Plagiarism software unveils one of Shakespeare’s sources | Hacker News Reader

Plagiarism software unveils one of Shakespeare’s sources

nytimes.com

88 pointsNaOH36 comments

This headline, while technically accurate, is misleading.

> The authors are not suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that he read and was inspired by a manuscript titled “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,” written in the late 1500s by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth, who served as an ambassador to Sweden.

Ok, we've attempted to make the title more accurate above.

Though plagiarism software was at the heart of McCarthy's work, the use of that term in the NYT's headline is pure clickbait. Shakespeare lived in a remix culture more like our contemporary one rather than late-20th century attitudes, and even the concept of plagiarism would likely have seemed odd to him and his contemporaries. He died a century before the Statute of Anne passed.

They don't speculate how the lowly Shakespeare could have got access to a courtier's unpublished manuscript.

It's easy to work out (that Shakespeare was possibly in touch with Thomas North, or they were only one bounce apart):

> Mr. McCarthy focused on Thomas North, a translator of Plutarch’s “Lives,” whom Shakespeare relied on heavily for his dramas.

...

> Mr. McCarthy found a reference to the manuscript by George North, a likely cousin of Thomas...

Though I'm sure you're aware of this, I'll mention for others the theory that Shakespeare was actually Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford[1], and therefore there would be no mystery about how he could have access. The commonly accepted William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon allowed his children to grow up illiterate (this is not a disputed fact); for someone who valued the English language so much, that seems unimaginable. For many reasons, I find the Edward de Vere theory[2] much more plausible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere%2C_17th_Earl_of...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespear...

I'm personally a fan of the Sir Francis Bacon theory, which I was introduced to from "The secret of Psalm 46"[1] while playing The Witness .

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFNbeeDILB0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_questio...

I was not aware there were theories about Shakespeare's identity. This is very interesting, thanks.

There are a bunch of theories. They are a kind of gentlemen-conspiracy theories. The phenomenon is basically founded in English class-snobbery: To some it is simply inconceivable that the son of a craftsman should be the greatest writer in the English language. So they concoct theories to prove the plays were actually written by some Lord or Earl or other person of better breeding and William Shakespeare, the commoner, was just a strawman or fake identity.

Oh, no, not that old chestnut: anyone who questions the Stratfordian theory is a snob and therefore wrong!

John Michell's book, "Who wrote Shakespeare?", is a great read: fun and informative. He doesn't argue for a particular answer to the question (which would have made the book much less fun), but the facts that he present do rather tend to support the idea that "Shakespeare" is likely to have been a closely-knit group of writers, with the actor from Avon being their front man and probably also a contributor, though we can hardly hope to ever know what exactly he contributed.

An interesting thing to ponder is why several fairly bad works were published under the "Shakespeare" name. Stratfordians say that those works weren't actually by Shakespeare (though if the contemporary attribution is not to be trusted why should we trust it in the case of the better works?) or that they were early works (even though some of them were first published later than the more famous ones).

It would be great if more people could accept the idea that several people can contribute to the writing of a play, just as several people can contribute to the writing of a novel (as in many well-known cases) or a film (as in almost every case).

It would be great if more people could accept the idea that several people can contribute to the writing of a play

I don't think I've ever met anyone who would say such a thing is impossible.

> It would be great if more people could accept the idea that several people can contribute to the writing of a play

Nobody disputes that, and it is indeed speculated that several plays or parts of plays are the result of collaborations. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare%27s_collab...

It is actually quite interesting and fun to read up on.

But please do remember to apply Occam's razor liberally when researching. Fun and seductive as it might be to puzzle together a historical whodunnit from the lives of contemporaries and see if a theory can stick, there has never been a real reason to discard the notion that William Shakespeare was simply William Shakespeare. It is still by far the simplest answer that leaves the fewest gaps.

Except for the fact that de Vere was dead before 12 of Shakespeare's plays were published it's a great theory ...

The question of his identity has been settled.

"In 1601, after his father’s death, Shakespeare the upstart returned to the college of arms to renew the family application for a coat of arms. He had made a small fortune in the theatre, and was buying property in and around Stratford. Now he set out to consolidate his reputation as a “Gentleman”. Under the rules that governed life at the court of Elizabeth I, only the Queen’s heralds could grant this wish.

"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."

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jan/08/sherlock-hol...

You are confusing Shakespeare the author of the plays with Shakespeare the actor and producer and theatre manager. No one I believe disputes the latter.

Shakespeare the author of the plays is one and the same with the actor and producer and theater manager, per the article.

But there are plays with Shakespeare's name on them published during Shakespeare's lifetime for which Stratfordian scholars deny authenticity (Bad Quarto of Hamlet, etc.) Showing that the gentleman from Stratford and the Shakespeare of the theater company were the same person, falsifies some alternative theories, but certainly not all - so "settled" and nailing "any lingering ambiguity" are exaggerations.

I'm a fan of the Sir Henry Neville was Shakespeare theory. Neville was also a diplomat and could well have known North.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevillean_theory_of_Shakespe...

Next thing you know, someone's going to rediscover commedia dell'arte!

edit for substance:

Plots of Commedia dell'arte scenarios, well known in England at the time Shakespeare was alive and writing, bear close similarities to the broad strokes of the plots of many of his plays. ( https://thought.artsci.wustl.edu/podcasts/commedia-dellarte )

This doesn't really connote plagiarism.

I think the point here is that some "dumb" (brute force) software found something missed by all the field experts.

I'm sure that in the next 20 years some "dumb" math software, some sort of "Coq neural network arxiv crawler" will find some new math.

