Books | Books News
Plagiarism Software Unveils a New Source for 11 of Shakespeare’s Plays
For
years scholars have debated what inspired William Shakespeare’s
writings. Now, with the help of software typically used by professors to
nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished
manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write “King Lear,”
“Macbeth,” “Richard III,” “Henry V” and seven other plays.
The news has caused Shakespeareans to sit up and take notice.
“If
it proves to be what they say it is, it is a once-in-a-generation — or
several generations — find,” said Michael Witmore, director of the
Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
The
findings were made by Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter, who describe
them in a book to be published next week by the academic press D. S.
Brewer and the British Library. 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.
“It’s
a source that he keeps coming back to,” said Mr. McCarthy, a
self-taught Shakespeare scholar, during a recent interview at his home
in North Hampton, N.H. “It affects the language, it shapes the scenes
and it, to a certain extent, really even influences the philosophy of
the plays.”
In
reviewing the book before it was published, David Bevington, professor
emeritus in the humanities at the University of Chicago and editor of
“The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (7th Edition),” called it “a
revelation” for the sheer number of correlations with the plays,
eclipsed only by the chronicles of Holinshed and Hall and Plutarch’s
“Lives.”
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
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.
Mr.
McCarthy used decidedly modern techniques to marshal his evidence,
employing WCopyfind, an open-source plagiarism software, which picked
out common words and phrases in the manuscript and the plays.
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.” In the opening soliloquy of Richard III (“Now is the
winter of our discontent …”) the hunchbacked tyrant uses the same words
in virtually the same order to come to the opposite conclusion: that
since he is outwardly ugly, he will act the villain he appears to be.
“People
don’t realize how rare these words actually are,” Mr. McCarthy said.
“And he keeps hitting word after word. It’s like a lottery ticket. It’s
easy to get one number out of six, but not to get every number.”
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” of a writer
that can be used to identify them 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.
Those
techniques may only be the “icing on the cake,” said Mr. Witmore, who
briefly examined an advance copy. “At its core, this remains a literary
argument, not a statistical one.” The book contends that Shakespeare not
only uses the same words as North, but often uses them in scenes about
similar themes, and even the same historical characters. In another
passage, North uses six terms for dogs, from the noble mastiff to the
lowly cur and “trundle-tail,” to argue that just as dogs exist in a
natural hierarchy, so do humans. Shakespeare uses essentially the same
list of dogs to make similar points in “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”
To
make sure North and Shakespeare weren’t using common sources, Mr.
McCarthy ran phrases through the database Early English Books Online,
which contains 17 million pages from nearly every work published in
English between 1473 and 1700. He found that almost no other works
contained the same words in passages of the same length. Some words are
especially rare; “trundle-tail” appears in only one other work before
1623.
In
the past, some scholars have identified sources for Shakespeare from a
few unique words. In 1977, for example, Kenneth Muir made the case that
Shakespeare used a particular translation of a book of Latin stories for
“The Merchant of Venice” based on the word “insculpt.” In recent years,
however, it’s become rare to identify new sources for Shakespeare. “The
field has been picked over so carefully,” Mr. Bevington said.
Mr.
McCarthy is an unlikely literary scholar. Originally from Amherst,
N.Y., he studied computer science and theater at the University at
Buffalo, but never graduated. He began writing for magazines and
newspapers and published a book in 2009, titled “Here Be Dragons,” about
the geographical underpinnings of evolution.
That
interest led him to wonder if literary ideas could propagate the same
way, and starting in 2006 he began to explore the sources of
Shakespeare. Mr. McCarthy focused on Thomas North, a translator of
Plutarch’s “Lives,” whom Shakespeare relied on heavily for his dramas.
In
April 2011, Mr. McCarthy brought some of his findings to Ms. Schlueter,
professor emerita of English at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and a
founding editor of Shakespeare Bulletin, a scholarly journal. She
admired his diligence and natural affinity for scholarly research.
“Dennis is the Steve Jobs of the Shakespeare community,” Ms. Schlueter
said, referring to the self-taught Apple founder.
Mr.
McCarthy, 53, works behind three computer monitors on the dining room
table of his home. Supported financially by his wife, a biotechnology
executive, he spends 12 hours a day or more at his computer.
Mr.
McCarthy found a reference to the manuscript by George North, a likely
cousin of Thomas, online in a 1927 auction catalog, which noted it would
be “extremely interesting” to compare certain passages with
Shakespeare. He and Ms. Schlueter scoured libraries and archives for a
year before enlisting the help of a manuscript detective, who studies
rare documents and traced it to the British Library, which had purchased
it in 1933. (The manuscript was filed under an obscure shelf mark,
which made finding it difficult.)
In
1576, North was living at Kirtling Hall near Cambridge, England, the
estate of Baron Roger North. It was here, Mr. McCarthy says, that he
wrote his manuscript, at the same time Thomas North was there possibly
working on his translation of Plutarch.
The
manuscript is a diatribe against rebels, arguing that all rebellions
against a monarch are unjust and doomed to fail. While Shakespeare had a
more ambiguous position on rebellion, Mr. McCarthy said he clearly
mined North’s treatise for themes and characters.
One
of the most compelling is Jack Cade, who led a failed popular rebellion
against Henry VI in 1450. Shakespeare describes Cade’s final days in
“Henry VI, Part 2,” in which he says he was starving and eating grass,
before he was finally caught and dragged through the street by his
heels, his body left to be eaten by crows. Scholars have long thought
that Shakespeare invented these details, but all of them are present in a
passage from North’s “Discourse” in which he inveighs against Cade and
two other famous rebels. Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Schlueter argue that
Shakespeare used those details to make Cade into a composite of the
three.
While
Cade is a minor character, Mr. McCarthy also argues that North’s
“Discourse” may have inspired one of Shakespeare’s most iconic
characters, the Fool in “King Lear.” He points to the memorable passage
in which the Fool and Lear are lost in a storm, and the Fool recites a
prophecy that he attributes to Merlin.
Scholars
have long puzzled over the recitation, which doesn’t seem to match any
known prophecy of Merlin’s. In their book, however, Mr. McCarthy and Ms.
Schlueter claim the passage was inspired by a version of Merlin’s
prophecy that North includes in his “Discourse” to present a dystopian
view of the world “turned up side down.” Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Schlueter
argue such lines may have inspired themes in “King Lear” and even the
character of the Fool.
While
agreeing the passage influenced the scene in “King Lear,” Mr. Bevington
cautioned against an overly expansive reading, noting such themes were
in the air in contemporaneous works, including Erasmus’s “In Praise of
Folly.” Whatever its influence, Mr. Witmore said, the find suggests that
while scholars may have exhausted print sources, there may be other
unpublished manuscripts that inspired the Bard that remain to be
discovered.
For
his part, Mr. McCarthy is already planning future volumes based on his
electronic techniques, hoping to present more discoveries that shed
light on how Shakespeare wrote his plays.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário
Observação: somente um membro deste blog pode postar um comentário.