[HN Gopher] Tracing an obsession with the Shakespeare authorship...
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Tracing an obsession with the Shakespeare authorship question
Author : purgator
Score : 36 points
Date : 2022-06-03 19:56 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| 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.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| 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.
| Veen wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| 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.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| 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/
| ttctciyf wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.
| tgv wrote:
| The one where Elton scientifically proves that
| Shakespeare also wrote Marlowe's plays?
| sritchie wrote:
| 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.
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| 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.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| 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?
| felix318 wrote:
| They may eventually find that Shakespeare's plays were not
| written by him, but by someone else with the same name.
| djur wrote:
| > 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.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| 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.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| 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.
| qiskit wrote:
| > 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.
| zqstall wrote:
| You have to click away one cookie popup (Europe), followed by two
| spam popups. Then the sidebar disappears and you cannot read the
| article.
| sdoering wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 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.
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >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.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| 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.
| gverrilla wrote:
| Why do they put these red-colored snippets of the text BEFORE it
| actually appears? It's a website, not a magazine..
| RappingBoomer wrote:
| 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...
| bazoom42 wrote:
| What do you feel this explains, which isn't explained by
| existing knowledge?
| djur wrote:
| 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
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