A Bombshell New Study Suggests Shakespeare May Not Have Written 15 of His Famous Plays

Yahoo

04-04-2025

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com
William Shakespeare is undeniably one of the most famous writers in human history. The 39 shows attributed to the 'Bard of Avon' have been performed, adapted, and studied innumerable times in the centuries since they debuted, and his 154 sonnets are some of the most quoted poems in the world.
The very name Shakespeare has become synonymous with the dramatic arts. But for a segment of the literary community some might call 'conspiracy theorists,' it shouldn't be.
Not because they believe the plays themselves, like Hamlet and Julius Caesar, are incorrectly placed within the literary canon. Rather, they think they're simply incorrectly labeled; specifically, on the author page.
This contingency, known as the Anti-Stratfordians (in reference to Shakespeare's home of Stratford-upon-Avon), argue that The Bard's lack of education and modest upbringing don't square with the vast vocabulary on display in Shakespeare's celebrated plays. 'They note that both of Shakespeare's parents were likely illiterate,' Biography.com states in further explaining the stance of the Anti-Stratfordians, 'and it seems as if his surviving children were as well, leading to skepticism that a noted man of letters would neglect the education of his own children.'
The Anti-Stratfordians also claim that 'none of the letters and business documents that survive give any hint of Shakespeare as an author,' and raise questions like 'Why was there no public mourning for him when he died?'
But these claims can all be refuted to one degree or another by those who believe in Shakespeare's authorship. Shakespeare's modest background? It's ultimately not dissimilar to that of Christopher Marlowe, a peer of Shakespeare's whose authorship of celebrated plays like Doctor Faustus has never been in doubt. In response to the claim of a lack of contemporary records, Biography.com notes that 'Tudor officials responsible for ascertaining authorship of plays attributed several works to Shakespeare.' And the claim of a lack of mourning is undercut by no less than Jacobean author Ben Jonson, whose esteemed poem 'To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, William Shakespeare' reads:
'To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much'
These debates of authorship tend to treat inference as evidence, and as such, can never really be conclusive. But a new study published by Oxford University Press offers new insight into the authorship debate. And it does so by taking the human element out entirely.
The study from Zeev Volkovich and Renata Avros, titled 'Comprehension of the Shakespeare authorship question through deep impostors approach,' decided to see if a deep neural network could do what centuries of scholars could not: conclusively identify works attributed to, but not written by, William Shakespeare.
The duo refer to their methodology for the analysis as 'Deep Imposter':
'The approach uses a set of known impostor texts to analyze the origin of a target text collection. Both the target texts and impostors are divided into an equal number of word segments. A deep neural network, either a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) or a pre-trained BERT transformer, is then trained and fine-tuned to differentiate between impostor segments.'
After a process which converted these text segments into numerical signals, the tested texts were clustered into two groups, which can be simplified into a score of 1 or 2. Those texts in cluster 1 would be those determined to be 'imposter texts' not composed by the author in question.
When Shakespeare's works were run through the aforementioned CNN neural network, a staggering fifteen titles were placed into cluster 1. Those included not just the usual suspects of 'Shakespeare Apocrypha' (works with no clear author sometimes attributed to Shakespeare) like A Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Faversham, but also some of the most beloved staples of the Shakespeare canon like The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
But before you go scribbling out Shakespeare's name from your copy of King John, understand that this isn't an ironclad system, nor do the study's authors claim it is. Instead, they note that this study was intended to introduce 'a novel methodology for investigating the stylistic fingerprints of authorship' in a way that 'goes beyond analyzing isolated words, encompassing intricate patterns across multiple linguistic structures.'
Earlier tests they cite in their study show that a work appearing in cluster 1 doesn't mean with absolute certainty that it's not written by its attributed author. For example, an early test fed the neural network some works by the authors Charles Dickens and John Galsworthy. 'The distribution of works within the clusters accurately reflects their original authorship,' the team behind the study wrote wrote. 'Specifically, two of the three sections of 'A Christmas Carol' are attributed to Charles Dickens. In contrast, only one of the six parts of 'Flowering Wilderness' is included in this category.' But nobody should come away from reading this study becoming a 'one-third of A Christmas Carol' truthers or anything like that. Dickens' authorship of that famous story isn't in doubt, nor is the aforementioned Galsworthy's of Flowering Wilderness.
So, what could be causing this misidentification? The study cites another test run, this one feeding the neural network the works of essayist Francis Bacon and playwright Christopher Marlowe. This found a number of Bacon's essays falling into cluster 1. Their explanation? Not some second, false author posing as Bacon, but rather Bacon's own 'literary journey.' Bacon reworked and refined his Essays from 1597 to 1625, such that they 'span a spectrum of styles, from the straightforward and unadorned to the epigrammatic.' Therefore, a departure in literary style from one work to another doesn't necessarily mean a different authorial hand, but rather an artistic development playing out over years of trial and error, as well as personal growth.
Few authors with any prolific volume will sound identical to themselves from years earlier, especially if their work undergoes heavy revisions over time. Particularly in the case of a dramatist, revisions, rewordings, and entire reworkings of plays can occur based on rehearsals, collaborator suggestions, and audience reactions. So, while this method can point out that A Midsummer Night's Dream is linguistically distinct from the bulk of Shakespeare's other work, it can't say for sure whether that's because the play was written by a secret second author, or just a case of throwing in a riff on Apuleius' The Golden Ass to get an extra giggle or two out of an audience—even if it wasn't Shakespeare's usual style.
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