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Oxford Professors Claim Shakespeare Co-Authored 'All's Well That Ends Well' With Thomas Middleton

The Huffington Post UK  |  By Posted: 25/04/2012 10:48 Updated: 25/04/2012 12:48

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Academics at Oxford University believe that William Shakespeare worked with a co-author when writing All's Well That Ends Well.

Just days after the Bard's birthday, the new study claims that one of his contemporaries, playwright Thomas Middleton, is the most likely collaborator after examining inconsistency in the play's text.

Rhyming patterns, grammar and specific words were all put under the microscope by Professor Laurie Maguire and Dr Emma Smith of the university's English department.

Maguire told the BBC that the word 'ruttish', for example, which means lustful, only appears at that time in a separate work by Middleton.

She said she is 'very confident' that theory is correct, and claimed that the majority of plays from Shakespeare's era were collaborative.

"We need to think of it more as a film studio with teams of writers," she said.

The theory will no doubt interest conspiracy theorists who since midway through the 19th Century have questioned the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

One of the longest-running and divisive topics in literature, sceptics over the years have tried to discredit Shakespeare with more than 70 different candidates, including the aristocrat Sir Walter Raleigh and dramatist Christopher Marlowe.

Last year saw the release of Anonymous, a major film starring Rhys Ifans that was based on the theory that Shakespeare's play were actually written by Edward de Vere, the Lord of Oxford - a theory based on the popular idea that Shakespeare would have been too uneducated to produce many of the cultural and classical references in his work.

The concept of co-authorship may seem a more moderate theory, but it is not a new one.

In fact, the first time Shakespeare's authorship was openly questioned was by a Joseph C Hart, who also believed there were other hands at work in the plays.

In his 1848 book The Romance of Yachting, Hart claimed that Shakespeare merely adapted the works of more educated playwrights to make them popular for the stage, and that his only original contribution were the crude jokes sometimes deployed by his characters.

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Academics at Oxford University believe that William Shakespeare worked with a co-author when writing All's Well That Ends Well. Just days after the Bard's birthday, the new study claims that one o...
Academics at Oxford University believe that William Shakespeare worked with a co-author when writing All's Well That Ends Well. Just days after the Bard's birthday, the new study claims that one o...
 
 
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Fair Dues
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21:05 on 05/05/2012
Oh, here we go again..WHY can't people just enjoy the language and the plays instead of carrying on pointless discussions about whether Shakespeare was the writer..?
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Popaluma
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07:52 on 04/05/2012
This old hoary claim, again.

Shakespeare of course, was a con-artist. We know this because such stupid, easily fooled men like John Milton ('On Shakespeare') and Ben Jonson (To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us) were totally taken in by the master charlatan and imposter. As if.

Up the Ruling Classes!
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Roger Cottrell
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14:40 on 25/04/2012
As a working class writer I tire of the "Shakespeare couldn't have written his own plays because he was a working class oik" culture that has drivelled on for decades. There are all sorts of reasons why we KNOW Shakespeare wrote his plays even if he used THEMES that had been ventilated in previous productions. For example, there were verisons of Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare's - so what? If our present era teaches us anything its that well heeled cretins like David Cameron can't run a country so whyshoudl they have some kind of cultural superiority in terns of narrative construction. The fusion of Aristotle's classical narrative structure and method with secondary plot lines and evices drawn from the miracle plays common in Startford of the time plus slices of social realism all point to ONE writer of plebeian stiock. Get over it. Shakespeare's one of us and didn't need any help from the toffs to whom his plays are actually quite ambivelant.
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sabelmouse
i love to tumble , ask me why .
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12:39 on 07/05/2012
f&f
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OliverKamm
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13:20 on 25/04/2012
There is an important recent body of scholarship on collaborative authorship in Shakespeare's plays, notably but not only in contributions by Middleton, Wilkins and Fletcher to the Jacobean works. And there is the crank conspiracy theory, held by no serious scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and with literally no documentary evidence in its support, that Shakespeare was a frontman for the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon or whoever. It's dismaying that the author of this article can't distinguish between the two and has thereby trivialised an important subject in Shakespearian research.
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inapickle
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12:00 on 26/04/2012
Thank you. I was searching for the words to express the same sentiment.
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sgfeldman
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05:49 on 29/04/2012
There is abundant title page evidence, now discounted by serious Shakespeare scholars but clearly accepted as genuine in the Bard's own time, that William Shakespeare wrote a series of plays now assigned to the "Shakespeare Apocrypha" or designated as Shakespearean "bad quartos." This qualifies as documentary evidence that William Shakespeare was the main author of a series of mediocre plays which modern scholars no longer attribute to him. There is also clear evidence for the existence of a major hidden poet at court during Shakespeare's time, and for the existence of a mediocre poet/playwright who served as a front man (or "Batillus") for the works of a great poet. It's dismaying that Oliver Kamm assumes that all people who question the traditional story about the lad from Stratford -- who hoarded grain during a famine; pursued his creditors in court for small sums of money; left his wife no more than his second-best bed in his crabby, mean-spirited will; apparently allowed his daughters to be raised as illiterature or marginally literate; and signed his name six different ways in six different scrawled signatures -- must be crank conspiracy theorists. --Sabrina Feldman (http://apocryphalshakespeare.com)
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HellBank
Curve: The loveliest distance between two points.
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13:10 on 25/04/2012
Crickets.
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