AI Used to Uncover Author of Lost Centuries-Old Spanish Play

Pioneering AI technology has been used in Spain to identify a previously unknown play by the revered Spanish playwright and poet Lope de Vega, The Guardian reports(Opens in a new window).

Last week, researchers at Spain’s National Library in Madrid announced that they had verified the nearly 400-year-old play that Lope de Vega was believed to have written a few years before his death in 1635. 

Lope was a luminary playwright belonging to what is referred to as the Spanish Golden Age, a period that marked a boom in cultural production at the same time as Spain’s empire in the Americas grew. 

The play, titled La francesa Laura (The Frenchwoman Laura) tells of an innocent wife who under the weight of suspicion, as the Guardian notes, is nearly sacrificed in an honor-killing but survives. 

La francesa Laura was identified after two literature experts, Germán Vega at the University of Valladolid, and Álvaro Cuéllar, who now sits in the department of Romance studies at the University of Vienna, launched a project titled Etso(Opens in a new window) that uses AI to analyze and establish the authors of anonymous or misattributed Golden Age plays.

1,300 such plays were transcribed using a transcription platform called Transkribus(Opens in a new window), before they were then compared to the language and style of 2,800 digitized works in the Etso database via a different program, Stylo. It was at this point that the play was shown to bear similar expressions to other Lope de Vega plays.

Speaking to The Guardian, Vega, the researcher, said, “After it had transcribed the 1,300 texts, the computer noticed that one of them was similar to 100 or so works – almost all of which were by Lope.”

“That really grabbed our attention – we didn’t think we’d find a Lope … [But] we then found a lot of expressions in La francesa Laura that fitted with those in other Lope plays. There were things in La francesa Laura that people in other Lope plays had said or would later say.”

Vega added that he believes AI can be of significant use in uncovering the authorship of lost and unidentified works: “Given there’s such an attribution problem with Golden Age theatre – so many anonymous pieces or misattributed pieces, I think this new technology means we’ll see more of this. There are still things that need to be clarified,” he told The Guardian.