Lend me your words: Bard’s collaborations

The ‘fingerprint’ of other authors has been found across William Shakespeare’s plays, an expert has said.

Joseph Fiennes with Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love. The Bard also loved to collaborate with other playwrights.

The “fingerprint” of other authors has been found across Shakespeare’s plays, an expert has said, with analysis of linguistic patterns indicating that the Bard was a “sociable” writer who collaborated regularly.

Researchers examined the frequency and patterns in which Jacobean playwrights used 100 common words such as “and”, “the”, “of” and “with” to create unique “language fingerprints”.

Plays including Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Henry VIII and all three parts of Henry VI bear signs that Shakespeare was not their only author, the British Science Festival in Leicester was told on Tuesday.

In addition, Shakespeare’s writing was detected in plays including The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, and Sir Thomas More by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle.

“Of 43 plays he had a hand in, 14 were co-authored,” said Gabriel Egan, a professor of Shakespeare studies at De Montfort University.

Shakespeare was a “more sociable writer than we ever thought”, he said. “He’s not off on his own thinking hard with that big dome head ... he’s also engaged with other writers.”

The analysis indicated that in each of the Henry VI plays Christopher Marlowe appeared to have written the opening scene. In Henry VIII, Prof Egan said, Shakespeare may have liked Marlowe to “get the play started” before taking the lead.

The Times