Plagiarism Software Unveils a New Source for 11 of Shakespeare’s Plays

New York Times ^ | Feb 7 2108 | MICHAEL BLANDING

[onedoug]

For years scholars have debated what inspired William Shakespeare’s writings. Now, with the help of software typically used by professors to nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Richard III,” “Henry V” and seven other plays. The news has caused Shakespeareans to sit up and take notice.

[Oklahoma]

No, The glovemaker’s son from Stratford didn’t write the works attributed to Shake-speare. The author was most likely Edward De Vere the 17th Earl of Oxenford.

And his contemporaries knew it.

[onedoug]

Naturally he had to be a nobleman, eh?

[Hawthorn]

>> Doris Kearns Goodwin, it’s you! <<

Didn't she crib material from Monica Crowley?

Or was it Nina Totenberg?

And say what you will about Janet Cooke and Steve Glass, but at least their fake stories were original!

[RevelationDavid]

Wow...the NYT?

Bill Shakespeare must have voted for President Trump.

[BuffaloJack]

> You can also remember exactly which FReepers are idiots. Sorry about what I typed to you on June 6, 2003.

My first contact on FreeRepublic was 2004, so you must have insulted someone else.

[Oklahoma]

He sure as Hell wasn’t some semi-literate that didn’t have any other member of his family that could read or write. That didn’t own a single book, manuscript or letter that was mentioned in his will. That wrote detailed descriptions of foreign countries he had never visited. That described details of the English Court that only someone close to the court could have known.

Maybe the real author wasn’t De Vere. Maybe it was Marlowe. Was he a nobleman? Or maybe a combination of several writers including Jonson. It didn’t necessarily have to be a nobleman but the author did need knowledge and training that we have no evidence that William Shakspere of Stratford possessed.

You can’t understand Shakespeare without understanding the politics of Elizabethan England. A pseudonym and metaphors were necessary to prevent angering ‘the powers that were’ when writing.

Go to YouTube and find the documentaries on the real author of the works of Shakespeare. Keep an open mind and then come back and tell us it can only have been the glovemaker’s son.

[xp38]

The works of Shakespeare stand on their own merit. Who actually wrote them doesn’t diminish them but yes it was Bill to the best of our knowledge.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

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.

Nothing to get excited about . . . plagiarism wasn’t illegal in Shakespeare’s time; copyright didn’t exist.

In fact, the Shakespeare folios which are the source of all our knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays were put together by his friends a decade after his death, from bits and pieces and memory. The reason was that paper was expensive - and that paper tended to get reused on that account. And, most importantly, Shakespeare couldn’t afford to publish his plays for the simple reason that competitors would simply have ripped them off without so much as a nod in his direction.

The publication of the folios was a labor of love and respect by his surviving friends, who couldn’t bear the thought that his genius would be lost to posterity. It was a consuming project, but never intended as a moneymaker. They couldn’t see a mass market for them; their only hope of breaking even was to make a limited number of copies on top-quality paper and sell them to the rich.

They were so hard up that they sold all the copies they made, including the very first copy which they edited to make later copies better. No two folios exactly alike, as updates were done between each folio printed.

This I recall from having read The Millionaire and the Bard, about the acquisition of folios by a Mr. Folger (not the coffee people but John D. Rockerfeller’s right hand man). The collection he amassed is in a library in the shadow of the SCOTUS building (when Folger was going over the plans for his library, he challenged a line item in the budget for air conditioners because he had no experience of them back then). Folger spent years scouting for the site, and years accumulating the real estate without inflating the price exorbitantly - then all of a sudden the government announced that it was using eminent domain to take over the area for use by the Library of Congress.

Folger didn’t take it lying down, tho - he wrote to the Librarian of Congress and notified him what a trove of Shakespeare folios and artifacts he had, and his plan to make his collection publicly accessible. He closed by saying that if he had to give up the site he had acquired, he would have to acquire a different site, which would not be in Washington - and possibly not in the US. The Librarian of Congress had to go back to Congress and get them to change the plan, after having fought for it. But Folger’s was an offer which could not be refused.

[unlearner]

Shakespeare did not actually write Shakespeare. Another guy named Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

[onedoug]

I’ve been to the Folger, and yes, their collection is very impressive. The Hunting Library in Pasadena CA also has a First Folio edition, as well as some other material.

[onedoug]

Marlowe died early on, and Jonson wrote his own poetic tribute to Shakespeare, by name, for the First Folio edition.

Yet true believers are nearly always impossible to convince otherwise, despite the mass of evidence to the contrary.

You have your opinions. I have mine. Carry on.

[Styria]

The author should read Poiesis: Structure and Thought by H.D.F. Kitto.

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.... In the opening soliloquy of Richard III (“Now is the winter of our discontent …”) the hunchbacked tyrant uses the same words in virtually the same order to come to the opposite conclusion: that since he is outwardly ugly, he will act the villain he appears to be.

That paragraph is a great demonstration that Shakespeare was in control of and shaping the material to make his plays say what wanted.

