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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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