The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare | Hacker News Reader

The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

theatlantic.com

33 pointslaurex50 comments

This is a short article by a journalist. It attempts to summarize my long academic book Shakespeare's Dark Lady; Amelia Bassano Lanier, The Woman behind Shakespeare's Plays? This is not a new subject. I announced it at the Washington Shakespeare Festival at the Smithsonian around 2007, and published an article on it as a new paradigm in 2009.I welcome an informed debate, but the best place to start is to become familiar with the book, then to discuss with me the additional unpublished research.

The far more likely explanation for all the evidence cited in the article is that Shakespeare got to know many interesting people who could tell him about faraway lands and aristocratic life, which fed into the settings of his plays, and Bassano was one of those acquaintances.

But as the article alludes, questions of authorship are dismissed by overwhelming consensus. It is also a question for which the sort of conclusive evidence that’s desired just doesn’t exist. In some sense, it’s analogous to climate change denialist articles.

So, it’s nice to learn more about Emilia Bassano. But it’s a problematic article, and, especially, your defense of it seems problematic. It almost detracts from her work to try to fit her into the Shakespeare authorship pigeonhole, and it’s also the case that there’s far less evidence for this competing hypothesis than the one favored by Occam’s Razor, that Shakespeare was simply Shakespeare, and astonishing as he was and the unresolved questions we have, we should just accept it.

I will assume the downvotes are from those dastardly Oxfordians, so comfortable in the shadows...

So as I know John Hudson is on here - how do you answer the critiques here: https://spectator.us/shakespeare-woman-atlantic/

I like the theory. But would a woman write "The Taming of the Shrew?"

Maybe. I still orthodox'ily consider William Shakespeare was the sole author. But I would not discount the possibility of a literary circle (or circles?) being the authors.

I think it's possible. Look at some of the most popular literature that has been written by women. Fifty shades and what not.

I still subscribe to the Lazarus Long theory of Shakespeare.

For those not familiar with it, would you state the theory?

I will try, I seem to be rate-limited to hell and back.

From Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, the implication being that old Bill Shakespeare was an unnaturally long-lifer like Lazarus Long:

> “Don’t praggle me, boy; I’ll quang you proper. Shakespeare and I never let grammar interfere with expressing ourselves. Why, he said to me once—”

> “Oh, stop it! He died three centuries before you were born.”

> “He did, huh? They opened his grave once and found it empty. The fact is, he was a half brother of Queen Elizabeth and dyed his hair to make the truth less obvious. The other fact is that they were closing in on him, so he switched. I’ve died that way several times. Ira, his will left his ‘second-best bed’ to his wife. Look up who got his best bed and you’ll begin to figure out what really happened. Do you want to try to define ‘love’?”

It's no less far-fetched than all of the other theories that people keep tossing out to try to strip Shakespeare of the authorship of his plays.

All: yes it's a provocative title and the topic has been overcooked over the years, but on HN what matters is the article. This article is interesting and perfectly on topic for HN. Most of us have never heard of Emilia Bassano. There's a great Borges quote. And so on.

Comments are welcome if your curiosity is engaged. But if you're triggered, and want to vent, that's not curiosity. Let it go and move to something you do feel curious about.

Accounts that flag too many on-topic articles like this one eventually get their flagging privileges removed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: by the way, here's another article arguing against the current one, which also gratifies intellectual curiosity: https://spectator.us/shakespeare-woman-atlantic/.

Flagging an obviously on-topic article

Obviously on topic? Really? You can dictate it is on topic because you have power to, but it is petty to threaten people for flagging when it is clearly not obvious it is on topic.

Ok, you've convinced me that "obviously" was an overstatement. I'll take that word out and tone down that sentence.

What's on topic is what gratifies intellectual curiosity. It may not gratify everyone's, but that's true of every submission.

A single errant flag isn't going to get anyone penalized, but if users show a pattern of flagging intellectually substantive articles on uncommon or unexpected topics (especially non-technical ones, such as about history or the arts), we take away their flagging rights. Those are some of the best and most underrepresented article types we see. We need more of them on HN, not less.

The parent article would likely be flagged less if it had a nicer title. A title like "Was Shakespeare a Woman?" likely sets off a lot of warnings on peoples' clickbait radars, causing people to flag the submission without even reading the article.

I agree completely, and normally we'd edit that out, but having read the article, I don't think it's that fair to do so. That's why I added the extra information after it—in the hope of cooling down the dreaded title fever.

Edit: I give in.

The crazy thing is: it's got a question mark, in the fucking headline. There's a question mark in the fucking headline.

Can people not just go "erm... no?" internally, when the question offends them?

