Henry VI, by Wiltopher Shakeslowe

October 26, 2016 7:20 AM

The Oxford University Press, upon the recommendation of a panel of 23 international scholars and extensive data analysis, has decided to give co-author credit of the three Henry VI plays to Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe has long been a candidate for the "true" authorship of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare (a.k.a. "the man from Stratford" to people who think Will didn't write them), with the main argument against the possibility being that Marlowe is widely considered to have died in 1593, when just 8 of the 37 plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare had been presented. The Henry VI plays all came out before Marlowe's death.

posted by Etrigan (44 comments total)

$hakespeare ft. Lil' Chris
posted by fairmettle at 7:34 AM on October 26, 2016 [31 favorites]

Congratulations, Marlovians, you got possibly the 3 least performed or enjoyed plays in the corpus. Maybe in another 400 years you can pick off Comedy of Errors or Two Gentlemen of Verona.
posted by Copronymus at 7:39 AM on October 26, 2016 [33 favorites]

Pseudocide! Conspiracies! Spies!

This turned out to be an amazing rabbit hole to fall down in.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 7:41 AM on October 26, 2016

Marlowe has never been a serious candidate for authorship of all of Shakespeare's plays. That he is now getting attribution to the early histories is, in part, because scholars on authorship long have noted Marlowe influence (use of language that seemed to echo Marlowe's) in early plays. Now, it seems, it is more than youthful imitation but rather so-authorship, a custom of writing back then .
posted by Postroad at 7:47 AM on October 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

Congratulations, Marlovians, you got possibly the 3 least performed or enjoyed plays in the corpus.

Right? I may actually think a little less of Marlowe now, knowing he shares some blame for the tedious rhymey-chimey verse in Henry VI, Part 1.
posted by Iridic at 7:56 AM on October 26, 2016

Shakespeare was a pretty light-fingered writer. I'd think it's more likely he nicked some good bits than that there was unacknowledged co-authorship.
posted by Segundus at 7:57 AM on October 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

Rise from your slumber, sheeple! O, and yield,
For though its flames shall close forensic's eye
Yet jet fuel cannot melt yon beams of steel.
posted by beerperson at 8:00 AM on October 26, 2016 [65 favorites]

So the only "evidence" this article provides is computer data analysis of the words? To that I say balderdash as proof enough to give Marlowe co-credit in print. Maybe it's just not in the article, but I think you need to give me documents or something that puts Shakespeare and Marlowe in the same room together around the time the plays were written. I need to see a statement like "we know they knew each other and met several times because ___." I can accept this computer analysis as a promising clue, but I don't see how it's definitive proof without some other corroboration that it's even possible.
posted by dnash at 8:06 AM on October 26, 2016 [13 favorites]

This is going to play havoc on Shakespeare's royalty payout schedule.
posted by xingcat at 8:19 AM on October 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

"What is Shakespeare famous for? Writing dialogue — interactions between two people. You would expect in his life there would be dialogue with other people."

Sweete Analutikes tis thou hast ravisht me
posted by Hypatia at 8:28 AM on October 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Still, he was adamant that this wasn't just a case of "computers telling us things."

Really? Cause it sure sounds like it's just a case of "computers telling us things." Like with the whole Proto-Indo-European phylogenetic tree. You take a problem which has withstood deep investigation by learned humans, and throw an algorithm at it and whatever comes out, declare the matter settled.

Still, if a bunch of Shakespeare scholars signed on to this, I guess it must have passed muster.
posted by edheil at 8:31 AM on October 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

So will they be credited as Shakespeare/Marlowe or Marlowe/Shakespeare? And will Yoko Ono be having a say in this?
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:47 AM on October 26, 2016

... Or in a world where there are orders of magnitude of words written about WS then he ever wrote, or collaborated on, then having some new thing may just be a way of meeting the old publishing needs that academics require.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:49 AM on October 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Why do they seem to be taking it as given that only Marlowe could write like Marlowe? Maybe Will was a super big fan of Malowe's and started out his writing career trying really hard to imitate him before finding his own groove? And did a good enough imitation job that a computer can't tell the difference?

