
Plagiarism software unveils one of Shakespeare’s sources - NaOH
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/books/plagiarism-software-unveils-a-new-source-for-11-of-shakespeares-plays.html
======
leereeves
This headline, while technically accurate, is misleading.

> The authors are not suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that
> he read and was inspired by a manuscript titled “A Brief Discourse of
> Rebellion and Rebels,” written in the late 1500s by George North, a minor
> figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth, who served as an ambassador to
> Sweden.

~~~
dang
Ok, we've attempted to make the title more accurate above.

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gumby
Though plagiarism software was at the heart of McCarthy's work, the use of
that term in the NYT's headline is pure clickbait. Shakespeare lived in a
remix culture more like our contemporary one rather than late-20th century
attitudes, and even the concept of plagiarism would likely have seemed odd to
him and his contemporaries. He died a century before the Statute of Anne
passed.

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specialbat
They don't speculate how the lowly Shakespeare could have got access to a
courtier's unpublished manuscript.

~~~
mysterypie
Though I'm sure you're aware of this, I'll mention for others the theory that
Shakespeare was actually Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford[1], and therefore
there would be no mystery about how he could have access. The commonly
accepted William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon allowed his children to
grow up illiterate (this is not a disputed fact); for someone who valued the
English language so much, that seems unimaginable. For many reasons, I find
the Edward de Vere theory[2] much more plausible.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere%2C_17th_Earl_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere%2C_17th_Earl_of_Oxford)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespear...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespeare_authorship)

~~~
rendall
The question of his identity has been settled.

"In 1601, after his father’s death, Shakespeare the upstart returned to the
college of arms to renew the family application for a coat of arms. He had
made a small fortune in the theatre, and was buying property in and around
Stratford. Now he set out to consolidate his reputation as a “Gentleman”.
Under the rules that governed life at the court of Elizabeth I, only the
Queen’s heralds could grant this wish.

"It’s at this point in the story that Wolfe discovered “the smoking gun”. In
the Brooke-Dethick feud, it becomes clear that “Shakespeare, Gent. from
Stratford” and “Shakespeare the Player” are the same man. In other words, “the
man from Stratford” is indeed the playwright. Crucially, in the long-running
“authorship” debate, this has been a fiercely contested point. But Wolfe’s
research nails any lingering ambiguity in which the Shakespeare deniers can
take refuge."

[https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jan/08/sherlock-
hol...](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jan/08/sherlock-holmes-of-
the-library-cracks-shakespeare-identity)

~~~
infradig
You are confusing Shakespeare the author of the plays with Shakespeare the
actor and producer and theatre manager. No one I believe disputes the latter.

~~~
rendall
Shakespeare the author of the plays is one and the same with the actor and
producer and theater manager, per the article.

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hprotagonist
Next thing you know, someone's going to rediscover commedia dell'arte!

edit for substance:

Plots of Commedia dell'arte scenarios, well known in England at the time
Shakespeare was alive and writing, bear close similarities to the broad
strokes of the plots of many of his plays. (
[https://thought.artsci.wustl.edu/podcasts/commedia-
dellarte](https://thought.artsci.wustl.edu/podcasts/commedia-dellarte) )

This doesn't really connote plagiarism.

------
21
I think the point here is that some "dumb" (brute force) software found
something missed by all the field experts.

I'm sure that in the next 20 years some "dumb" math software, some sort of
"Coq neural network arxiv crawler" will find some new math.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
That doesn't seem accurate, the unpublished document was selected first before
being matched using the software.

I'm not sure how they are dating the unpublished document so as to be certain
which is the earlier source. The NYT just says McCarthy claims the production
date.

------
igravious
Hmm. Unfortunate title by the NYT. “The authors are not suggesting that
Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that he read and was inspired by a
manuscript titled “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,” written in the
late 1500s by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth,
who served as an ambassador to Sweden.”

And the authors didn't use plagiarism software, the article never mentions
which exact piece of software they use but it does say, “Scholars have used
computer-assisted techniques in the humanities for several decades. Most of
that scholarship, however, uses function words such as articles and
prepositions to create a “digital signature” that can be used to identify a
writer as author or co-author of another work, rather than using comparatively
rare words to locate a source.

Mr. McCarthy was inspired to use plagiarism software by the work of Sir Brian
Vickers, who used similar techniques in 2009 to identify Shakespeare as a co-
author of the play “Edward III.” While the book has been received favorably,
the statistical techniques used have not yet been subjected to a rigorous
review by other scholars in the digital humanities field.

The first part is accurate and refers to _computational stylometry_ or
lesserly _statistical stylometry_ [0] Software like that gives you a measure
for similarity in style. I've been to a couple of academic talks on the
topic–what the software does is track stylistically invariant features, this
can be function word relative frequency, but it also can track infrequently
used words (or phrases). Using this technique (computational method) you can
compare texts and see how they cluster. Similar texts will cluster closer
together but it does not mean the author's plagiarised each other, just that
have similar "styles" for one definition of style. My understanding of
plagiarism software is that it looks for similarities in _content_ , not
_form_.

source: I'm supposed to be a digital humanist! :)

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Current_research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Current_research)

related: “The Secret Life of Pronouns: James Pennebaker at TEDxAustin”

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGsQwAu3PzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGsQwAu3PzU)

