Gabriel Egan

Scholars are unsure just what William Shakespeare wrote. We now know that plays published under his name contain contributions from other dramatists, and that he had a hand in others' plays. Moreover, half of Shakespeare's plays are known to us via multiple early versions whose differences might reflect revision of the play by Shakespeare and/or someone else, or censorship, or corruption of the text in scribal and print transmission. This is a project is funded Academies Partnership in Supporting Excellence in Cross-Disciplinary Research (APEX) scheme, grant APX\R1\241032. Two researchers at De Montfort University, Professor Gabriel Egan (expert in Shakespeare) and Professor Raouf Hamzaoui (expert in Information Theory), will collaboratively explore the differences between the early editions of Shakespeare using new information-theoretic techniques that shed light on literary style, habits of revision, censorship, and textual corruption in ways not previously possible. This work is timely as the full set of plays (Shakespeare's and other writers') has only recently become available to investigators as large numbers of well-curated digital texts.