7 ms·
The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
- lsh 8y agoMore importantly, how did Shakespeare feel about bathrooms for the transgender?
- dang 8y agoCan you please not post such dross to HN? "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- happppy 8y agoMight be!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dang 8y agoAll: 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 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/ https://spectator.us/shakespeare-woman-atlantic/.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoFlagging 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.
- dang 8y agoOk, 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.
- ve55 8y agoThe 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.
- dang 8y agoI 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.
- tom_ 8y agoThe 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.
- thrower123 8y agoI still subscribe to the Lazarus Long theory of Shakespeare.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoFor those not familiar with it, would you state the theory?
- thrower123 8y agoI 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.
- Causality1 8y agoA 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.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago>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.
- jonstewart 8y agoBut 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.
- jonstewart 8y agoI will assume the downvotes are from those dastardly Oxfordians, so comfortable in the shadows...
- emmelaich 8y agoI 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Mirioron 8y agoI think it's possible. Look at some of the most popular literature that has been written by women. Fifty shades and what not.
- Tycho 8y agoThe 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.
- JohnHud 8y agoThis 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- qazpot 8y agoNext Up on Hacker News: 1. The case for Flat Earth 2. The case for Black Julius Caesar ..... PS: This article should be counted as spreading fake information. Link to Snopes that debunks it - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/amelia-bassano-william-shakespeare/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/amelia-bassano-william-sha...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ameister14 8y agoSo as I know John Hudson is on here - how do you answer the critiques here: https://spectator.us/shakespeare-woman-atlantic/ https://spectator.us/shakespeare-woman-atlantic/
- Finnucane 8y ago"Shakespeare couldn't have written those plays because [insert cultural bias here]."
- dang 8y agoSorry, but this is bad manners, breaks several of the HN guidelines, and is no way to treat a guest. If you're going to engage with an author who probably isn't familiar with HN (or any reader, really), please do better than a snarky one-liner. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19908505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19908505 and marked it off-topic.