Researchers Discover Potentially Lost Shakespeare Play

A work by Shakespeare might have turned up 400 years after it was initially written.

According to CNN, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have discovered that Lewis Theobald's 1728 play DOUBLE FALESHOODS may have actually been penned by the great writer, alongside his friend John Fletcher, nearly 100 years prior.

"The match between the 'Double Falsehood' play and Shakespeare was a landslide. It was shockingly clear," Ryan L. Boyd, who co-wrote and researched the play with James W. Pennebaker, said.

The pair parsed through 33 of Shakespeare's and a handful by both Fletcher and Theobald. Their findings created a "psychological signature" of the authors "based on word choices, phrase patterns and other factors," as CNN explains.

The abstract of the research piece reads:

"More than 100 years after Shakespeare's death, Lewis Theobald published Double Falsehood, a play supposedly sourced from a lost play by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Since its release, scholars have attempted to determine its true authorship. Using new approaches to language and psychological analysis, we examined Double Falsehood and the works of Theobald, Shakespeare, and Fletcher. Specifically, we created a psychological signature from each author's language and statistically compared the features of each signature with those of Double Falsehood's signature. Multiple analytic approaches converged in suggesting that Double Falsehood's psychological style and content architecture predominantly resemble those of Shakespeare, showing some similarity with Fletcher's signature and only traces of Theobald's. Closer inspection revealed that Shakespeare's influence is most apparent early in the play, whereas Fletcher's is most apparent in later acts. Double Falsehoodhas a psychological signature consistent with that expected to be present in the long-lost play The History of Cardenio, cowritten by Shakespeare and Fletcher."

To read the entire new piece of research, click here.