Here’s an interesting rebuttal by an Oxfordian (a competitor to McCarthy’s theory) including a list of methods of textual analysis about midway down the article w/the note that “parallels from plays of uncertain or contested authorship prove nothing.”

Plus a comment by McCarthy’s fellow researcher:  “Not once...have I found anything to disprove the notion that Thomas North wrote source plays for all of the plays in the Shakespeare canon. Nor, however, have I found anything that definitively proves it....there are no surviving plays with Thomas North’s name on them, or even hard evidence that North was a playwright.....”

https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/blanding-north-hyde-review/

Let the debate roil on.

What I've never liked about the debunking Shakespeare contingent was their insistence that only a nobleman could have written the plays. The need to somehow prove that only nobly born people can do anything creative or honorable or whatever seemed to have died out in the 20th century, and good riddance.

I'm not an idolator, so if the person North, whom I've never heard of before, was the actual author of the plays, well, that's okay. It will take some getting used to, but as he may have said, "the play's the thing."

Quote from: Bill Hiatt on October 12, 2023, 02:08:19 AM

I believe it now only because the textual evidence is overwhelming. But it helps that that evidence is also confirmed by other circumstances.

Here in Australia, we call this "Tall poppy syndrome."

The need to cut down anyone who gets put up on a pedestal. It's pretty sickening to watch. imo.

Everything I've read here on this is circumstantial and coming from a Bot. None of it represents truth, just speculation by something which is known to make sh*t up, and then people hyping it.

The truth is lost.

The only thing going on here is the character assassination of an author who made it.

Like what sparked this in the first place.

I agree that "Tall Poppy Syndrome" is bad. And I've always found earlier disputes about Shakespeare's authorship to be supported by insufficient evidence.

But that doesn't mean that every potential authorship challenge is necessarily wrong.

In the sense that we don't have eyewitnesses saying that Thomas North actually wrote the plays, then yes, I guess the evidence is circumstantial. But if we adopt that standard, we'd have to throw out many established historical facts, because their credibility was established through circumstantial evidence. For any history before the modern period, we are often reliant on accounts written long after the fact and have to use circumstantial evidence to confirm or deny them. And even some of those written by people in a position to know aren't always accurate. Julius Caesar's remarks about druids, for example, aren't backed up by archaeology or by accounts of his contemporaries and seem to be mostly propaganda.

Hopscotch is right that there was a lot of borrowing and adapting going on, most of which wouldn't be allowed by modern copyright laws. But the level of verbal resemblance here means that North wrote most of the substance of the plays currently attributed to Shakespeare. If we used modern conventions, the title page would read something like, "Romeo and Juliet by Thomas North, edited by William Shakespeare." The actual title pages of published Shakespeare plays say something like, "adapted by William Shakespeare." The only ones that aren't qualified in that way are for plays in the Shakespearean apocrypha.

For the sake of focus, let's address the one part of the evidence that I think is the most incontrovertible. Shakespeare's plays contain numerous parallels to unpublished works by Thomas North. The most natural explanation would be that writing containing large amounts of such material was written by Thomas North or was at least a substantial source for the finished product.  What other possibilities are there?

That the resemblances are coincidental--statistically impossible

That WS is the illegitimate son (or otherwise related) to TM and thus had access to his private papers--no evidence, circumstantial or otherwise. They may have met. McCarthy's theory assumes that North, then having financial hard times, sold his plays to WS, which would imply they met at some point. Their careers overlapped, so they could have been in touch in other ways. But there's no reason to assume a personal connection enough for North to be passing along his private papers to Shakespeare. The language borrowed from them is so thoroughly integrated into the plays that the more logical assumption is that North must have baked it in when writing the original plays.

That WS and TM collaborated on the plays. One could argue for some collaboration. For example, I think it's possible they collaborated on the Ur-Hamlet (1589 or so). But if the language in the play ends up being overwhelmingly North's, then it really doesn't matter how it came about. Whether North wrote a play Shakespeare adapted or whether they worked on a play together, the overwhelming authorship credit, in the modern sense, belongs to North. Shakespeare may well deserve the credit for preserving and popularizing the work. He knew how to please a crowd.

I can't think of any other logical possibilities. But I'm always happy to be proved wrong.

Quote from: Post-Crisis D on October 12, 2023, 01:36:38 AM

Quote from: TimothyEllis on October 12, 2023, 01:28:44 AM

Why, after all this time, does it even matter?

Truth?  Giving credit where actual credit is due?

This far away in time, the truth is gone.

People can play games with dumb bots and pretend they're discovering truth, but it's all lost in time now.

Anyone petty enough to want to rewrite history using a dumb bot at this point, just gets my contempt.