[I find myself thinking of Belbo in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, feeding occult texts into a computer until it churns out a new conspiracy theory, which real life occultists start thinking is real.]
posted by dnash at 8:50 AM on October 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

Does this mean that Marlowe retroactively nailed Gwyneth Paltrow?

That was what inspired him to write "A Winter's Tale", also known as "the cold play".
posted by w0mbat at 8:58 AM on October 26, 2016 [13 favorites]

And yet the million monkeys toil on, unheeded.
posted by one_bean at 8:59 AM on October 26, 2016 [15 favorites]

> Like with the whole Proto-Indo-European phylogenetic tree. You take a problem which has withstood deep investigation by learned humans, and throw an algorithm at it and whatever comes out, declare the matter settled.

I did grad work in Indo-European linguistics and I have no idea what you're talking about.

As for the Shakespeare stuff, I honestly don't understand why this press release is such a huge story (I heard it on the news this morning right alongside the election and Syria). It's not exactly earthshaking news that some of the plays have multiple authors; for example, Shakespeare collaborated with Fletcher on a couple of plays in 1612-14, and I thought the inclusion of Cardenio in the New Oxford Shakespeare (for which, as it happens, I was a copyeditor) was a lot more interesting than this. But I guess it's hard for people to disentangle the "Shakespeare didn't write those plays, it was Marlowe/Bacon/Lord Soandso!" nonsense from the prosaic fact that playwrights collaborated, so it all gets dumped into the same mental OMG bin.
posted by languagehat at 9:06 AM on October 26, 2016 [15 favorites]

I'll say, without irony, Yoko Ono is as cool as they come and digs at her are just strange: Dames! Amirite? Take my wife, please. *rimshot* We're in a Shakespeare thread; Reference Lady MacBeth, or something. Paltrow? Like actors aren't flaky.

I was a non-Lit English major and the sensationalism of Shakespeare promotes Literature (a good thing, but I have limits): Oh, another white male responsible for a super-human feat. I enjoyed complaining before Romeo + Juliet, Shakespeare in Love and Anonymous how seldom the "miracle" of him was examined.

On Preview, what languagehat has added.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 9:10 AM on October 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

".. may actually think a little less of Marlowe now, knowing he shares some blame for the tedious rhymey-chimey verse in Henry VI, Part 1."
Bad. Yes. But then Marlowe's "Massacre at Paris" and "Jew of Malta"? Kit could write some bad stuff too
posted by Postroad at 9:15 AM on October 26, 2016

17th Earl of Oxford out here like
posted by No-sword at 9:34 AM on October 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

So is this like giving Ghostface Killer co-writing credit on all of Action Bronson's verses 400 years from now?
posted by sleeping bear at 9:36 AM on October 26, 2016

I honestly don't understand why this press release is such a huge story

Well, it's been a pretty slow 20,000 weeks on the Shakespeare news front.
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:36 AM on October 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

There's a long, long, long, long backstory to the controversy over the authorship of the Henry VI plays, going back to the eighteenth century, and the various disagreements eighteenth-century editors and critics had over which bits of Shakespeare's folio canon didn't qualify as "genuine" Shakespeare (a rather surprising amount, as it turns out). Shakespeare editor Edmund Malone wrote a whole dissertation on the authorship of the Henry VI plays in 1787, included in full in his 1790 edition of the plays. The authorship question then gets debated further in the nineteenth century, by scholars and gadflies like John Payne Collier and F. G. Fleay (fascinating figures in their own right), and then on into the twentieth century. (Though there's a gap between about 1924 and really the mid-'80s, when it wasn't seen as particularly respectable to talk about multiple authorship in the Shakespeare canon. I blame the New Critics for that one.)

Oxford and New Oxford Shakespeare editor Gary Taylor then reopened the debate with an article in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in English in 1995, arguing that there were up to four separate authors in 1 Henry VI, including Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe. (My friend Paul wrote his PhD thesis in an attempt to prove that there were only three collaborators on the play.) It's interesting to now see Marlowe fingered using new stylometric evidence, but really, this is a supposition that goes back almost 300 years.

