NUMBER-crunching literary criticism was the butt of an academic in-joke in “Arcadia” (1993), Tom Stoppard’s cerebral play. Bernard Nightingale, a foppish poetry don, scoffs at a colleague who used a computer program to attribute an anonymous story to D.H. Lawrence. To Bernard’s “inexpressible joy”, he found that “on the same statistical basis, there was a ninety percent chance that Lawrence also wrote the ‘Just William’ books and much of the previous day’s Brighton and Hove Argus”. The “maths mob” skewered in Mr Stoppard’s play no longer seems so ridiculous; with the publication of the “New Oxford Shakespeare”, they have shaped the debate about authorship in Elizabethan England.