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- Researchers have used machine learning to tentatively confirm an old theory about Shakespeare and a collaborator named John Fletcher.
- Forensic textual analysis of Shakespeare is popular because of longtime questions and conspiracy theories about what he really wrote.
- The algorithm identified text differences and tics more granular than what human scholars have already noticed, expanding their evidence.
Caroline Delbert, writer, book editor, researcher, and avid reader says, A scientist used AI to determine where John Fletcher ends and William Shakespeare begins.
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Photo: Universal History ArchiveGetty Images
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The MIT Technology Review reports
that a scientist claims he knows for sure where Shakespeare ends and
his long-suspected collaborator begins. Petr Plecháč used machine
learning to train an algorithm on the works of William Shakespeare and
another writer named John Fletcher. Literary scholars began speculating
on the possibility of shared authorship in 1850, and Plecháč believes he
has confirmed that scholar’s theory.
First,
some quick and dirty background on the shared authorship theory.
Scholars have always known that Shakespeare was replaced by Fletcher
after Shakespeare’s death. The fact that a theatrical company easily
swapped Fletcher in for Shakespeare suggested that the two men occupied a
similar niche in terms of their writing style and audience appeal.
It’s
common for just one or a handful of writers from a time and place to
survive into today’s popular imagination. We read Shakespeare but not
Fletcher the same way we read Charles Dickens and not other writers of
serial novels from his era. Fletcher also spent much of his career working collaboratively, not just the suspected work with Shakespeare but with a handful of other colleagues...
The debate over Fletcher versus Shakespeare has lingered for nearly two
centuries. Now, Plecháč has fed Shakespeare’s relevant solo-authored
work and Fletcher’s work into an algorithm. With four of each writer’s
contemporary works in the body of evidence, the algorithm was then fed Henry VIII and led through the play section by section. Like the scale in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, each passage was deemed “Shakespeare” or “Not Shakespeare.” Overall, he confirmed both Spedding and Merriam.
Source: Popular Mechanics
