
The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare - laurex
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076/
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JohnHud
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with me the additional unpublished research.

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Tycho
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.

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jonstewart
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.

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

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ameister14
So 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/)

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emmelaich
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.

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

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thrower123
I still subscribe to the Lazarus Long theory of Shakespeare.

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

~~~
thrower123
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.

------
dang
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](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
_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.

~~~
dang
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.

~~~
ve55
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.

~~~
dang
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.

~~~
tom_
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.

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Causality1
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.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>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.

