Mathematical Analysis Suggests Marlowe And Shakespeare Co-Wrote
For decades now, researchers have been debating how much influence, if any, Marlowe had on Shakespeare's work. In fact, some have even claimed that the two writers were the same person.
But thanks to a culmination of mathematical analyses and hundreds of years of literary scholarship, including studies on Shakespeare's vocabulary, moral philosophies, and poetic style, an international group of researchers think they've finally put the mystery to bed once and for all.
The long-held suggestion that Christopher Marlowe was William Shakespeare is now widely dismissed, along with other authorship theories. But Marlowe is enjoying the next best thing, taking centre stage alongside his great Elizabethan rival with a credit as co-writer of the three Henry VI plays.
The two dramatists will appear jointly on each of the three title pages of the plays within the New Oxford Shakespeare, a landmark project to be published recently by Oxford University Press. Using old-fashioned scholarship and 21st-century computerised tools to analyse texts, the edition’s international scholars have contended that Shakespeare’s collaboration with other playwrights was far more extensive than has been realised until now.
Researchers believe that computerised textual analysis is now so sophisticated that they can even distinguish between Shakespeare writing under Marlowe’s influence and Marlowe writing alone.
One piece of evidence identified five “Shakespeare-plus words”: gentle, answer, beseech, spoke, tonight.explained Gary Taylor a researcher from Florida State University: “What we mean by Shakespeare-plus is that we’ve looked at the frequency of certain words which might seem commonplace like ‘tonight’ in all the plays of that early period, say up to 1600.
Anybody could use any of these words. They’re not words that Shakespeare invented. But we can say Shakespeare used ‘tonight’ much more often than other playwrights in those 20 years.
“Shakespeare-minus words … are much less likely to appear in a Shakespeare play. So, this is a statistical argument … not simply statistics about individual words, but combinations of individual words. With Marlowe, for example, combinations of words such as ‘glory droopeth’ appear to be unique to him in that period.
“Recent studies by specialists already agree that Shakespeare did not write the passage where Joan of Arc pleads for help from demonic spirits and then is captured by the English [Part One, 5.3, 5.4]. We have added new evidence from ‘unique n-grams’: that is, phrases that occur in the passage being tested. Marlowe’s works contain many more such parallels than any other playwright,” Taylor added. Other words and phrases identified as commonly occurring in Marlowe works include “familiar spirit, cull out, regions under earth, oh hold me, to your wonted, see, forsake me, droopeth to, curse, miscreant, ugly, change, shape thou, change my shape, suddenly surprise, your dainty, fell and enchantress”.
Taylor acknowledges that doubts may be cast on their conclusions: “You can’t say anything about Shakespeare without somebody disagreeing with you … But our knowledge of the past increases by debate of this kind.”
Marlowe’s life of Myth and Mystery
The life of Christopher Marlowe has long been pored over for evidence that he wrote a handful of William Shakespeare’s works. The scholar JB Steane said in 1969 there were so many rumours it would be absurd to dismiss them all as part of the “Marlowe Myth”.
Few undisputed facts exist about the playwright’s life, but he was baptised in Canterbury on 26 February 1564. The son of a shoemaker, Marlowe attended the King’s school in Canterbury before being awarded a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he received his BA degree in 1584.
Marlowe took lengthy absences and the university was about to refuse him a master’s degree when, in 1587, the Privy Council wrote to compliment his “good service” to the Queen on “matters touching the benefit of his country”. The letter prompted the theory that he had been a secret agent for Elizabeth I’s “spymaster”, Sir Francis Walsingham.
His plays were wildly popular for the brief period that he was on the Elizabethan literary scene. Dido, Queen of Carthage is thought to have been his first. Tamburlaine the Great, among the first English plays in blank verse, was written around 1587; the Jew of Malta, is thought to have been written around 1589, and Doctor Faustus was first performed between 1588 and 1593.
His death in Deptford in May 1593, aged 29, has provoked years of speculation, from the Queen ordering his assassination because of his atheism, to his being killed by a love rival. In 1925, the scholar Leslie Hotson published the coroner’s report in his book The Death of Christopher Marlowe. Witnesses testified that he was stabbed in the eye during a fight over payment of a bill and died instantly. The document did not end speculation, with some supporting the theory that Marlowe faked his death and continued to write as Shakespeare.
