AI 'reveals Shakespeare and Fletcher’s different roles in Henry VIII'

Czech academic Petr Plechac has run tiny pieces of text through a new algorithm that he says identifies their distinct contributions

When the scholar James Spedding analysed the authorship of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in 1850, he pored over the details of the text and eventually attributed the play not only to the Bard, but to his successor at the King’s Men theatre company, John Fletcher. Now 169 years later, an academic has used artificial intelligence to back up Spedding’s theory and pin down exactly who wrote what.

Petr Plechac from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague trained an algorithm on scenes from Shakespeare’s later plays Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, and on Fletcher’s Valentinian, Monsieur Thomas, The Woman’s Prize and Bonduca. He also ran a selection of scenes from works by Philip Massinger, Fletcher’s successor at the King’s Men and another possible candidate for authorship of Henry VIII, through the algorithm.

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