The new claim that Shakespeare collaborated with Marlowe is more complicated than it looks

Poor, overlooked Christopher Marlowe, the other great Elizabethan playwright, just got a big publicity boost. The editors of The New Oxford Shakespeare recently announced that they’ll be listing Marlowe as the co-author of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III. Using as-yet unpublished computerized textual analysis, they think they can prove that Marlowe and Shakespeare collaborated on the three plays.

It’s the sort of big, splashy announcement that draws attention from even those outside academia: It got picked up by the Guardian, NPR, the New York Times. In some cases, that’s because journalists wanted to pretend that this means we have proof that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. (No one is saying that, including the editors of The New Oxford Shakespeare.) But mostly it’s because it’s exciting to think that two of the greatest literary minds of their time actually did work together. It’s sort of like finding out that Beethoven and Mozart somehow wrote a sonata together: How exciting that two geniuses collaborated! Also, kind of weird that the result wasn’t that good!

But not every Shakespeare scholar is convinced that the argument that Shakespeare and Marlowe collaborated is as definitive as the New Oxford editors say it is.

Who is Christopher Marlowe?

It’s a shame Marlowe isn’t better known, in part because he really was a great writer, and in part because he had the kind of hilariously overwrought life that begs for a biopic. Historical evidence suggests that he may have been a spy for Queen Elizabeth. He was arrested for atheism, and he died of a knife to the face in a drunken tavern brawl at age 29. In between, he had time to become one of the greatest poets of his age.

Marlowe’s professional writing career was only six years long, from 1587 to 1593, but it was massively influential. (He would have overlapped just barely with Shakespeare, who started writing professionally in the mid 1580s at the earliest and 1592 at the latest.) Marlowe popularized the use of blank verse in theater, meaning he popularized the verses of unrhymed iambic pentameter that would give Shakespeare’s plays their lilting musicality. And his Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II is widely considered to be the first great English tragic drama.

It is also one of the darkest and bloodiest plays you are ever likely to come across. (Technically, two of the darkest and bloodiest plays.) Over the course of the two parts, Tamburlaine conquers and slaughters his way across multiple continents. He tortures and humiliates his enemies, locking them in cages and using them as footstools, and he slaughters women and children, all in pursuit of his own power and glory.

That ethos is, more or less, par for the course when it comes to Marlowe. His plays are dark and cynical, filled with characters who pursue power for the sake of power, whose means are bloody and whose ends are ignoble. And his characters are rarely given to examining their own motives, at least not the way Shakespeare’s are.

Marlowe’s plays tend to be less interested in their characters’ psychologies than Shakespeare’s, even when they’re working with the same general type. Shakespeare’s Shylock, the Jewish money-lender of The Merchant of Venice who demands a pound of flesh from his victims, was inspired by Barabas, the murderous Jewish money-lender of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta — but The Merchant of Venice cares about how Shylock thinks and why he would demand a pound of flesh. Shylock gets to make that famous “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech. He has an inner life, and the audience is asked to empathize with him despite his dark deeds.

Barabas, meanwhile, cheerfully tells his conspirator that “we are villains both” and goes on to act like a villain for the rest of the play without any more navel-gazing. Barabas is a villain because he says he is, and because in Marlowe’s world just about everybody is villainous. There’s no need to give them monologues explaining the reasons behind their dark deeds. They just do them.

What are these three Henry VI plays?

The three Henry IV plays are probably some of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, and widely agreed to be some of his weakest, especially Part I. They cover the War of the Roses, which is the part of English history that dissolves into a blur of people with the same names enmeshed in a bloody power struggle for no clear reason. (So far, so Marlowe.) 1 Henry VI begins at the funeral of Henry V, and 3 Henry VI ends with the coronation of Edward IV; in between, there’s all sorts of treachery and shifting alliances and double-crossing as England approaches a civil war that won’t be fully resolved until Richard III.

Scholars have thought for years that Shakespeare might have written the Henry VI plays in collaboration with someone else, mostly because they are, to put it kindly, uneven. In 1949, T. M. Parrott called 1 Henry VI a “poor play … a thing of shreds and patches, and only a few of the patches can be recognized as sewn on by Shakespeare’s hand.” On the whole, the three plays lack the psychological insight that characterizes Shakespeare’s later work. Critics also thought that Joan of Arc was treated inconsistently — sometimes depicted as a witch and sometimes as a martyr — and that the blank verse was too variable in its quality to all have come from Shakespeare.

But these arguments are all subjective, based on aesthetics. There’s never been a smoking gun proving that Shakespeare had a collaborator for these plays — and, after all, they appear in the First Folio with Shakespeare’s name on the cover, with no co-author mentioned. And while Marlowe has been a popular candidate as the possible co-author, no one has ever claimed to have definitive proof that he was absolutely involved in writing the Henry VIs. Until now.

The New Oxford Shakespeare’s claim is based on statistical computer analysis

The editors of The New Oxford Shakespeare argue that they’ve been able to use computers to quantify and measure the kinds of aesthetic disparities critics have been quibbling over for years. Gary Taylor, the lead editor, explained the process to NPR:

For one example, the word glory is not all that unusual in plays of the period. And the verb droopeth, you know, it occurs in a number of different writers. But if you put those two words together right next to each other, glory droopeth, that occurs in one of these disputed passages in "Henry VI, Part 1." The only other place it occurs in all the plays of the period is in a play by Marlowe.