I thought the inclusion of Cardenio in the New Oxford Shakespeare (for which, as it happens, I was a copyeditor) was a lot more interesting than this.

YES! Please, can we talk about this? Cardenio—fake or fortune? Is Tiffany Stern right? Did Lewis Theobald forge Double Falsehood in 1727, or was he thoroughly stitched up by Alexander Pope and the eighteenth-century copyright holders to the collected Shakespeare?
posted by Sonny Jim at 9:46 AM on October 26, 2016 [12 favorites]

So the only "evidence" this article provides is computer data analysis of the words?

Ohh scare quotes!

And no, that is not the only evidence. Scholars used automated text analysis--which for many things, like coding events, have been found to be more reliable than humans--to see if there are patterns in the data that provide evidence for or against the claim that Marlowe wrote some of these plays as well. That's a pretty defensible application and isn't new: other scholars tried the same thing on the Federalist Papers probably 50 years ago. That evidence, combined with background knowledge from a number of scholars with subject matter expertise, seems more than sufficient to give co-credit to Marlowe.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:53 AM on October 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

but I think you need to give me documents or something that puts Shakespeare and Marlowe in the same room together around the time the plays were written.

My Shakespeare/Marlowe slashfic puts them in the same room together around the time the plays were written, but they get distracted from the writing pretty quickly.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:00 AM on October 26, 2016 [27 favorites]

Thanks, sonny jim
But why blame the New Critics for not talking about authorship when their focus was on a given text and its meaning but not authorship, bibliographic studies, staging, etc.?
As for Cardenio, what of Pericles (now accepted, generally), Two Noble Kinsmen(accepted), and Edward III (somewhat accepted) note: I have published an edition of this play..
There are those plays Shakespeare might have had a hand in, but slightly; others that are attributed to him but hardly accepted by most scholars and those I have noted that are accepted as having had Sheakespeare's help in a scene or two or possible more.
posted by Postroad at 10:01 AM on October 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

That evidence, combined with background knowledge from a number of scholars with subject matter expertise, seems more than sufficient to give co-credit to Marlowe.

I knew Hamilton couldn't have written fifty-one essays
posted by thelonius at 10:17 AM on October 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yes, Postroad—all of those collaborations are pretty much accepted now, including Edward III, which is an unjustly neglected play (and which I've done work on also). And Arden of Faversham is in the New Oxford too, which is pretty exciting—I know my former PhD supervisor will be very happy about that, considering how much work he's put into trying to prove Shakespeare's authorship of the quarrel scene over multiple decades ...

But why blame the New Critics for not talking about authorship when their focus was on a given text and its meaning but not authorship, bibliographic studies, staging, etc.

Sorry: that was sloppy on my part. I meant the influence of the New Critics. Really, when I was starting to study this stuff in the late '90s, attribution studies was still really unfashionable in Shakespeare circles. The turnaround in recent years has been really marked.
posted by Sonny Jim at 10:22 AM on October 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

languagehat, googling up an answer I found out I was conflating two different things.

First there is work by Don Ringe, Ann Taylor, and Tandy Warnow in 1996 on using computational methods to come up with different possible topologies for the IE phylogenetic tree. This made the news in the NYT.

Later on, in 2003, there was work done along similar lines but with much stronger claims made about the information which could be inferred from this work, by Russel Gray and Quentin Atkinson. This provoked some skepticism.

I think I was taking some of the strong criticism of the latter and inadvertently associating it with the former.
posted by edheil at 10:34 AM on October 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's incredible how many people in this thread credit their uninformed, tossed off hypotheses more than the conclusions of distinguished scholars. Nothing draws out anti-intellectualism on Mefi like literary academia, I guess.

I'm a graduate student who studies this period of literature. Textual editing is not my specialty and my knowledge of computer-aided author identification is somewhat limited, but maybe I can clear up a few points. Anyone really interested in modern editing practices on these types of texts would be well advised to check out Gary Taylor's Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture.

