'Henry VIII' was a collaborative work by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. After Shakespeare's death in 1616, Fletcher replaced him as the house playwright for acting troupe The King's Men. It was a known fact to literary experts that the play was written by both Shakespeare and Fletcher, but it remained unknown as to who penned what parts of the play. Czech artificial intelligence researcher, Petr Plecháč, decided to solve this mystery by training a machine-learning algorithm on the works of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and other contemporary writers. As per his findings, the algorithm proved that several scenes of the play were written by Fletcher including much of the second act.

When the scholar James Spedding analysed the authorship of Shakespeare's Henry VIII in 1850, he pored over the details of the text and eventually attributed the play not only to the Bard, but to his successor at the King's Men theatre company, John Fletcher. Now 169 years later, an academic has used artificial intelligence to back up Spedding's theory and pin down exactly who wrote what. Petr Plechac from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague trained an algorithm on scenes from Shakespeare's later plays Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, and on Fletcher's Valentinian, Monsieur Thomas, The Woman's Prize and Bonduca. He also ran a selection of scenes from works by Philip Massinger, Fletcher's successor at the King's Men and another possible candidate for authorship of Henry VIII, through the algorithm. Plechac then showed the algorithm Henry VIII.

Artificial intelligence has been used to determine how much of the play'Henry VIII' was written by William Shakespeare and how much was penned by John Fletcher. Fletcher replaced Shakespeare as the house playwright for acting troupe The King's Men in 1616 and, while literary experts have long known Henry VIII was a collaborative work, they didn't know how much of the work was written by Fletcher. To solve the puzzle, Czech artificial intelligence researcher, Petr Plecháč, decided to train a machine-learning algorithm on the works of Shakespeare, Fletcher and other contemporary writers. He then'let it loose' on a the text of Henry VIII to see if it could determine the true authorship of each scene. Mr Plecháč says the algorithm proves that Fletcher wrote several scenes - including much of the second act.

For much of his life, William Shakespeare was the house playwright for an acting company called the King's Men that performed his plays on the banks of the River Thames in London. When Shakespeare died in 1616, the company needed a replacement and turned to one of the most prolific and famous playwrights of the time, a man named John Fletcher. Fletcher's fame has since quelled. But in 1850, a literary analyst named James Spedding noticed a remarkable similarity between Fletcher's plays and passages in Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Spedding concluded that Fletcher and Shakespeare must have collaborated on the play.

The MIT Technology Review reports that a scientist claims he knows for sure where Shakespeare ends and his long-suspected collaborator begins. Petr Plecháč used machine learning to train an algorithm on the works of William Shakespeare and another writer named John Fletcher. Literary scholars began speculating on the possibility of shared authorship in 1850, and Plecháč believes he has confirmed that scholar's theory. First, some quick and dirty background on the shared authorship theory. Scholars have always known that Shakespeare was replaced by Fletcher after Shakespeare's death.

The versified play Henry VIII is nowadays widely recognized to be a collaborative work not written solely by William Shakespeare. We employ combined analysis of vocabulary and versification together with machine learning techniques to determine which authors also took part in the writing of the play and what were their relative contributions. Unlike most previous studies, we go beyond the attribution of particular scenes and use the rolling attribution approach to determine the probabilities of authorship of pieces of texts, without respecting the scene boundaries. Our results highly support the canonical division of the play between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher proposed by James Spedding, but also bring new evidence supporting the modifications proposed later by Thomas Merriam. 1 Introduction In the first collection of William Shakespeare's works published in 1623 (the so-called First Folio) a play appears entitled The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight for the very first time. Nowadays it is widely recognized that along with Shakespeare, other authors were involved in the writing of this play, yet there are different opinions as to who these authors were and what the precise shares were of their authorial contributions. This article aims to contribute to the question of the play's authorship using combined analysis of vocabulary and versification and modern machine learning techniques (as proposed in [1,2]). 2 History and related works While the stylistic dissimilarity of Henry VIII (henceforth H8) to Shakespeare's other plays had been pointed out before [3], it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that Shakespeare's sole authorship was called into question. In 1850 British scholar James Spedding published an article [4] attributing several scenes to John Fletcher. Spedding supported this with data from the domain of versification, namely the ratios of iambic lines ending with a stressed syllable ("The arXiv:1911.05652v1