It's foolish no doubt to attack a conclusion before reviewing the arguments in detail, but I think it most unlikely that Marlowe was a collaborator on any of the H6 plays. Of all the authors of the 1580s/early 1590s Marlowe is one of the most instantly recognizable. Given how intensively these plays have been read for centuries, it's surprising how rarely the possibility of Marlowe's involvement has been mooted. And when I read Edward II, Marlowe's own history play, I can see why.
Shakespeare's own style, so idiosyncratic in later years, is in 1590 quite hard to distinguish from authors like Greene, Peele or perhaps Nashe (the latter is hard to say, since Nashe wrote nothing like a history play, unless it was this). So it is - or should I say was? - by no means proven that Shakespeare shared the authorship of any of these plays, though the majority of scholars seem to think so for 1H6.
I look forward to being, if not persuaded, at least shaken in my belief. But the Guardian article seems to show a paltry fascination with statistics that is far from inspiring faith in this enterprise. As David rightly points out, Middleton's revisions don't make the plays in question collaborative retrospectively. And a stray interpolated speech or song doesn't seem to me a proper collaboration either. When Shakespeare really collaborates - with Peele on Titus Andronicus, or in the two surviving Fletcher collaborations - you don't need a computer to see what's going on.
|