It's silly to object on the ground that there's no definitive proof Shakespeare and Marlowe knew one another. During the early 1590s, both Shakespeare and Marlowe were selling plays to Pembroke's Men. Shakespeare may have even been an actor in the company. The London theatrical scene of the day was small enough that it's more likely than not that all of the major figures were acquainted with each other, but in Shakespeare and Marlowe's case the connection is especially close.

Attributing parts of Shakespeare's plays to other authors has no real relation to anti-Stratfordianism. These scholars are not trying to diminish Shakespeare. Collaboration in the period was the norm, and if anything an honest accounting of how many Shakespearean works are collaborative has been hampered by the desire to see him as a transcendent literary genius. We have a modern ideological bias toward imagining great authors as independent. In fact, authorship norms for plays in the period might be loosely compared to how television shows are written today. Anti-Stratfordians still imagine that the author of Shakespeare's plays is a transcendent genius and tend to have similarly anachronistic expectations of how authorship worked at the time.

Marlowe was the most popular playwright of the day and Shakespeare was certainly influenced by him. Apparently some people here don't realize that scholars also know this and attempt to account for it in statistical analysis. While I guess it's not literally impossible that Shakespeare for some reason wrote some sections of the Henry VI plays in statistically convincing pastiche of Marlowe's writing while writing other sections in his own style, this is implausible on many levels. Computer analysis looks for things like frequently used words and phrases and signature grammatical moves. It would be fair to say that Shakespeare's early writing was to some extent a pastiche of Marlowe's, but the idea of statistical analysis is that it allows to move past the stylistic similarities that one can easily observe through reading the plays and look at distinctive elements that influence alone doesn't really account for. It seems unlikely that Shakespeare searched through Marlowe's corpus for particular words that Marlowe used with greater frequency than other authors of the period so that he could write speeches that sound more like Marlowe for part but not all of the plays.

Statistical analysis of authorship may not be able to move us beyond a reasonable doubt, but there are obviously plenty of works whose authorship is not in question on which one can test its validity. My understanding is that nowadays it works extremely well in these control cases. The evidence here is substantial.
posted by vathek at 10:55 AM on October 26, 2016 [16 favorites]

Booooo! Boooooooo! *pelts Oxford University Press with spoiled food and small stones*

(I must say, I didn't expect my BA in English to become obsolete in just twenty-odd years...)
posted by wenestvedt at 11:06 AM on October 26, 2016

When I was a tiny baby undergrad, I once went to my mentor professor's office hours for her Shakesepeare course and asked, breathlessly if she thought Richard III (and Margaret of Anjou, and Edmund, and Iago, and Katherina) were possibly based on a real person who had that basic personality, because Shakespeare seemed so fascinated with that personality type and wrote them into his plays over and over again at varying levels on the righteous outrage--> pure evil scale, and do you think this person was Kit Marlowe because of the similarities to Tamburlaine and was it also possible they were dating? She said that was certainly an interesting idea and 10 years later I no longer have to find obscure slash fiction on livejournal to affirm this, it's been validated by the Oxford University Press. I am really ridiculously vindicated on the behalf of that handful of underground, non-academia affiliated Shakespeare/Marlowe/Tolkien scholar ladies on lj in the early 2000s, though. I always felt like they'd hit on something deeply true and real about the works that formal academia wasn't going to allow to be speculated on. PM me for fanfic recs from the ancient world.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 11:09 AM on October 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

> I think I was taking some of the strong criticism of the latter and inadvertently associating it with the former.