Truly we are lost.

EDIT: Perhaps downvoters are assuming that while the headline actually reads "Was Shakespeare a woman?", it could instead read something else. And, yes, that is true. There is a huge number of possible combinations of letters that could occur in a headline, even if we ignore the meaningless ones. But I am restricting myself, perhaps unreasonably, to considering the headline that is actually there.

this is one thing i hate about hacker news' policy of editing (and thus editorializing) titles and links. for one, nobody knows what you two are discussing because no one knows what the original title was, what the original change was, and how those differ from the current title. it just confuses things. and more often i can't find articles i had read earlier in the day because the title and maybe even link has changed. and all that ignores the possibility of editorializing an article's title. to me, the original title, regardless of its provocativeness, is always preferred. if there is a need to update the link, then that should be in a comment and stickied if hacker news had that feature.

If we change the title we usually say "submitted title was XYZ" in a comment, like so: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22submitted%20title%20was%22&....

If you don't see that, it almost always means the original title was just whatever shows in the article. That was the case with this one.

"Clearly not obvious it is not topic"?

A perfectly valid opinion, but it's manifestly not clearly not obvious it is on topic.

> This article is interesting and perfectly on topic for HN. Most of us have never heard of Emilia Bassano. There's a great Borges quote. And so on.

I'm genuinely curious what makes a post "on topic" for HN. Are each of these sufficient criteria?

- Being about someone "we've never heard of". - Having a great quote by a famous person.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not sufficient, but relevant. If an article contains lots of new information about an intellectually interesting theme, then it's on topic here.

I've flagged the piece as wild speculation. Baffled what part of the article stimulated your intellectual curiosity. Remarkably, the article itself rests the case of relationship between Shakespeare's plays and the respective lady, as well as the the motivations of the author, in two phrases out of the hundreds meandering mostly around the subject. To save everyone else's time:

> Her writing style bears no obvious resemblance to Shakespeare’s in his plays, though Hudson strains to suggest similarities. The overlap lies in the feminist content.

Curiosity and speculation are compatible. The spirit that would banish speculation, not so much.

What about pieces that are written with a not-so-subtle ideological axe to grind? Let's take fundamentalist Christianity, for example https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/humans/wheres-the-evi.... Would that qualify as "intellectual curiosity"? As far as I can tell, OP is the same genre of wild speculation, only written from a fundamentalist feminist perspective.

Good question. Ideological axe-grinding leads to predictable arguments in which people have nothing new to say and merely flame each other. That very much destroys the curious spirit, so from an HN point of view—totally different. We moderate all that heavily, since otherwise flamewars would consume the site. If you want to see how heavily, check out how tedious it is: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I don't think you're characterizing this article fairly at all. The quote you cherry-picked earlier made it sound much dumber than it is (I actually objected to that earlier but decided to let it go) and "fundamentalist feminist" seems to me way off base. Are you sure it's just "speculation" that you're upset about? To me it feels more likely to be about the ideological vibes the article could possibly be giving off, or the buttons it could be pushing. I say that without judgment; it's understandable if so; but in that case we're simply not talking about curiosity. I don't get the impression that the author is grinding an axe. She just went down a rabbit hole that surprised her, and dug up a lot of interesting information along the way. Sure it's speculation, but it's an interesting ride. If you don't enjoy that ride, others are not far away.

Synopsis of the article:

- First half: Shakespeare didn't write the plays himself.

- Second half: Life of Emilia Bassano, and "traces" thereof in some of Shakespeare's work, as narrated by "Emilia Bassano’s most ardent champion" John Hudson.

In all honesty, the only quote I could find that attempts to substantiate the claim of Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare, about 3/4 in the piece, is the one I quoted. The claim doesn't stand on its face, as she's a published author and her style doesn't match Shakespeare's work. Case closed.

If you have another quote that substantiates the claim in the title, would you please share it, instead of engaging in threats and personal attacks?

Edit: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As far as my reading comprehension goes, a conservative interpretation of the evidence in the article supports at best "Emilia Bassano inspired some of Shakespeare's work". I can't explain the jump to "Emilia Bassano wrote all of Shakespeare's work", maybe you can help. Going with the conservative interpretation, the article seems better fit for the Literary Review magazine.

You're treating the article as if it's claiming proof when it's really just exploring a question. Is that really so hard to see? or so bad?

A literary review article is perfectly welcome on HN if it's interesting and curious. We could use more of those.