Now, just those two words by themselves would not be enough. But when you find a number of unusual combinations of this kind all clustered together in one place, then the simplest explanation for that is that there's two different writers here.

In other words, Taylor and his colleagues have used computers to identify word clusters that are common in Shakespeare’s plays, and word clusters that are less common in Shakespeare’s plays and more common in works by other contemporary dramatists, like Marlowe’s “glory droopeth.” Then they used computers to find and count the iterations of those word clusters in the Henry Sixes. Based on the pattern of word clusters they identified and counted, they have concluded that there is more than one author of the Henry VI plays, and that Marlowe is that co-author.

Not all Shakespeare scholars find that argument convincing.

Why some scholars are skeptical

It’s worth bearing in mind that the edition of the New Oxford Shakespeare that lays out this argument and all the accompanying research hasn’t been published yet, so all of the scholars I talked to were careful to make the caveat that they aren’t working with full knowledge of the data. The one scholar I’ve spoken with who has seen some of the data, Jonathan Hope of the University of Strathclyde, assured me that “It is very thorough and respectable.”

But according to these experts, there are a few reasons to be skeptical about the New Oxford Shakespeare’s claims:

1. Marlowe was a great writer, and the Henry VI plays aren’t that good

The main argument for the idea that Shakespeare had a co-author for the Henry VI plays is that they’re not consistently up to Shakespeare’s standard — but that doesn’t mean that they’re up to Marlowe’s standard, either. Marlowe’s style was noticeably different from Shakespeare’s, but it was still really, really good. If Shakespeare and Marlowe collaborated, you would expect a play that had some noticeable tonal shifts but also had at least really good — if not great — blank verse all the way through. The Henry VI plays are not really good all the way through.

Again, this is an aesthetic argument, so it’s hard to be definitive, but experts on Marlowe and Shakespeare remain skeptical.

Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard, the author of Will in the World, said, “I’m a bit skeptical [of the claim that Marlowe is a co-author], mostly because those plays seem pretty crude to me, in the way I associate with the more usual candidates for collaboration, especially George Peele. But I suppose it is possible.”

And Eric Rasmussen, who co-edited Oxford’s edition of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Other Plays and the Arden edition of 3 Henry VI, sees only a little Marlowe in the Henry VI plays. “I would agree that there’s a whiff of Marlowe in the Jack Cade scenes in Part 2,” he says, “but otherwise not much.”

2. The word-cluster methodology is not necessarily definitive

The New Oxford Shakespeare’s methodology depends on the idea that we can reliably link a given word cluster to a given writer. But as John Drakakis of the University of Stirling told me, that’s not necessarily the case. “Dramatists could imitate each other,” Drakakis says, “so what looks like a Marlovian style might have been Shakespeare imitating someone else.”

So that “glory droopeth” in 1 Henry VI might be Marlowe using one of his favorite phrases — or it could have been Shakespeare trying to sound like one of his favorite writers. We don’t know for sure.

It’s also not clear that we can definitively say that Marlowe used the phrase “glory droopeth” more than any of his contemporaries. Of all the printed matter produced in the Elizabeth era, only about 15 to 20 percent survives today, Drakakis says. That means that it’s much more difficult to make a statistically significant claim about the relative frequency of Elizabethan word usage than Taylor and his colleagues are suggesting.

3. Oxford Shakespeare has a history of making splashy claims it’s not always able to back up

Rasmussen pointed out that Oxford has a bad track record when it comes to making exciting new discoveries about Shakespeare:

The first edition of the Oxford Shakespeare, back in 1986, was ushered in with banner headlines throughout the world heralding that it would include a newly discovered poem, “Shall I fly? Shall I die?” (an attribution that never got any traction). It was an edition obsessed with its own uniqueness: changing Falstaff’s name to “Oldcastle” and the title of King Henry VIII to All is True, etc.

The edition in question was co-edited by Gary Taylor, who is also the lead editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare who I quoted above. Taylor led the publicity campaign to convince the world that Shakespeare was the author of an unknown poem, discussing the story of his discovery in the New York Times. But it never gained much traction in the academy, because “Shall I fly? Shall I die?” is a terrible poem that doesn’t use language consistent with Shakespeare’s, and the links tying it to Shakespeare were never that substantial in the first place.

Now, when collections of Shakespeare’s work include “Shall I fly,” they list it as apocrypha or as a contested work; many don’t list it as all. And similarly, Falstaff remains Falstaff and Henry VIII remains Henry VIII in almost all the reputable editions of Shakespeare.

But that doesn’t mean that all of the 1986 edition’s claims have been discounted. As Taylor pointed out to the Guardian, the 1986 edition proposed that Shakespeare had worked with a collaborator on eight of his plays. At the time, that claim was novel and contested, but now it’s been widely accepted.

We don’t know for sure if Marlowe worked on the Henry VI plays, but we do know who the winners are here

So what we’re left with is a claim that sounds big and exciting but is supported by dubious methodology and made by a scholar with a mixed track record. Scholars may keep debating this claim for a while, but there’s every chance that the “Marlowe co-wrote the Henry VI plays” claim will go the way of “Shakespeare wrote ‘Shall I fly.’”

But that doesn’t mean there are no winners in this scenario. The New Oxford Shakespeare is getting a nice, dramatic publicity boost, a much bigger one than most new editions of Shakespeare get. The little-performed and little-read Henry VI plays are suddenly the object of international interest for the first time in a very long time. And poor, overlooked Christopher Marlowe is making headlines, which is a win for us all.

Now go read Tamburlaine.

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