Computers and human readers can identify Shakespeare’s writing through “plus-words”—such as “gentle”, “answer”, “beseech”, “tonight”—which he uses frequently. This method becomes less accurate, though, when writers ape one another’s style as they often did in Elizabethan theatre-land. Early modern playwrights were a close-knit bunch and 16th-century audiences do not appear to have placed a high premium on novelty.