London. A new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare identifies Christopher Marlowe as the co-author of three of his works, an event that throws light on the links between the two great writers after centuries of speculation and conspiracy theories.
Marlowe will be recognized as a co-author of the three plays of Henry VI in the collection New Oxford Shakespeare which will be published in several volumes during the next few weeks for the publishing and press department of the University of Oxford.
“Shakespeare has entered the world of metadata, and there are some questions that we can now respond with confidence and that people have been asking for a long time,” said Gary Taylor, one of the editors of the project, to Reuters.
The issue of whether Shakespeare wrote all the works attributed to him has been the subject of endless conjecture, and one of the theories that are most persistent indicates that they were in fact written by Marlowe, a notion rejected by the experts in the famous playwright.
Taylor said that scholars used databases of works and other writings of the period elizabethan, not only written by Shakespeare or Marlowe, but by many other writers of the time, to find the words or distinctive phrases.
“This type of metadata was available recently,” he said. “There are parts that were clearly written by Shakespeare and others that clearly belong to Marlowe,” he said, and added that the regions most lauded were written by Shakespeare.
The collection New Oxford Shakespeare includes 44 works, of which 17 were identified as works in which they collaborated with other authors. The previous edition of the same publisher, published in 1986, indicated that eight of the 39 works had been subject to collaboration of other writers.
Marlowe, author of “The jew of Malta”, “Doctor Faustus” and “Edward II”, is widely known in popular culture british as the great rival of Shakespeare’s, although Taylor argues that the struggle responds to mere speculation.
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