Shakespeare's fingerprints identified on 3 Elizabethan-era plays

Experts have claimed that William Shakespeare may have penned parts of three Elizabethan-era plays after a new linguistic “fingerprinting” test discovered his fingerprints on the manuscripts.

The three plays – ‘Arden of Faversham’, ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ and ‘Mucedorus’, which were previously believed to have been written by others, will now be included in a new edition of works by the famous playwright, ‘William Shakespeare and others: Collaborative plays’, the Guardian reported.

A renowned Shakespeare scholar, Jonathan Bate, believes that the evidence shows that specific parts within those plays must have had input from Shakespeare.

Bate, professor of English literature at Oxford University, said that the upcoming issue is perhaps the single most significant lacuna in 21st-century Shakespearean scholarship.

Bate added that the advanced computer-assisted analysis presents Shakespeare in a new light – as “reviser, rewriter and collaborator”.

The three plays will be published by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Palgrave Macmillan.