Disputed play is called a genuine Shakespeare
“Double Falsehood,” an 18th century play whose authorship has been disputed for centuries, is almost certainly the work of William Shakespeare, according to new research.
Shakespeare appears to have had some assistance from John Fletcher, a contemporary who is thought to have co-written three plays with the Bard.
Nevertheless, “the entire play was consistently linked to Shakespeare with a high probability,” wrote the authors of the study, published last week in the journal Psychological Science.
Those findings came after two researchers subjected the play’s language to psychological scrutiny and computer analysis that examined every pun, put-down and preposition.
The researchers’ method supercharged the practice of “stylometry” long used by scholars of literature by recruiting computers to churn through millions of sentences.
Computers can quickly discern linguistic regularities that become an author’s “signature.” When the authorship of a book or play is contested, computer-enhanced stylometry can compare suspected authors’ signatures to that of the disputed work, yielding a scientific basis for assigning authorship.
In the end, two psychology professors from the University of Texas at Austin, Ryan L. Boyd and James W. Pennebaker, declared that the author of “Double Falsehood” — a tale of fathers, sons, duty and love set in Andalusia — was Shakespeare, and not his acolyte Lewis Theobald.
Theobald, a Shakespeare scholar and collector of manuscripts, published the play in 1728, claiming it came from three original manuscripts written by the Bard. Those manuscripts, however, were said to have burned in a library fire.
Under the direction of Boyd and Pennebaker, computers churned through 54 plays — 33 by Shakespeare, nine by Fletcher and 12 by Theobald. The computers counted each play’s average sentence length, quantified the complexity and psychological valence of its language and sussed out the frequent use of unusual words.
“Our results offer consistent evidence against the notion that ‘Double Falsehood’ is Theobald’s whole-cloth forgery,” wrote Boyd and Pennebaker.
Creating a writer’s psychological signature opens up new avenues to authenticating disputed works, wrote Boyd and Pennebaker. But they underscored that it can also be used to provide a “better understanding of individuals’ composite mental lives.”
The researchers cite long-standing research that shows that the way writers use language, the words they choose and even the length of their sentences bespeak their cognitive style and temperament.
A deep analysis of a writer’s verbal output can “paint a very rich picture of who that person is, how he or she thinks, and what he or she thinks about,” they wrote.
For Shakespeare, much of whose life remains a mystery, the analysis offers a bit of insight: his frequent use of prepositions suggests he was rigorously educated in grammar.
His heavy use of “social content words,” as opposed to words related to thought processes or emotion, suggests he was more attuned to social niceties and advancement than he was either cerebral or preoccupied by his own or others’ feelings, the authors wrote.