Abbey Hull for redOrbit.com – @AbbeyHull4160

Using psychological theory and text-analyzing software, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have now created a thematic signature and psychological profile of the late, the great, William Shakespeare within his established works, identifying him as the author of the long-contested play Double Falsehood.

“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,” said researcher Ryan Boyd of UT at Austin.

Now published in Psychological Science, Boyd and fellow researcher James Pennebaker of UT-Austin wanted to discover the identity of Double Falsehood’s author. Double Falsehood, published in 1728 by Lewis Theobald, was said to be inspired by three original Shakespeare manuscripts that have since been lost. Without proof, the authorship of the play has long been debated of whether Shakespeare himself or Theobald was the true author.

To be or not to be the author…

Boyd and Pennebaker examined 33 Shakespearean plays, 12 by Theobald, and 9 by John Fletcher, a colleague (and sometimes collaborator) of Shakespeare. Using text-analyzing software, the plays were broken down by the playwrights’ use of function words (e.g. pronouns, articles, prepositions) and content category words (e.g. emotions, family, religion, senses). The software also identified themes in each of the works to form thematic signatures of each author.

Next, researchers examined each work to determine how “categorical” the writing was. Categorical writing tends to link with a more analytical and formal way of thinking, and so researchers created psychological signatures by studying how heavily function words were used. Those who used categorical thinking tend to be emotionally distant and problem-solve, while those who scored low in categorical thinking more likely live in the moment and focus on social issues.

So, who wrote it?

When comparing the psychological signatures of Shakespeare, Theobald, and Fletching, it was clear that the author of Double Falsehood was most likely Shakespeare. Theobald only matched best once as its author when it came to his content words, and even then only by one of three statistical approaches the researchers used. Further, Theobald was known to be abrasive, but the author of Double Falsehood was more likely sociable.

“I’ve always held huge admiration for scholars who grapple with literature—there is a great deal of detective work that goes into figuring out who the authors really are ‘deep down,’ their motivations, their lives, and how these factors are embedded within their work,” says Boyd. “We demonstrate with our current work that an incredible amount of this information can be extracted automatically from language.”

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