributes a co-writer, Thomas Kyd. Here is a Yahoo! News story on the use of plagiarism software to attribute Edward III to Shakespeare.

Note that at the time of posting, the Wikipedia article on Edward III did not have a reference to this development. According to that article (and the Yahoo! article), this play was often attributed to Shakespeare. This free plagiarism tool, Pl@giarism, adds some weight to that attribution. The software is from Erasmas Universiteit Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.