Tracing an obsession with the Shakespeare authorship question | Hacker News Reader

Tracing an obsession with the Shakespeare authorship question

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43 pointspurgator30 comments

> McCarthy used plagiarism software to compare the text of North’s translations—about a million words in all—with the text of Shakespeare’s plays—another million words. When he did, his computer lit up like a Christmas tree, displaying thousands of phrases in common, many found in similar situations and contexts, and many unique in English. Some were up to eight words long, the equivalent of hitting every number in a Powerball ticket and then some.

So, all the way back in high school, we were required to submit all of our essays through a plagiarism detection software. This would routinely mark up our essays to be about 10-20% plagiarized, and having actually written my own essays myself, I can attest that all of that is false positive.

When you're highlighting that the longest span of such text is only eight words, that screams to me "pure false positive." Hell, in modern times, try suing someone over a copyright violation of a mere eight words and you're liable to be laughed out of court.

This information is useless without controlling for other works known to not be plagiarized from one another to find a typical false positive rate.

In particular this:

> Some were up to eight words long, the equivalent of hitting every number in a Powerball ticket and then some.

Which assumes plays are completely random sequences of words, and there is no such things as meaning or common phrases.

>and many unique in English.

I believe by unique here they must mean found only in two places.

on edit: which is an unique definition actually.

Particularly as the plays are obviously based on those translations regardless of who wrote them, and the better read parts of the audience would probably have appreciated recognising the quotes.

> There were just too many coincidences pointing to North’s authorship of the source plays—too many characters and ideas in North’s work and people and events in his own life that seemed to make their way into the Shakespeare canon.

Some variation of this claim has appeared in every anti-Stratfordian conversion story going back over a century to the original Baconians. The problem is that you can make similarly compelling biographical concordances with other figures of the time who definitely didn't write Shakespeare, and you can do the same with other playwrights' work. A deeper problem is that it assumes Shakespeare's work "should be" autobiographical, but there's no reason to assume that about a popular artist who we know based much of his work on existing stories.

Such an approach also tend to look only for confirmations, not contradictions.

Shakespeare is prolific, his work encompass a great many characters, thoughts, and events. It is easy to find parallels in any persons life. But if we say all events must have a biographical inspiration, we can esily eliminate any single person as the possible author.

I thought it would be about Shakespeare not writing his plays but this was a lot more interesting. I think it is totally plausible that he used things from other people.

He did use stuff form other people all the time. Almost every play is based on pre-existing material, like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragical_History_of_Rome...

This particular theory says his plays are based on hypothetical now lost plays by Thomas North. This is rather speculative and hard to prove or disprove given these plays are lost.

> I think it is totally plausible that he used things from other people.

Good artists copy. Great artists steal. Shakespeare is as great an artist as you can be.

We may never have a definitive answer, but it is very difficult to reconcile the humble circumstances of one William Shakspere (sic) of Avon, with the encyclopedic knowledge and vast experience required to write those plays.

Shakespeare is believed to have had a grammar school education where he wold have learned latin, rethoric, and studied classics like Ovid and Plutarch.

I’m not sure what “humble” implies, but his mother was from a wealthy family and his father was alderman and mayor. (Not that being rich makes you a better writer, but it explains how he could get this education.)

And “vast encyclopedic knowledge” is overtating it somewhat. His plays are fiction and use a lot of artistic license, like placing the royal court of Denmark in Elsinore.

By "humble circumstances" I presume you refer to the fact that he wasn't born an aristocrat? This certainly bothered the 19-century upper class which is why they came up with the "oxfordian" theories, that Shakespeare of Avon was really a front for some proper aristocratic author.

It also bothered them that Shakespeare was an actor, since actors at the time was considered lower status. So by separating the actor Shakespeare from a hypothetical aristocratic author, the prestige of the greatest author of the English language was saved.

It was also rather embarrassing that Shakespeare was part owner of the Globe Theater and seemed to have been a savvy businessman, becoming wealthy through his career. This was embarrassing because a proper aristocrat and poet should of course be elevated above any concerns about earning money (as opposed to just naturally having them).

What a snobby argument!

Try Charles Nicholl's The Lodger for a pretty detailed study that leaves little room for doubt about the fellow from Stratford.

Try the very short biography by Bill Bryson, the central point of which is how little historical evidence of anything to do with Shakespeare actually exists and the ludicrous ammount of speculation over the years by various hunch holders. I also like the 1987 moot court considering 17th Earl of Oxford arguments in front of then sitting Supreme Court Justices: William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens [1]

[1] https://www.c-span.org/video/?618-1/

A "snobby" argument I think would be one that doesn't even bother attempting a counterargument but instead furnishes innuendo and dismissal based on an implicit claim of superior authority.

Well, there is a lot of scholarship refuting the snobby argument, including the book referenced in the reply. "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" covers this too, with lots of analysis of back and forth competitive poetry and passages between Shakespeare and contemporary playwrights like Marlowe, who knew Shakespeare well. Seems odd to imagine that they would also be involved in a coverup.

Thanks for the recommendation, I think it's in my tsundoku somewhere. What I liked about The Lodger was that it doesn't go on about authorship at all, just painstakingly reconstructs a time, a place and a life and leaves a picture convincing enough that it really leaves some speculation looking rather daft.

You need to provide an argument before anyone can provide a counterargument! What specific parts of Shakespeares work couldn’t plausibly have been authored by someone with his background and education?

This is such an old and discredited argument that it literally turns up in Ben Elton’s Shakespeare sitcom as something to be parodied; it’s probably not deserving of much of a counter argument. Like, it’s more or less a conspiracy theory at this stage.

The one where Elton scientifically proves that Shakespeare also wrote Marlowe's plays?

You might as well be asking them to argue that the moon landing was real.

The anti-Stratfordians have absolutely no evidence other than speculation and snobbery.

He didn't go to university, but his background wasn't all that humble. His father was an alderman and successful glover and his mother came from a well-off land-owning family. It's usually thought he had a grammar school education based on the Latin classics.

> encyclopaedic knowledge

Eh. In practice, if in doubt, he made it up, particularly in respect to geography. If anything this is an argument against the “Shakespeare must actually have been aristocratic” thing, if anyone still took that seriously.

They may eventually find that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by him, but by someone else with the same name.

this makes sense...i have long been a proponent of the idea that Oxford was the main source of the shakespeare plays, and not the actor William Shakspere (yes, that was how he signed his name). But this very convincing scenario explains a lot...

Both the Bard and the Stratford man were referred to by many spellings of "Shakespeare", as was typical of the time. This is because they were the same person. This argument against Shakespeare's authorship has been debunked for decades.

https://shakespeareauthorship.com/name1.html

What do you feel this explains, which isn’t explained by existing knowledge?

Why do they put these red-colored snippets of the text BEFORE it actually appears? It's a website, not a magazine..

You have to click away one cookie popup (Europe), followed by two spam popups. Then the sidebar disappears and you cannot read the article.

Or you use mobile Firefox with block g extensions and never even see the cookie banner or the notification banners.

Reading works fine.

But I agree. In normal circumstances things like that should not happen.

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