If the truth is gone, then why not list all the plays as anonymous?

You and I share a similar contempt for dumb bots, but using a very specific kind of dumb bot as a plagiarism detection tool convinced me of their usefulness in certain defined circumstances, providing that humans interpret the data intelligently.

We also know that writers do leave their fingerprints in what they write. Stephen King's attempt to publish under the Richard Bachman name was foiled by fans who recognized the writing as King's. Similar pseudonymous works by JK Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) were also discovered by fans. In some way, the anonymous book, Primary Colors was identified as the work of Joe Klein. Earlier, I mentioned that Ted Kazcinsky was identified as the Unibomber using forensic linguistics. it is possible to identify writers through their style and vocabulary.

That being the case, is it that far-fetched to think that a bot could be fed lexical and stylistic data and find resemblances?

I would suggest that anyone interested read the book before deciding that contempt is the appropriate response.

As a quick note, Dennis McCarthy started out as an indie author with his first book, North of Shakespeare. Ironically, he is also kind of like the success story told about Shakespeare. McCarthy doesn't have a college degree and wasn't a good student in school. But he was able to self educate in areas that interested him. Without a biology background, he was able to learn enough about biogeology to publish successful works on the subject (even in peer-reviewed scientific journals). He changed our understanding of how certain species exist only in widely separated areas. Without an English background, he took on the Shakespeare authorship question and has attracted the support of at least one major scholar in the field (who, like me, was convinced Shakespeare was the author before seeing McCarthy's evidence).

I can understand people disagreeing with him. But I don't think he merits contempt.

I think we're all unhappy with potentially unfounded accusations being leveled at a fellow author. I'm not convinced by the general statements in the thread-starting article that the accusations are sufficiently supported. But that shouldn't prejudice us against forensic linguistics, which is a valid tool if properly used.

Literature is a product of its author's environment. What we write reveals something about us. Who we are reveals something about our writing.

That's the only reason who wrote Shakespeare makes a difference. Knowing something about the author helps inform our understanding of the author's work. I think keeping the authorship with Shakespeare is appealing psychologically because it gives us a nice success story--poorly educated butcher's son rises to create some of the greatest literature ever written in English. Who wouldn't want to believe that? We always want to root for the underdog. And there are real stories about that kind of success. But it now appears Shakespeare isn't one of them.

The forensic linguistic evidence makes a compelling case, particularly when it shows dependence on North's private papers that WS couldn't have had access to. When you add biographical connections to North, the case becomes overwhelming. Shakespeare could have gotten information about how nobles behaved from one of his noble patrons. But is it likely he could have gotten the story of murder of Gonzago (the play-within-the-play in Hamlet), a story not available in English or generally known in England? North visited the castle of the Duke or Urbino, from whose family the murder story comes. His journal indicates he could have gotten the story firsthand, but he preserves an erroneous version of the name of the victim, an error that would have been unique to him but that appears in Hamlet. McCarthy even traces the imagery used in the castle's artwork to other Shakespeare plays. Detail after detail, the plays relate clearly to North's experience but not at all to Shakespeare's.

Here's a really interesting tidbit. The play Arden of Feversham, once regarded as falsely ascribed to Shakespeare, is now regarded as mostly his because of resemblances to the canonical plays. But it turns out those resemblances are all to parts of the plays clearly written by North. What makes the play really interesting is that AF is a domestic tragedy--based on North's own family. Thomas Arden was murdered by his wife, who also happened to be North's half-sister. The play contains a lot of details that are accurate when compared to the historical information we can reconstruct. The murder itself was famous, but whoever wrote the play knew a great deal more than the average person, even to the point of having accurate geographical information about the setting. North has a personal reason to know so much about it. Shakespeare doesn't.

Anyway, the Italian plays make much more sense as the products of the pen of someone who traveled extensively in Italy. The supposedly Shakespearean part of Henry VIII, with its full throated and anachronistic praise of the Catholic Catherine of Aragon makes more sense as being written originally when Catherine's daughter, Mary, was queen and Catholicism was still the state religion than it does as a Shakespearean product during the reign of James I, when Protestantism was the state religion. There are a lot of references that make more sense coming from North at an earlier time than from Shakespeare at a later one.

And then there's the fact that many of Shakespeare's contemporaries either didn't praise him or actively criticized him as a plagiarist and/or a mediocre writer. We used to attribute those to jealousy, but there are a lot of them, and they make much more sense if in fact Shakespeare was, among other things, the front man for someone else.

I never used to believe this. I believe it now only because the textual evidence is overwhelming. But it helps that that evidence is also confirmed by other circumstances.