One in three Shakespeare plays were co-authored

A THIRD of Shakespeare’s plays were probably collaborations, experts believe, after finding the “linguistic footprint” of other contemporary authors scattered throughout his prose.

Works including Pericles, Titus Andronicus and the trilogy of Henry VI

plays all hint that far from being a solitary playwright, Shakespeare worked with a team of writers, who penned entire acts or even kicked plays off.

It is also likely that plays attributed to other authors, such as Sir Thomas More

by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, and the anonymous Edward III, were part-written by Shakespeare.

The discovery was made by putting the entire canon of Shakespeare and writers such as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Middleton through a computer algorithm which analysed the placement and repetition of the 100 most common words in the English language – such as “the”, “and” and “on”.

All writers have a linguistic fingerprint which governs how often they will use a word, and the chance that it will appear alongside others.

They discovered that many passages attributed to Shakespeare bore a greater resemblance to the writing style of other authors. For example, the writing style of the opening act of Henry VI, Part 2 bears a close resemblance to that of Marlowe.

Prof Gabriel Egan, of De Montford University in Leicester, who made the discovery alongside computing experts from the University of Pennsylvania, said it is likely that Shakespeare had a hand in 43 plays, of which 14 were coauthored.

“He is a much more sociable writer than we ever thought,” he said. “He must have worked in the theatre, read other people’s work and, in many cases, sat with them and said, ‘Let’s do a play’.

“We’re also finding new plays which were anonymously published and we’re finding Shakespeare in those.”

In some instances, it appears that other writers did not just contribute, but started off Shakespeare’s plays such as Titus Andronicus.

“There is some evidence they divided the labour and evidence that they did this thematically. In Henry VII the Jack Cade’s rebellion scenes seem to be Marlowe, particularly because they have a decapitation, and Marlowe likes decapitations,” said Prof Egan.

The research was presented at the British Science Festival in Leicester.