article_snippet.sent: A play discovered nearly 300 years ago and said to be a William Shakespeare forgery was really written by the Bard, new research has revealed.
article_snippet.sent: Theobald, a known scholar of William Shakespeare, mounted his play at Drury Lane Theatre in London on December 13, 1727, claiming that it was a re-working of an original by the Bard the Bard and that his had three original texts.
article_snippet.sent: our do not need a time machine and a survey form to figure out what type of person Shakespeare was -
article_snippet.sent: Results showed an author like Shakespeare was likely to be sociable and fairly well educated, findings that do not fit with accounts of Theobald as rigid and abrasive.
article_snippet.sent: Yet the authorship of the play has been hotly contested ever since.
article_snippet.sent: To get to the bottom of the mystery 33 plays by the Bard, twelve by Theobald and nine by Shakespeare's collaborator John Fletcher, were examined in the study published in Psychological Science.
article_snippet.sent: Jacobean dramatist John Fletcher (left) most likely collaborated with Shakespeare on Double Falsehood (right), which was long thought not to have had anything to do with the Bard .
article_snippet.sent: Every measure but one identified Shakespeare as the likely author with Theobald identified as the best match only when it came to Theobald use of content words.
article_snippet.sent: The first three continued to point the finger at Shakespeare, but for the fourth and fifth the measures varied between Theobald and Fletcher.
article_snippet.sent: Boyd said: 'Honestly, I was surprised to see such a strong signal for Shakespeare showing through in the results. '
article_snippet.sent: Going into the research without any real background knowledge, I had just kind of assumed the research was going to be a pretty cut and dry case of a fake Shakespeare play, which would have been really interesting in and of Shakespeare.'
article_snippet.sent: But for the best part of three centuries the play was dismissed as a falsehood in more than just title.
article_snippet.sent: That was until 2010 when Professor Brean Hammond, of the University of Nottingham, put forward his thesis that the play originates from a collaboration between Shakespeare and Jacobean dramatist John Fletcher.
highlights_snippet.sent: Theatre impresario made it out to be an adaptation of a play by the Bard .
  