Shakespeare ‘had a co-writer’

Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well might have been co-authored with a fellow playwright, Oxford University academics have found.

Thomas Middleton has been revealed as the most likely co- writer of the comedy, according to analysis of the text, spelling, speech prefixes and narrative phrasing.

Professor Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, of Oxford University’s English faculty, said writers had their own distinctive literary fingerprints and anomalies.