Artificial intelligence used to determine how much of Henry VIII was written by Shakespeare
Artificial intelligence has been used to determine how much of the play ' Henry VIII' was written by William Shakespeare and how much was penned by John Fletcher.
Fletcher replaced Shakespeare as the house playwright for acting troupe The King's Men in 1616 and, while literary experts have long known Henry VIII was a collaborative work, they didn't know how much of the work was written by Fletcher.
To solve the puzzle, Czech artificial intelligence researcher,
, decided to train a machine-learning algorithm on the works of Shakespeare, Fletcher and other contemporary writers.
He then ' let it loose' on a the text of Henry VIII to see if it could determine the true authorship of each scene.
says the algorithm proves that Fletcher wrote several scenes - including much of the second act. It also found a lot of joint scenes and collaboration.
The theory that Fletcher contributed to Henry VIII was first proposed by literary analyst James Spedding in 1850 after he noticed similarities between Fletcher's plays and parts of Henry VIII.
Spedding suggested that Fletcher regularly writes ' ye' instead of ' you' and 'em' instead of ' them' which he says were linguistic characteristics found in Henry VIII.
'Our results highly support the canonical division of the play between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher proposed by James Spedding,' Mr. Plechac from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague told the MIT Technology Review.
As part of its training, the algorithm was taught to recognise plays Fletcher wrote at the time, including Valentinian, Monsieur Thomas, The Woman's Prize, and Bonduca.
It was also taught to recognise Shakespeare' s style by examining some of his other plays from the same period: The Tragedy of Coriolanus, The Tragedy of Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.
Mr. Plechac also trained the algorithm to recognise the work of Philip Massinger, another suspected Shakespeare collaborator from the time.
' The participation of Philip Massinger is rather unlikely,' he said.
The machine learning technique takes a body of the author's work to train the algorithm then a smaller body of their work to test it on.
As an author's style can change over their lifetime it had to be tested on work from a similar period, which is why there were a small subset of plays by each author involved in the testing process.
Once it has learned the author's style and commonly used words and patterns, it can then recognise that pattern in works it has never seen - which is how it was able to determine line-by-line authorship of Henry VIII.
Out of the 17 scenes in the play the algorithm found that seven were written exclusively by Shakespeare and five by Fletcher.
The algorithm found that Shakespeare wrote the first two scenes of the play, Fletcher likely wrote act 1 scene 3 through to act 2 scene 3 and then Shakespeare took over until act 3 scene 1.
Plechac said: 'We can thus state with high reliability that Henry VIII is a result of collaboration between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher.'