LD-SCHOOL Oxfordians still fondly remember the trick that Oxfordian scholar Louis Benezet, Sr. liked to play on Stratfordian English Lit pro- fessors in the 1940’s. He would give them a seventy-line mixture of pas- sages from Shakespeare and Oxford, defy them to tell one author from the other, find they had great trouble in doing so, and conclude that his experiment showed their styles to be barely distinguishable. 1 Much has changed since those days. In 1980, Steven May (79-84) showed from external evidence (and over Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s objections that “he is unconcerned with stylistic criteria” [396]) that some of the passages Benezet thought were Oxford’s were in fact written by Robert Greene, and that five other poems confidently assigned to Oxford by J.T. Looney and other Oxfordian scholars (following A.B. Grosart), were not Oxford’s work. In 1987, our students in the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic, sponsored by the Sloan Foundation and the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable, began what became a seven-year computer study of all testable Shakespeare claimants, to see which, if any, matched Shakespeare. For the first two years the tests were favorable to Oxford, attracting much inter- est among Oxfordians and warm invitations to present our results to Oxfordian audiences. But in 1989 we discovered what looked like serious flaws in our then-best test (Valenza 1990) and turned to six other tests that showed mismatch after mismatch between Shakespeare and twenty-seven testable poet claimants, including the front-runners Oxford, Bacon, and Marlowe. Oxford’s poems flunked five of the six new tests and seemed particularly different from those of Shakespeare. When the students reported these results to the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable in 1990, they got worldwide media attention. A round of “refutations” ensued in Oxfordian publications and in private correspondence with Oxfordians. Some of these made worth- while points; some did not. But the invitations to respond to them in Oxfordian publications and meetings stopped completely. We made a few revisions in our tests and published our general findings in mainstream journals, Computers and the Humanities (1991), and Notes and Queries (1991a). 2 CAN THE OXFORD CANDIDACY BE SAVED? A Response to W. Ron Hess,“Shakespeare’s Dates: Their Effect on Stylistic Analysis” Ward E.Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza ❦ There is a differency between a grub and a butterfly, yet your butterfly was a grub. Coriolanus: 5:4.12 71