"The trouble with that approach is that it can't distinguish between bits genuinely writ by old Will and bits penned by someone else deliberately aping his style and using (as the chap behind this freely admits) entire phrases from known Shakespeare plays."
But he breaks it down to Shakespeare writing 40% and Thomas Kyd writing 60%. A collaboration that no author took credit for. Shakespeare was well known at the time but Thomas Kyd wasn't, and the he gets a just as strong a match on Thomas Kyd as he does on Shakespeare.
"So why would the Bard, at this stage in his career - age 32 and well established by the time Edward III was published in 1596 - need to collaborate on a play? Simply because, as literature scholars have documented, the London theaters of the day were competing for audiences and had to churn out material as quickly as possible to stay ahead of one another. To do so, they often used groups of authors to write playbooks in a matter of weeks, paying each author by the scene. The theater companies would then often advertise themselves, rather than the authors, on the published playbooks.
'In Edward III, it's quite a typical arrangement; Shakespeare writes three scenes near the beginning and one later on, presumably to guarantee some kind of continuity," says Vickers. "It's a very good play, but it suffers from some inconsistencies - characters who appear in some of Shakespeare's scenes don't appear later on.'"
It seems unlikely that someone else would fake both Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, together, for the same play, unless it was Thomas Kyd himself. But, then, why wouldn't he fake the whole thing?
Paulo Joe Jingy
"I just couldn't live in a world without me."