Thanks for responding! And yes, the Gray/Atkinson stuff is pretty flimsy (I've attacked it more than once on my blog).
posted by languagehat at 11:18 AM on October 26, 2016

> I've attacked it more than once on my blog

Possibly where I read it :)
posted by edheil at 11:21 AM on October 26, 2016

aka, GOSH, OF COURSE KIT MARLOWE WAS THE BETA READER FOR THE HENRY CYCLE, COME ON FORMAL ACADEMIA, GET WITH THE PROGRAM
posted by moonlight on vermont at 11:25 AM on October 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

sonny --
the New Critics flourished when I was an undergrad, but in Elizabethan academic circles, there were textual scholars such as Fredson Bowers who worked with accuracy of texts; scholars who worked with authorship issues and historical analysis (prior to Greenblatt and the New Historicism), etc., so that issues of dual authorship, printing history, staging, censorship, etc were all being studied at the same time as the New Critics were continuing their search for symbols, chasing them with butterfly nets, and wondering who those foreign people were that called themselves structuralists and deconstructionists.
posted by Postroad at 11:57 AM on October 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Tear them both for their bad verses!
posted by comealongpole at 1:40 PM on October 26, 2016

Certainly, Postroad. I'm not denying the huge amount of bibliographical work that went on mid-century. But authorship and attribution studies did go through a long period of unfashionableness. Sure, there were still people working on Middleton and Fletcher and their potential collaborations with Shakespeare, but if you read mid-20th-century editions of previously disintegrated plays like the Henry VI trilogy, you find editorial arguments against collaboration being made based on the concept of "organic unity," which certainly sound New Critical to me. Hugh Grady's written about this.
posted by Sonny Jim at 3:20 PM on October 26, 2016

Well, it's been a pretty slow 20,000 weeks on the Shakespeare news front.

What are you talking about. SHAKESPEARE'S HEAD IS MISSING!
posted by maxsparber at 3:41 PM on October 26, 2016

Aristotle argued for organic unity...was he a new critic?
posted by Postroad at 7:22 PM on October 26, 2016

Marlowe is believed to have died in 1593 when he was stabbed under mysterious circumstances.

I thought he was stabbed under the ribs.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:32 PM on October 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Aristotle argued for organic unity...was he a new critic?

It's about the critical moment, though—the specific form of criticism that was dominant in the mid-twentieth century and the impact that had on both critical and editorial practice. For the New Critics, following Brooks, the task of the critic was the resolution of opposites and tensions—the proof, through an act of bravura close reading, that the various parts of a poem cohered into a satisfying "unity." There's the suggestion of a problem—that the poem is in some way broken-backed—and the critic "solves" that problem by demonstrating in the act of criticism that in fact the problem itself is an illusion.

This form of literary-critical practice undeniably segues over into editorial rhetoric in the mid-twentieth century. The Introductions to a number of influential editions of previously disintegrated plays in the mid-twentieth century perform the same kind of work. There's the suggestion of a problem—usually, this is a citation of previous scholarship, often from the nineteenth century, suggesting that the play was a collaboration between Shakespeare and someone else. There's the assertion that a collaborative play would necessarily be "broken" or incoherent or unfulfilled in some way, and then an assertion by the editor that the play in fact can't be collaborative because its internal patterns of language, imagery, and plot are coherent and unified and therefore all the products of a single authorial hand. Here's Andrew Cairncross in the Introduction to the 1962 New Arden 1 Henry VI, showing how this works in practice. "A theory of collaboration [for the play] . . . seems to me no longer in keeping with the progress of Shakespeare criticism," he writes. Instead,

the play bears the stamp of a single mind ... 1 Henry VI is ... not a 'Talbot' play; nor does the evidence suggest that any part of it is by another hand; nor that it is adapted. It is of the same stuff and conception as the other parts of the series, which portrays, in itself, as in each member, a unity not of plot or character, but of idea and design and imagery.

That's how collaboration was denied, and it's that critical mindset (dominant, if not hegemonic, for much of the twentieth century) that the Oxford (and now New Oxford) Shakespeares are aiming at with stylometric and linguistic evidence. But it's a project that's taken decades to get to this point.
posted by Sonny Jim at 2:59 AM on October 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

'And yet the million monkeys toil on, unheeded.'

Blurst. Reference. ever
posted by Myeral at 12:36 PM on October 27, 2016

> Marlowe is believed to have died in 1593 when he was stabbed under mysterious circumstances.

I thought he was stabbed under the ribs.

I thought it was those two men who came through the door with guns.
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:24 AM on October 28, 2016