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Shakespeare’s Secret Helper?
William Shakespeare is credited with writing some of the world’s most famous plays—from Romeo and Juliet to King Lear. But did he write them all by himself? Experts have long speculated that he had help, and now, Christopher Marlowe is getting some credit. For the first time, The New Oxford Shakespeare, a respected anthology, is listing Marlowe as co-author of all three Henry VI plays. Marlowe and Shakespeare were contemporary playwrights in 16th-century London. Scholars settled on Marlowe after using computers to analyze the plays and finding language patterns that were close to Marlowe’s own work. Not everyone agrees, but if Shakespeare did have a secret co-author, does that make him a fraud? No, says Rebecca Bushnell, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania. What it does mean, she says, is that we should see these works “more as collaborative efforts than the output of a single, controlling genius.”