A new edition of William Shakespeare's complete works will name Christopher Marlowe as co-author of three plays, shedding new light on the links between the two great playwrights after centuries of speculation and conspiracy theories. Marlowe will be listed as co-author of the three Henry VI plays in the New Oxford Shakespeare, due to be published in instalments in the coming weeks."Shakespeare has entered the world of Big Data and there are certain questions that we are now able to answer more confidently," said Gary Taylor, one of the project's senior editors.The issue of whether Shakespeare wrote all the plays attributed to him has been the subject of endless conjecture, with one theory claiming that they were all written by Marlowe.Taylor, a Florida State University professor, said academics had known for a long time that Shakespeare worked with other writers on some plays.Scholars used databases of plays from the Elizabethan period, not just by Shakespeare or Marlowe, but by other playwrights, to search for distinctive word combinations ."That kind of Big Data was never available until recently," he said.The academics who worked on the New Oxford Shakespeare were extremely confident about Marlowe's authorship of some parts of the Henry VI plays, Taylor said."There are parts that are very clearly by Shakespeare and there are parts that are very clearly by Marlowe," he said.The New Oxford Shakespeare includes 44 plays, of which 17 are identified as having been written in collaboration with other authors.Taylor said that collaboration between playwrights was entirely normal in the Elizabethan period.The author of The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus, Marlowe passed into British popular culture as Shakespeare's great rival, but Taylor said that was speculation."It's possible they loved each other, it's possible they hated each other. We have no way of knowing," he said. ..