That doesn't seem accurate, the unpublished document was selected first before being matched using the software.

I'm not sure how they are dating the unpublished document so as to be certain which is the earlier source. The NYT just says McCarthy claims the production date.

Hmm. Unfortunate title by the NYT. “The authors are not suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that he read and was inspired by a manuscript titled “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,” written in the late 1500s by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth, who served as an ambassador to Sweden.”

And the authors didn't use plagiarism software, the article never mentions which exact piece of software they use but it does say, “Scholars have used computer-assisted techniques in the humanities for several decades. Most of that scholarship, however, uses function words such as articles and prepositions to create a “digital signature” that can be used to identify a writer as author or co-author of another work, rather than using comparatively rare words to locate a source.

Mr. McCarthy was inspired to use plagiarism software by the work of Sir Brian Vickers, who used similar techniques in 2009 to identify Shakespeare as a co-author of the play “Edward III.” While the book has been received favorably, the statistical techniques used have not yet been subjected to a rigorous review by other scholars in the digital humanities field.

The first part is accurate and refers to computational stylometry or lesserly statistical stylometry[0] Software like that gives you a measure for similarity in style. I've been to a couple of academic talks on the topic–what the software does is track stylistically invariant features, this can be function word relative frequency, but it also can track infrequently used words (or phrases). Using this technique (computational method) you can compare texts and see how they cluster. Similar texts will cluster closer together but it does not mean the author's plagiarised each other, just that have similar "styles" for one definition of style. My understanding of plagiarism software is that it looks for similarities in content, not form.

source: I'm supposed to be a digital humanist! :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Current_research

related: “The Secret Life of Pronouns: James Pennebaker at TEDxAustin”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGsQwAu3PzU

Digital Humanist sounds interesting, what does it imply?

Hi there,

Glad you asked. Happy to share.

A digital humanist[0][1][2] is both (a) someone who applies computational methods and digital technology to research questions in the arts and humanities (so-called humanities computing[3]) and (b) someone who critically thinks about what sort of impact information and communications technologies are having on their discipline, included in this portion would be new media studies.

As such digital humanities is a very broad church. It serves as a glue between people in different art/humanities-based fields and disciplines so that even though I might be in Classics and you might be in History we would still be able fruitfully collaborate. Of great concern to the digital humanities are open standards, open data, and open access. We care about metadata, semantic annotation, encodings, certain statistical methods, network analysis, digital archiving, computational linguistics, concept modelling, the semantic web stack, and so on.

We also see ourselves as the inheritors of the humanist tradition, from Petrarch on downwards–we are certainly not anti-science and we reject the science/humanities dichotomy. Many of us would advocate for a third culture along the lines of Brockman[4] though this sentiment is more latent than explicit.

If you've any questions please do not hesitate to ask!

[0] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/

[1] http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities

[3] http://www.mccarty.org.uk/essays/McCarty,%20Humanities%20com...

[4] https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_brockman-the-third-cu...

> the authors didn't use plagiarism software, the article never mentions which exact piece of software they use

The article (at least now) says "Mr. McCarthy used decidedly modern techniques to marshal his evidence, employing WCopyfind, an open-source plagiarism software".

This seems correct, and the software is indeed intended to be used primarily to detect plagiarism: http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/wordpress/

I could have sworn that paragraph wasn't there when I read the article, I remember reading the paragraph above which reads, "Martin Meisel, professor of dramatic literature emeritus at Columbia University, said in another review that the book is “impressively argued.” He added that there is no question the manuscript “must have been somewhere in the background mix of Shakespeare’s mental landscape” while writing the plays." and the one below which starts, "In the dedication to his manuscript, for example, North urges those who might see themselves as ugly to strive to be inwardly beautiful, to defy nature. He uses a succession of words to make the argument, including “proportion,” “glass,” “feature,” “fair,” “deformed,” “world,” “shadow” and “nature.”"

Though I'm far from being an expert in this area this is the first time I've heard of the above mentioned software being mentioned in the digital humanities or humanities computing context. Generally scholars use R or Python to perform computational stylometry. See this representative paper, for instance: https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016-1/eder-rybicki-ke...

I have an article about copying between dance sources of the same era... since copying wasn't considered a bad thing, it's nice that folks weren't rephrasing to pretend like they weren't:

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/articles/copying.html

This is going to make for interesting research into Shakespeare's art, the same way that the North version of Plutarch's Lives informs the famous "The barge she sat in" passage from Antony and Cleopatra: http://bloggingshakespeare.com/the-barge-she-sat-in

I also think that it's interesting that one of the main texts that this article applies to is King Lear, which also takes inspiration from the Book of Job, a contemporary Elizabethan play called Gorbuduc, prior versions of Lear ("Leir"), and the Cinderella story, among others. Generally, it's interesting to look at how Shakespeare inverts, changes, or fuses his sources: Lear is, like Job, an intensely ordered play that motions towards disorder, and like Job it contains a menagerie of animals referenced incidentally -- Shakespeare alone elevates this to a thematic discussion of "nature," which in turn also provides him a rich vein of material, since "nature" (i.e. mother nature, order, human nature, etc.) and "natural" (i.e. legitimate child, fool, unvarnished truth) had multiple meanings that provide thematic offshoots for the play. All of which is to say that the key isn't just what sources the plays but what Shakespeare does to transform his source material.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

updated for sanity. sorry!

Appreciated! I'll detach my reply and mark it off topic so your comment can run free.

Edit: although the article doesn't claim plagiarism, no? It just involved plagiarism detection software. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16336420

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16336447 and marked it off-topic.

Perhaps Jobs really was correct when he said: great artists steal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com