~~~
JorgeGT
> the authors didn't use plagiarism software, the article never mentions which
> exact piece of software they use

The article (at least now) says "Mr. McCarthy used decidedly modern techniques
to marshal his evidence, employing WCopyfind, an open-source plagiarism
software".

This seems correct, and the software is indeed intended to be used primarily
to detect plagiarism:
[http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/wordpress/](http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/wordpress/)

~~~
igravious
I could have sworn that paragraph wasn't there when I read the article, I
remember reading the paragraph above which reads, "Martin Meisel, professor of
dramatic literature emeritus at Columbia University, said in another review
that the book is “impressively argued.” He added that there is no question the
manuscript “must have been somewhere in the background mix of Shakespeare’s
mental landscape” while writing the plays." and the one below which starts,
"In the dedication to his manuscript, for example, North urges those who might
see themselves as ugly to strive to be inwardly beautiful, to defy nature. He
uses a succession of words to make the argument, including “proportion,”
“glass,” “feature,” “fair,” “deformed,” “world,” “shadow” and “nature.”"

Though I'm far from being an expert in this area this is the first time I've
heard of the above mentioned software being mentioned in the _digital
humanities_ or _humanities computing_ context. Generally scholars use R or
Python to perform computational stylometry. See this representative paper, for
instance: [https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016-1/eder-rybicki-
ke...](https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016-1/eder-rybicki-
kestemont.pdf)

------
greglindahl
I have an article about copying between dance sources of the same era... since
copying wasn't considered a bad thing, it's nice that folks weren't rephrasing
to pretend like they weren't:

[http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/articles/copying.html](http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/articles/copying.html)

------
foxhedgehog
This is going to make for interesting research into Shakespeare's art, the
same way that the North version of Plutarch's Lives informs the famous "The
barge she sat in" passage from Antony and Cleopatra:
[http://bloggingshakespeare.com/the-barge-she-sat-
in](http://bloggingshakespeare.com/the-barge-she-sat-in)

~~~
foxhedgehog
I also think that it's interesting that one of the main texts that this
article applies to is King Lear, which also takes inspiration from the Book of
Job, a contemporary Elizabethan play called Gorbuduc, prior versions of Lear
("Leir"), and the Cinderella story, among others. Generally, it's interesting
to look at how Shakespeare inverts, changes, or fuses his sources: Lear is,
like Job, an intensely ordered play that motions towards disorder, and like
Job it contains a menagerie of animals referenced incidentally -- Shakespeare
alone elevates this to a thematic discussion of "nature," which in turn also
provides him a rich vein of material, since "nature" (i.e. mother nature,
order, human nature, etc.) and "natural" (i.e. legitimate child, fool,
unvarnished truth) had multiple meanings that provide thematic offshoots for
the play. All of which is to say that the key isn't just what sources the
plays but what Shakespeare does to transform his source material.

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dang
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

~~~
hprotagonist
updated for sanity. sorry!

~~~
dang
Appreciated! I'll detach my reply and mark it off topic so your comment can
run free.

Edit: although the article doesn't claim plagiarism, no? It just involved
plagiarism detection software.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16336420](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16336420)

------
amelius
Perhaps Jobs really was correct when he said: great artists steal.

