Molière most likely did write his own plays
Two French researchers from the CNRS and Ecole nationale des chartes disprove the theory according to which Corneille was Molière's ghostwriter - a popular and century-old theory, defended by some academics and writers. According to their forthcoming study in Science Advances, Molière would most likely be the only author of his numerous masterpieces. Was Pierre Corneille Molière's ghostwriter? The idea dates back to 1919, when French poet and writer Pierre Louÿs wrote a now famous article, attributing Amphitryon and a few other plays signed by Molière to Corneille. This suspicion grew further, to encompass all of Molière's plays: how would it be possible that a poorly educated actor, managing his own theatre company, and valet of the king's chamber, could have written so many masterpieces' Molière would only have been the main protagonist of the plays. Their actual author, Pierre Corneille, would have benefited from his fame and talent, without exposing himself to controversies nor tarnishing his reputation as a serious author. This theory was revived in the early 2000s by researchers in linguistics, stating that Corneille and Molière's styles were extremely close - which would mean that Corneille actually wrote Molière's works. Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps, two researchers in computational linguistics from the CNRS and the École nationale des chartes, used "authorship attribution" techniques to disprove this theory.
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