How ‘Sherlock of the library’ cracked the case of Shakespeare’s identity | Hacker News Reader

How ‘Sherlock of the library’ cracked the case of Shakespeare’s identity

theguardian.com

58 pointssambeau22 comments

This is interesting, but what specifically did she discover? The article is confusingly written and never makes it clear what the "smoking gun" actually is.

It's totally clear, see the paragraph starting "It’s at this point in the story that"

Yes, I read that paragraph. It's anything but clear: "It’s at this point in the story that Wolfe discovered “the smoking gun”. In the Brooke-Dethick feud, it becomes clear that “Shakespeare, Gent. from Stratford” and “Shakespeare the Player” are the same man."

What specifically did Wolfe discover? Certainly not the Brooke-Dethick feud itself: https://books.google.com/books?id=EAuvCFM2S34C&pg=PA183&lpg=.... Perhaps new information about it? Surely the Guardian's readers could handle a detail or two. It's after all customary for an article about a new discovery to say what the discovery is.

I think the core discovery is when Shakespeare from Stratford gets linked to Shakespeare the player, making her think that these two are the same person.

> "When “Shakespeare the Player” found himself on this list, his campaign for social advancement seemed in jeopardy. A bitter row broke out at court between two factions. Shakespeare himself became an object of ridicule. Another rival, Ben Jonson, in his satire Every Man out of his Humour, poked fun at him as a rustic buffoon who pays £30 for a ridiculous coat of arms with the humiliating motto “Not Without Mustard”."

"Not Without Mustard" being a reference to Shakespeare of Stratfords request that his family motto be "not without right."

To be even clearer: it sounds like there was never any clear documentation directly linking "William Shakespeare, the guy from Stratford-upon-Avon" and "William Shakespeare, actor and playwright," and this opened up a window for speculation (by well known people and others) that these were actually different people. Heather Wolfe found the needed documentation in an old court case, proving that Shakespeare is actually Shakespeare:

> It’s at this point in the story that Wolfe discovered “the smoking gun”. In the Brooke-Dethick feud, it becomes clear that “Shakespeare, Gent. from Stratford” and “Shakespeare the Player” are the same man. In other words, “the man from Stratford” is indeed the playwright. Crucially, in the long-running “authorship” debate, this has been a fiercely contested point. But Wolfe’s research nails any lingering ambiguity in which the Shakespeare deniers can take refuge.

> Heather Wolfe found the needed documentation in an old court case, proving that Shakespeare is actually Shakespeare.

This is what I sorta inferred from the article. The author says there was a smoking gun but I didn't see where it went off.

What did Wolfe's research uncover? A previously overlooked court document hidden in the archives of the Folger Library in Washington DC?

The article describes all that, but it never says what is new. If you Google "brooke dethick" you'll find that the argument about coats of arms has appeared in lots of previous work about Shakespeare. The other details are even less obscure.

> Wolfe says she looks forward to “poking about” in the archives, and is convinced that Shakespeare’s identity no longer needs re-confirmation.

So no need, for her, to verify if Shakespeare was real or a ghost-writer.

I was pretty interested in reading this until the first paragraph slapped me with some tired narrative.

Holy crap. What is wrong with these people?

Every couple years somebody else comes out of the woodwork with a new theory about who Shakespeare was. We just don't know a lot about the guy and there's not we can do about it.

Except this is an article about someone who did something about it, and thus we now know more about the guy.

Reads article about the identity of Shakespeare, still doesn't know the identity of Shakespeare.

But seriously, if you need a tl;dr search for "It's at this point," read that paragraph, and note that what she found was that Shakespeare was a real man, not the pen name of someone else.

That's the discovery. Save yourself 20mins of reading a poorly-written article.

[EDIT: spelling.]

There's never been any serious question that Shakespeare was a real person. There's been a long-running and largely silly 'controversy' about the authorship of his works. This discovery just takes away another toehold the 'Shakespeare authorship controversy' people cling to.

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