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Data Science suggests that Shakespeare may have had a famous co-author on three of his plays

Published: 1 November 2016

The title page of theÌýnew Oxford edition of Shakespeare's threeÌýHenry VIÌýplays will, for the first time ever, include the words "byÌýWilliamÌýShakespeare and Christopher Marlowe".ÌýMost people have heard of Shakespeare's hunchback kingÌýRichard III. Perhaps not everyone knows that Richard III is actually the fourth part of a longer cycle of Shakespearean plays that starts with Henry VI Parts 1, 2 andÌý3.ÌýAlthoughÌýscholarsÌýhave long suspected that Part One might beÌýthe work of several authors, this is the first time thatÌýChristopher Marlowe has been named as a co-author.

Christopher Marlowe is best known today as the author of the tragedy Doctor Faustus. He was born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare. When theÌýHenry VI plays were written, that is, in the early 1590s andÌýat very near the beginning of Shakespeare's career, Marlowe was actually the more famous of two playwrights. Sadly, Marlowe's brilliant career was cut short when he was murdered at the age of 29.Ìý

A fringe group of scholars have contended for decades that the Shakespearean canon must have beenÌý·É°ù¾±³Ù³Ù±ð²ÔÌýby someone better educated and of nobler origins than Shakespeare. But this latest attribution is not claiming thatÌýall of Shakespeare's plays wereÌýthe work ofÌýanother writer, not does it rely on details of the author's biography to support its conclusions. Instead, theÌýteam of 23 scholars from five countriesÌýused statistical methods to analyze groupings of words, known as n-grams. Their technique was to compareÌýthe n-grams of these playsÌýto other works known to be written byÌýa particular author, and thereby determine which sentences and scenes were more likely to be the work of which writer. For example, the bigram "glory droopeth" appears in a scene in Henry VI Part One butÌýnowhere else in anyÌýShakespearean text. Indeed, the only other play where it does occur, according to these authors, was oneÌýby Marlowe. Perhaps more tellingly, these combinations of a positive noun and a more negative verb are characteristic of Marlowe's style but not of Shakespeare's. An accumulation of many such cluesÌýhave led to these authors' identifying Marlowe as the plays' co-author.

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