Was Shakespeare a plagiarist? David Mitchell plays the bard for laughs in Upstart Crow.
I sort of fell for a conspiracy theory, not that long ago. Not really. Not very badly. But still; I ended up tweeting a thing which kind of said that I could, maybe, bring myself to believe that Shakespeare was not the author of Shakespeare’s plays, but that they were written by a woman called Emilia Bassano.
Sure, I can give mitigating factors — the piece arguing it was in the Atlantic! Steven Pinker had tweeted it apparently approvingly! I included a lot of verbiage about how it might still be “utter garbage” and how I thought it was very unlikely to be true! But, still, I found it convincing enough to tweet it out, publicly and positively.
The thing was, there were some interesting hints. There is, apparently, a strange shortage of surviving manuscripts in Shakespeare’s own hand, unlike other playwrights of the time. And in the same year of Shakespeare’s first public work, an Elizabethan literary critic wrote cryptically about an anonymous “Gentlewoman” who had written sonnets and a comedy, “in her tongue & pen a divine Rhetoric … [a] beautiful and allective style, as ingenious as elegant”.
A rival playwright wrote, again cryptically, of an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers”, who considers himself the “onely Shake-scene in a countrey”. The Atlantic piece says that in classical literature the crow was a thieving bird who stole other birds’ feathers, and that for “anti-Stratfordians”, ie Shakespeare truthers, it was a coded accusation that Shakespeare was a plagiarist. Ben Jonson wrote a satirical poem which was widely believed to be about Shakespeare, and in which he accused the subject of “[making] each man’s wit his own”.
The piece also asked: how come a man who had never apparently had much education or left England knew so much about northern Italy, or astronomy, or foreign languages? Bassano, apparently an exiled Venetian noblewoman, would fit better. The author of the Atlantic piece was also much baffled by how Shakespeare could write women so well and so sympathetically.
Anyway, it turned out to be complete toss. The piece ended up needing significant corrections; the author had ignored scholars who had given her info she didn’t like; it cited material from someone who also believed that ley-lines were landing markers for alien spaceships. The Atlantic ran five ‘responses’ to it from Shakespeare scholars, most of them utterly panning it (the one that didn’t was by Mark Rylance, who is an excellent actor but not a historian).
I’m reminded of this because I came across a study in the journal Science Advances, which provides (it says) evidence against the cross-channel version of this conspiracy theory, that Molière’s plays were in fact written by someone else, probably a rival playwright called Pierre Corneille.
I had never heard of this conspiracy theory, but it seems to have the same sort of structure: he wasn’t acknowledged as a writer in his own time, he lacked education necessary to write the material he purportedly wrote, there aren’t many surviving original manuscripts, etc. I don’t have the necessary expertise to critique the study, but it essentially looked at the entire body of written work by Molière along with that of several contemporary French playwrights, including Corneille, and found no similarity of the kind you would expect if any of it was written by the same man.
As I said: I don’t know whether the study really does nail the coffin shut on Molière truthing. But my bet, nonetheless, is that the Molière truthers are wrong, simply because it is much easier to come up with conspiracy theories than it is to debunk them.
For instance: did you know that the latitude of the Great Pyramid of Giza is the same as the speed of light in a vacuum, to nine significant figures? Seriously. The Great Pyramid’s latitude: 29.9792458°N. The speed of light in a vacuum, in metres per second: 299,792,458. Check it out. Ancient Egyptians did not know the speed of light in a vacuum. How do you explain a coincidence like that – a one-in-a-billion coincidence! – without admitting that aliens built it?
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