Machine Learning Has Revealed Exactly How Much of a Shakespeare Play Was Written by Someone Else
Literary analysts have long noticed the hand of another author in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Now a neural network has identified the specific scenes in question — and who actually wrote them.
By Emerging Technology from the arXiv
For much of his life, William Shakespeare was the house playwright for an acting company called the King’s Men that performed his plays on the banks of the River Thames in London. When Shakespeare died in 1616, the company needed a replacement and turned to one of the most prolific and famous playwrights of the time, a man named John Fletcher.
Fletcher’s fame has since quelled. But in 1850, a literary analyst named James Spedding noticed a remarkable similarity between Fletcher’s plays and passages in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Spedding concluded that Fletcher and Shakespeare must have collaborated on the play.
The evidence comes from studies of each author’s linguistic idiosyncrasies and how they crop up in Henry VIII. For example, Fletcher often writes ye instead of you, and ’em instead of them. He also tended to add the word sir or still or next to a…
