A new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare's will for the first time name Christopher Marlowe as the co-author of three plays, shedding new light on the links between the two great playwrights after centuries of speculation and conspiracy theories.

Marlowe will be listed as co-author of the three Henry VI plays in the New Oxford Shakespeare, due to be published in several instalments over the coming weeks by the Oxford University Press.

"Shakespeare has entered the world of Big Data and there are certain questions that we are now able to answer more confidently that people have been asking for a very long time," Gary Taylor, one of the project's senior editors, said.

The issue of whether Shakespeare wrote all the plays attributed to him has been the subject of endless conjecture, with one persistent theory being that they were actually written by Marlowe – a notion rejected by Shakespeare scholars.