OCTOBER 27, 2016 // 19
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Shakespeare to share credit for Henry VI
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One of the Pacific
Northwest’s great
small newspapers
LONDON — The Bard
was not a solo act.
Oxford University Press’
new edition of William
Shakespeare’s works will
credit Christopher Marlowe
as co-author of the three
Henry VI plays, under-
scoring that the playwright
collaborated with others on
some of his most famous
works.
Marlowe, a playwright,
poet and spy, will share
billing in the latest version
of the New Oxford Shake-
speare being published this
week. While scholars have
long suspected that Shake-
speare’s plays included
the work of others, new
analytical methods helped
researchers conclude that
sections bore the hallmarks
of Marlowe’s hand.
“Shakespeare, like other
geniuses, recognized the
value of other people,” Gary
Taylor, a professor at Florida
State University and the
principal investigator of the
new work, said Monday.
“What is Shakespeare fa-
mous for? Writing dialogue
— interactions between two
people. You would expect in
his life there would be dia-
logue with other people.”
A team of 23 internation-
al scholars looked afresh at
the man many consider the
greatest writer in the English
language. The challenge, put
simply: If one is going to
compile the complete works
of Shakespeare one irst has
to determine what they are.
Five of the world’s most
senior Shakespeare schol-
ars —Taylor, Hugh Craig at
the University of Newcastle
in Australia, MacDonald P.
Jackson at the University of
Auckland in New Zealand;
Gabriel Egan at De Mont-
fort University, Leicester
and John Jowett of the
Shakespeare Institute at the
University of Birmingham
— had to be convinced of
AP PHOTO/STEVEN SENNE
Book conservator Lauren Schott polishes a case containing 17th century editions of plays at-
tributed to William Shakespeare in an exhibit called “Shakespeare Unauthorized” at the Boston
Public Library, in Boston, Mass.
the issues of authorship in
the works.
The editors concluded
that 17 of 44 works asso-
ciated with Shakespeare
had input from others. The
scholars used computerized
data sets to reveal patterns,
trends and associations —
analyzing not only Shake-
speare’s words, but also
those of his contemporaries.
In Shakespeare’s time,
there was an insatiable
demand for new material to
feed the appetite of the irst
mass entertainment industry.
A relatively small group of
people — a cabal of sorts
who knew one another —
worked feverishly to meet
this demand. Taylor com-
pared them to screenwriters
in the early days of Holly-
wood.
To study them, the team
of scholars used what Taylor
described as the analytic
equivalent of combining
voice recognition, inger-
prints and DNA testing
— looking for patterns to
see how various authors
and playwrights wrote and
worked.
“Shakespeare has now
entered the world of big
data,” Taylor said, adding
that while the bard’s work
has been studied intensive-
ly, that’s not always the
case in the same measure
for other writers of his
generation.
Still, he was adamant
that this wasn’t just a case
of “computers telling us
things.” One needs to ask
the right question.
“What you need is a
method that treats all the
writers as the same and try
to identify in an empirical
way what distinguishes him
as a writer — what makes
him different than the oth-
ers,” he said.
Marlowe, born in 1564,
the same year as Shake-
speare, was a graduate of
Cambridge University who
wrote poetry and plays such
as the two part “Tambur-
laine” and “Dido, Queen
of Carthage.” A part-time
spy for the government of
Queen Elizabeth I, Marlowe
is believed to have died in
1593 when he was stabbed
under mysterious circum-
stances.
Oxford University Press
says that “identifying Mar-
lowe’s hand in the Henry VI
plays is just one of the fresh
features of this project.”
The authorship of
Shakespeare’s works has
long been disputed, with
one now-discredited theory
being that philosopher Sir
Francis Bacon is the true
author of the works. But
Bacon is only mentioned in
the forward of this volume.
His authorship, Taylor said,
is “just a wonderful story.”