You're absolutely right. I expect[ed] articles on HN to make a credible attempt at being true, ideally independently verifiably so. "Did Emilia Bassano ghost-write Shakespeare works? Most likely not." would be a slightly more intellectually honest presentation, given the extraordinarity of the claim, the paucity of positive evidence, the presence of negative evidence, and it being 1 out of 66 other competing claims at being Shakespeare [0]. Leaving one more quote from article, re: the rabbit hole the author just happened to stumble into out of intellectual curiosity.

> What would the revelation of a woman’s hand at work mean, aside from the loss of a prime tourist attraction in Stratford-upon-Avon? Would the effect be a blow to the cultural patriarchy, or the erosion of the canon’s status? Would (male) myths of inexplicable genius take a hit? Would women at last claim their rightful authority as historical and intellectual forces?

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/amelia-bassano-william-sha...

This may be the problem. That's not the standard that applies to HN. The standard is much broader: is it intellectually interesting? Does it gratify intellectual curiosity.

> You're treating the article as if it's claiming proof when it's really just exploring a question.

It's not "exploring a question." It's casting aspersions. Which is cowardly and intellectually dishonest.

Also the article contains nothing but lies.

Could you please review the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Note how they include:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

The author of an article is someone, and we're far away from strongest plausible territory here.

I have no dog in this fight but that is a very uncharitable "synopsis". The main argument that I took away is that the plays contain many references to things (foreign cultures, social customs, musical instruments, etc.) that Shakespeare had no way of being exposed to, based on what we know of his life, but this woman's background did expose her to all these things, and she ran in the same circles at the same time (enough so that she could have been his lover). The secondary argument is the feminist content. It's all obviously very circumstantial and doesn't constitute "proof", but it's highly unlikely we'll ever get any actual proof after five hundred years of digging into the limited evidence from the time. The point is it's interesting to consider, and might make you think differently about the context and content of his (or her) work.

If they ran in the same circles and exchanged ideas, wouldn't that be exposure to the references of things that Shakespeare didn't have first-hand experience with ?

That's addressed in the article:

  Could the plays’ many connections to Bassano be explained by simply
  assuming the playwright knew her well? “Shakespeare would have had 
  to run to her every few minutes for a musical reference or an 
  Italian pun,” he said.

This is far from a charitable interpretation of the article and to me it seems rather ironic that you would claim Dang is threatening you and engaging in personal attacks when you seem to handwave the article away by attacking the author with an underpinning of claiming they have an ideological axe to grind.

Would you consider ill-informed, poorly-argued, patently false nonsense on-topic if it concerned a science or technology topic? This “triggers” people with interest or expertise in literature because the “X wrote Shakespeare’s plays” has been discussed to death by experts and lay people alike. It’s the literary equivalent of crackpot amateur theories about the solution to cold fusion.

Putting the question that way stacks the deck a bit. Could an article be both interesting and mistaken on a technical topic? Sure it could.

> Accounts that flag too many on-topic articles like this one eventually get their flagging privileges removed.

Any chance we could get an 'unflag' option? I've accidentally flagged at least one article...

There is one? At least, I remember accidentally flagging a bunch of stuff and fixing it.

Ed: just checked in case I was crazy. The flag link turns into an unflag link once the page reloads.

... ok weird I guess I failed to reload, thanks for checking

So truth is not part of the Hacker News guidelines.

Of course not. Something can be interesting and wrong. Sometimes great things begin by being wrong. Nor do we have a truth machine that would allow us to distinguish wrong things and mark them off topic.

> triggered

Please don't misuse this word, it does not mean "annoyed", it is something serious that can happen to someone with PTSD. Unfortunately socially-challenged people with alt-right leanings have co-opted the term to harass vulnerable people. (Not saying you're any of this, it has seeped out into more general usage too, but it would be considerate of us to avoid it.)

Words develop multiple meanings. This word has passed beyond specialized usage. When that happens, the arrow of time is irreversible. I know this is painful when it's a word you have close associations with—I've felt that many times myself—but I don't think anything can be done about it.

If the more general usage were malicious, I'd agree with you and stop using it, but I don't think it's malicious at all. It refers to a process that takes place in the human nervous system, one we all would do well to become more conscious of in ourselves. And it's the best word I know of for describing that. We can talk about activation as well, but that's a bit different and not always as clear.

Linguistic descriptivism helps with what does tend to happen, not with what should happen. With sufficient effort, I think it's still possible to make a difference.

A better question than "was Shakespeare someone other than Shakespeare" but "is Shakespeare worthy of the attention in the first place?"

One could argue that his cultural impact and popularity alone answers that question in the positive, but that argument also applies to Kim Kardashian.

>but that argument also applies to Kim Kardashian.

Let’s talk after 400 years. I would be surprised if most people would know about Kim Kardashian 100 years from now.

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