Did Shakespeare write 'Double Falsehood'?

In another great news for Shakespeare aficionados, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, US, have discovered a unique psychological profile that characterises Shakespeare's established works.

Applying psychological theory and text-analysing software, they found that this profile strongly identified Shakespeare as an author of the long-contested play "Double Falsehood".

"Double Falsehood" was published in 1728 by British author Lewis Theobald, who claimed to have based the play on three original Shakespeare manuscripts.

The manuscripts have since been lost, presumably destroyed by a library fire, and authorship of the play has been hotly contested ever since.

Some scholars believe that Shakespeare was the true author of "Double Falsehood" while others believe that the play was actually an original work by Theobald himself that he tried to pass off as an adaptation.

Research in psychology has shown that some of the core features of who a person is at their deepest level can be revealed based on how they use language.

"With our new study, we show that you can actually take a lot of this information and put it all together at once to understand an author like Shakespeare rather deeply," explained lead research Ryan Boyd.

For the results, Boyd and his colleague James Pennebaker examined 33 plays by Shakespeare, 12 by Theobald, and nine by John Fletcher, a colleague (and sometime collaborator) of Shakespeare.

The texts were stripped of extraneous information (such as publication information) and were processed using software that evaluated the works for specific features determined by the researchers.

For example, the researchers' software examined the playwrights' use of function words (pronouns, articles, prepositions) and words belonging to various content categories (emotions, family, sensory perception, religion).

By aggregating dozens of psychological features of each playwright, Boyd and Pennebaker were able to create a psychological signature for each individual.

They were then able to look at the psychological signature of "Double Falsehood" to determine who the author was most likely to be.

"Looking at the plays as whole units, the results were clear: Every measure but one identified Shakespeare as the likely author of 'Double Falsehood," Boyd noted.

Theobald was identified as the best match only when it came to his use of content words and even then only by one of the three statistical approaches the researchers used.

The research shows that it is indeed possible to start modelling people's mental worlds in much more complete ways.

"We do not need a time machine and a survey form to figure out what type of person Shakespeare was -- we can determine that very accurately just based on how he wrote using methods that are objective and easy to do," Boyd informed.

The findings were published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

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