After all these years, someone might have figured out exactly how much Shakespeare worked on one of his last plays. It's long been suspected that Shakespeare didn't write the whole of Henry VIII, but now, thanks to machine learning, we could know just how much he outsourced to a playwright friend. For those of you who aren't up on your Shakespeare, the notion that Henry VIII may have had more than one formal author is also a very old one, born from the fact that some of the scenes just don't "sound" like Shakespeare. His co-author is generally supposed to be his successor, John Fletcher. They also collaborated on The Two Noble Kinsmen: both of their names were on the published edition.

'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.

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.