Ay, to the proof: did Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew have two authors?

Since the 18th century, scholars have suspected that William Shakespeare was not the sole author of The Taming of the Shrew. Now dramatic evidence of the hand of his fellow great dramatist Christopher Marlowe has been discovered in “groundbreaking” research.

Linguistic analysis of the 1590s’ comedy has revealed Marlowe as the most plausible candidate, with a database search of all contemporary writings uncovering extensive parallels with his work. This would be the first evidence that the author of Doctor Faustus, about a man who sells his soul to the devil, wrote comedy.

The research has been conducted by Dr John V Nance, an associate editor for The New Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Alternative Versions, who is also working on technology that looks set to revolutionise Shakespeare studies.

Searching for rare lexical matches in the canon of every single English dramatist writing from 1576 to 1594 is laborious, because it is done manually. However, an automated system is about to be launched that will be able to analyse 500 words in seconds, a process that until now has taken weeks.

“We’ll be able to test an entire play in a day,” Nance told the Guardian.

It will still be several weeks before the technology will be available, so Nance’s manual research of the play focused on scene 3, among passages where Shakespeare’s authorship has been doubted.

Shakespeare’s secret co-writer finally takes a bow … 430 years late Read more

In referring to scene 3, he is following the conventions of The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition, where each scene is numbered consecutively. It appears as act 1 scene 1 in other editions.

Nance, a research fellow at Florida State University, said: “Marlowe is the last author that I would have expected to be present in this play – and a bit inconvenient as there’s no real parallel to The Shrew both thematically and stylistically in his canon …

“We don’t think of Marlowe as a comic writer. There are comic instances in Faustus and The Jew of Malta, but those are tinged with a bit of sinister darkness.

“Where we’re spotting Marlowe in scene 3 of The Shrew, this is a different type of comedy, a romantic comedy without anyone being sent to hell. If Marlowe is confirmed as co-author, this is certainly going to reorientate our impression of his interests as a dramatist.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christopher Marlowe, best known as the author of Doctor Faustus, in about 1585. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty

In scene 3, the characters of Lucentio and his servant Tranio arrive in Padua. Nance said: “It’s the scene that presents to us a disaffected scholar, someone who has abandoned the higher learning to experience a more physical and sensual form of being. There may be parallels in that to Faustus.”

He added that the database search discovered that Marlowe has at least 10 times more unique parallels in scene 3 than Shakespeare. This is the exact inverse of what emerged from passages firmly attributed to Shakespeare.

Examples that are unique to Marlowe’s canon and found nowhere else in English drama of the time include the phrase “to be achieved”, which appears in both The Shrew and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, part 1, with exactly the same spelling – “to be atchiev’d”. Marlowe is also the only playwright to use the word “metaphysics” or any variants: “metaphysical” appears in The Shrew, and “metaphisickes” in Faustus.

Nance’s research will appear in a new book, Early Shakespeare, 1588-1594, a major reappraisal of Shakespeare’s early career by various leading scholars, to be published this month by Cambridge University Press.

Dr Rory Loughnane, its co-editor with Andrew J Power, described The Shrew research as “groundbreaking”. Loughnane, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent and a general editor of the Oxford Marlowe editorial project, said: “It has long been suspected that … The Shrew was co-authored. Gary Taylor and I noted in 2017 that it was ‘extremely likely’ that Shakespeare was not the only substantive author. Nance’s new research helps establish this likelihood as a near certainty.

“This is a transformative finding for our understanding of the play’s composition, as well as having significant implications for any critical assessments of the play’s structure, themes and characters. More research is required into the identity of the play’s co-author or co-authors, but any future studies will have to take Marlowe’s candidacy seriously.

“Nance’s groundbreaking research, complementing other exciting new studies in Early Shakespeare, 1588-1594, forces a broader reconsideration of Shakespeare’s early working life and writing practices.”

Through the New Oxford Shakespeare team, Nance has been working with the EarlyPrint database and Anamol Pundle and Patrick Weller of Insight Data Science in Seattle to build automated search programs that will be available to the public for free.

Discussing the technology’s potential, he said: “We’re going to find some more new answers to bold questions.”