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Topic: A Thought Experiment on the Shakespeare Authorship Question Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Steven Brake
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Joined: 01 January 2016
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Posted: 09 May 2025 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply
Michael Penn wrote: One question is what is the date any of the plays were written?

SB replied: Yes, this isn't absolutely settled. 

Michael Penn wrote:  A different one is does the admittedly problematic dating of the plays create a secondary problem in terms of who could've been the author?

SB replied: No. Stylistic analysis of the plays credited to Shakespeare prove - or, if that's too strong a word, strongly indicate - that they are the work of the same person, often working in collaboration with another writer. So the first three parts of Henry VI are written by Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe (the latter now officially credited by The New Oxford Shakespeare), Macbeth contains work by Thomas Middleton,  John Fletcher co-wrote Henry VIII (or "All Is True) and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

As posted before, the role of collaboration compounds the difficulties in arguing that someone other than Will of Stratford was the author, or co-author, of the plays attributed to him in the First Folio.
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Houston Mitchell
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Posted: 10 May 2025 at 1:10am | IP Logged | 2 post reply
If Shakespeare collaborated with another writer, how do we know how much Shakespeare contributed and how much the other writer contributed? Maybe the other guy wrote 98% of it. How do we know?
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Mark Haslett
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Posted: 10 May 2025 at 2:56am | IP Logged | 3 post reply
Houston: If Shakespeare collaborated with another writer, how do we know how much Shakespeare contributed and how much the other writer contributed? Maybe the other guy wrote 98% of it. How do we know?

**

There is no actual answer to that question, Houston.

Working in the TV writing business, I know what it's like to have a project reach audiences after going through many writers. I can speak from experience of how something can become successful for both the writers and the audience in a way that nobody is sure who has the best claim to any particular scene, much less the overall work. And there is a 100% chance that none of our friends, much less strangers born 100 years from now could ever tell either.

Watch one of the writer's room scenes from The Dick Van Dyke show and then imagine that scene going on for 8 hours a day, 5 to 6 days a week for two weeks for an hours' worth of storytelling. Then add another week of one writer putting it together, then two to three weeks of rewrites from one to two other writers.

And look at the Sir Thomas Moore manuscript if you don't think that's how it was done in Shakespeare's day.

Marlowe's plays read like the work of a committee. Several of Shakespeare's plays read like the work of a committee. Some Stratfordians put great stock in their "scientific" "stylometric" methods for recognizing the work of different writers-- but their methods often have massive question marks like not being able to recognize HAMLET as being by Shakespeare. It's bad science and magical thinking.

Anyone who says they can tell who wrote what in a collaborative piece is selling snake oil. It is easy to be convinced you can tell-- but it is a very different thing to arrive at the truth of the matter.

Edited by Mark Haslett on 10 May 2025 at 3:18am
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