‘Shakespeare wrote Double Falsehood’
WASHINGTON: English playwright William Shakespeare has been identified as the true author of a longcontested play published nearly 300 years ago and believed to be an adaptation of the bard’s work, scientists said.
Applying psychological theory and text-analysing software, researchers have discovered a unique psychological profile that characterises Shakespeare’s established works, and this profile strongly identifies Shakespeare as the author of ‘Double Falsehood’.
“Research in psychology has shown that some of the core features of who a person is at their deepest level can be revealed based on how they use language,” said researcher Ryan Boyd of the University of Texas at Austin. “With our new study, we show that you can actually take a lot of this information and put it all together at once to understand an author like Shakespeare rather deeply,” said Boyd. They examined 33 plays by Shakespeare, 12 by Theobald, and 9 by John Fletcher, a colleague of Shakespeare. The study also provides a deeper exploration of an author’s psychological profile. The play was published in 1728 by Lewis Theobald, who claimed to have based the play on three original Shakespeare manuscripts. The manuscripts have since been lost, presumably destroyed by a library fire, and authorship of the play has been hotly contested ever since. The research was published in the journal Psychological Science.