[Oklahoma]

Occam’s Razor can be applied to most questions and I think it applies to the idea that Marlow’s murder was staged, but stranger things have happened. Jonson is more likely to have been involved with editing the works than actually writing them although a collaboration is at least possible.

One thing is certain about Jonson, however. He very definitely had to have had possession of the plays to edit them. I understand he was living and working for Francis Bacon when the First Folio was published. Does that mean something?

Another odd coincidence is that Edward De Vere’s daughter was the wife of Philip Herbert the Earl of Montgomery and later Pembroke. The First Folio was of course dedicated to Herbert and his brother William.

Now, what is this “mass of evidence to the contrary” proving that the glove maker’s son wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare?

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks onedoug. About the nicest thing that the arrogant swine G.B. Shaw ever wrote about Shakespeare was that he could tell a great story, provided someone had told it to him first.

"There are moments when one asks despairingly why our stage should ever have been cursed with this ‘immortal’ pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendently platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers. With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious from of indignity. To read Cymbeline and to think of Goethe, or Wagner, of Ibsen, is, for me, to imperil the habit of studied moderation of statement which years of public responsibility as a journalist have made almost second nature to me." -- the blowhard George Bernard Shaw

Shaw, btw, also attended one of Samuel Butler's lectures on the subject of Homer, and left convinced that the author of the Odyssey was a woman (or one of the ancient ghoti, if you understand the reference).

[sidebar: Shaw vs. Churchill]

[Yardstick]

Yep, I feel the same way about NPR. Beautiful work tragically undermined by libtard political bias.

[SunkenCiv]

Ben Jonson contributed a poem to the dedications printed in the First Folio:

To the memory of my beloved, Mr. William Shakespeare and what he hath left us... While I confesse thy writings to be such, As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much... Soule of the Age ! The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our Stage ! ...Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe, And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give... I should commit thee surely with thy peeres, And tell, how farre thou dist our Lily out-shine, Or sporting Kid or Marlowes mighty line. And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke, From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke For names; but call forth thund'ring schilus, Euripides, and Sophocles to vs, Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, To life againe, to heare thy Buskin tread... He was not of an age, but for all time ! ...For a good Poet's made, as well as borne. And such wert thou. Looke how the fathers face Lives in his issue, even so, the race Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines In his well toned, and true-filed lines, In each of which, he seemes to shake a Lance, As brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance. Sweet swan of Avon! ...Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage, Or influence, chide, or cheere the drooping Stage; Which, since thy flight fro' hence, hath mourn'd like night, And despaires day, but for thy Volumes light.

Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays, there's simply no basis to claim otherwise. An older, and dying poet / playwrite made note of the fact that what is now called Henry VI, pt 3 had already become a hit, and in fact was apparently what made Shakespeare a star -- the actual box office receipts were recorded and the record has survived, and apparently that one play outsold all other contemporary plays combined. WS was actor and playwrite by 1592.

...there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum [Johnny do-it-all], is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey... -- Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance by Robert Greene (published September 20, 1592)

It would be nice if London hadn't burned to the ground in 1666, carrying off the state and company's copies of the approved books (which were pretty ancient by that time), because the 37 plays of the First Folio are the only complete texts that have survived. Cardenio survives as a single page of music with a dash of dialogue, and the unfiniished "Sir Thomas More" was a collaboration.

• Tudor coroners' records give clue to 'real Ophelia' for Shakespeare
• Katharine Hamlet
• The Book of Sir Thomas More: Shakespeare's only surviving literary manuscript
• Henslowe's diary: including the first recorded performances of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, and a possible performance of The Taming of the Shrew
• Henslowe's diary: including the first recorded performances of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, and a possible performance of The Taming of the Shrew

[SunkenCiv]

side note — The Folger Shakespeare Library, what a great place, open house is annual and approaching fast — its collection of First Folio originals consists of more than half of the surviving originals available in the world. There are other old documents of note, such as, I think it was, Henry VIII’s prayerbook with Hank’s notes in the margins. :^) The study done on the First Folio originals made it possible to classify them by the way they were assembled by the respective printers.

[SunkenCiv]

https://www.folger.edu/

[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

Monty Python -- The Oscar Wilde Sketch

The scene takes place in 1895, in the drawing room of Wilde's London home. Holding court amid a roomful of sycophants, Wilde (played by Graham Chapman) competes with the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw (Michael Palin) and the American-born painter James McNeill Whistler (John Cleese) to impress Queen Victoria's son Albert Edward (Terry Jones), the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII. As for the historical basis of the sketch, "There seems to be no evidence for the convivial triumvirate of Whistler, Wilde, and Shaw," writes Darl Larsen in Monty Python's Flying Circus: An Utterly Complete, Thoroughly Unillustrated, Absolutely Unauthorized Guide, "especially as late as 1895, when Whistler was caring for his terminally ill wife and Wilde was in the early stages of his fall from grace." Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest opened in February of that year, and shortly afterward he became embroiled in a legal battle with the Marquess of Queensberry that led eventually to his imprisonment for homosexuality. -- Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw Engage in a Hilarious Battle of Wits