I'm wrong about many things, as my family will confirm, but ready to suffer correction. Trouble is, McCarthy's arguments for North as Shakespeare are no more convincing than are the arguments made for any other candidate. Not against Will's fellow playwrights and competitors who, over his 25yr writing career, thought he wrote 'em. Until solid contrary evidence, I stick with Will.
For the record, I was correcting Hyde, not you.
However, I will disagree with the assumption that McCarthy's arguments are no better than anyone else's. There have been plausible attempts to relate events in the plays to the lives of a number of different people. But most of those people either have very little writing to compare to the plays or have writing that doesn't sound like the plays at all (Francis Bacon). McCarthy's forensic linguistics are hard to ignore. Since I think I'm the only person here who's actually looked at the evidence, I was initially puzzled by people's ability to dismiss it, sight unseen. But as I think about it, perhaps it isn't so puzzling.
In the conventional biographies, Shakespeare is a success story of the small-town-boy-makes-good type. And as LilyBLily mentioned earlier, a lot of the impetus behind early movements to remove Shakespeare as the author were rooted in snobbery. The essence of the argument is that a commoner like Shakespeare, and an incompletely educated commoner at that, couldn't possible have written the plays attributed to him. I agree that's a snobbish way to look at it. There are plenty of self-educated people who've done great things (including, ironically, McCarthy). By itself, I've always found the argument about birth and education flawed. But that isn't the approach McCarthy is using.
Another complication is our attitude about AI, and I'm not any happier about that than anyone else, as my posts in other threads will document. But the software in question isn't AI. It's a narrow-purpose algorithm for finding textual similarities. That's not anything like the current AI (though the software the journalist used to impugn Lackberg may be different. I don't know). McCarthy started with online plagiarism software of a type similar to what I used. In contrast to current AIs, that kind of software doesn't make stuff up. It identifies actual similarities, though the significance of those similarities requires a human interpreter, as I have said.
If you were to look at the similarities, you would see that some of them are closer than others. And it is true, as Jeff said,
And if two men are products of the same time and place, then it's hardly beyond the realm of possibility that they might end up writing linguistically or topically similar stuff. We see this sort of thing today. Two different authors will write nearly identical books at the same time and often even employing similar turns of phrase, and it turns out it's all by sheer happenstance, not plagiarism.
When I was checking for plagiarism, I certainly looked at whether or not phrases were common and/or likely to turn up in a similar context. But the thing is, McCarthy checked for that kind of thing using EEBO (Early English Book Online), which includes a rich selection of texts from Shakespeare's lifetime. He found some possible similarities were indeed commonplace. But he also found that many were rare, and a lot were unique to North and Shakespeare. If they were in fact common phrases or expressions that many people in the time period might have used, then they shouldn't have been unique to those two authors. There should have been other examples of them.
At the risked of beating the point to death, the fact that those resemblances included not just North's published works but also works that were unpublished or unpublished at the time. Shakespeare scholars have certainly not run to embrace McCarthy's theory, but none of them have so far offered a convincing explanation for those resemblances, at least to the best of my knowledge.
On your point about the attitudes of his contemporaries, it's not really the case that they universally thought Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. McCarthy cites numerous examples of contemporaries raising doubts, and Feldman cites even more (though in support of a different authorship theory.) The most famous one is from Robert Greene's last work:
. . . an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his tyger’s head, wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well about to bombast out a blank verse, as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
The tyger's head part is a reference to a line in
Henry VI Part 3. Shake-scene (scene stealer) is presumably a play on Shakespeare's name. Writers at the time lampooned each other frequently, but to avoid possible censorship or legal action, they normally made their attacks without using the playwright's actual name. There are a lot of other, similar references from various authors.
Keep in mind that noblemen might have written plays but typically didn't publish them or have them performed under their own name for a variety of reasons. Even if someone suspected North was behind the plays, they wouldn't have linked North's name to Shakespeare's because of the potential backlash.
There is also the previously alluded to problem of Shakespeare's title pages. The plays currently considered to be by him and published in his lifetime all have some formula similar to "adapted by" before his name. In other words,
Shakespeare himself isn't claiming to be the original author.The only plays published in his lifetime and listed as written by him are some of the Shakespearean apocryphal plays (rejected by critics as not good enough to be by Shakespeare). But if that were the case, why is there no record of Shakespeare rejecting the attribution? Feldman makes the claim that in fact the apocryphal plays are much more Shakespeare's real work than those considered his. And whatever critics think of them today, they were crowd pleasers in their own day.
In other words, the contemporary evidence is at best mixed. We know a lot of plays were performed under Shakespeare's name, but by the explicit record of the print editions, the ones we think of as his aren't the ones he actually claims to have written, at least, not in their original form.
Who knows? New evidence may come to light that somehow refutes McCarthy's theory. But in the meantime, we seem to have more than enough to be the proverbial smoking gun.
