Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/15/plagiarism-software-finds-shak.html
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See what happens when you don’t have DRM?
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It was the best of times, it was the BLURST of times?!!!
[I know that’s not Shakespeare, but still…]
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Sounds like Shakespeare was a bit of hipster.
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Okay everybody, let’s start the conspiracy discussion on who really wrote George North’s book, and is there a freaky biblical code hidden in it?
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That quote would be even better if he “stole” it from someone else.
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Common knowledge for anyone who studies annotated versions of Shakespeare’s plays.
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It was Shakespeare.
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So William wrote the book on rebels, but William is really Francis Bacon so he wrote all of them? Or did William write the book on rebels pretending to be North and then Francis wrote the plays pretending to be William? Does that mean that George wrote The New Atlantis?
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It’s easy enough when you approach it as pathological steganography.
You need to read it backwards, taking the first word from every paragraph.
While not plagiarism - details, characters, circumstances and in many cases whole plot lines in a large number of Shakespeare’s plays also came from Holinshed’s Chronicles. So this latest research comes as no surprise to anyone who, like me, has studied the works of Shakespeare.
Still prefer J K Rowling though myself.
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Son of a bitch.
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“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” - James Nicoll
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I don’t actually see any other way to do art except by the means Jarmusch describes: Since you understand the world by experiencing the world, whatever strikes you as you experience it (right down to vocab you’ve picked up from some book) becomes a piece of the puzzle as you then pull together for yourself a synthesis of your experience (even if you write abstractly, of course). It’s the hard work of using the pieces together to enact your particular purpose keeps it from being a rehash.
It’s maybe fun to call this activity theft because of our awareness of the crime of plagiarism and theft being a crime, but yeah no.
Shakespeare was inventive, but I’m guessing (not being a scholar) that his inventiveness was in the work of synthesizing all this stuff and making good characters and poetry out of it.
He supposedly was a “genius” at creating news words, too, but even his rep for this is distorted/not wholly real when examined under the desk lamp of scholarship (fun that he may have been a word-nerd/magpie, tho):
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Am I misremembering, or wasn’t he a notorious roisterer who eventually went mad from syphilis? Or was that some other historickal George North… probably a common enough name…
And doing a quick google, it turns out Red Green didn’t come up with “Now is the Winter of Our Discount Tent” either. Man, reexamining all my heroes today…
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dammit, i knew people were reusing words, words other authors had used previously!
get your own words people, authors should only use their own original words, not copy the words that other people use!
(wait maybe “plundering words” is exactly how language works everywhere in all cases. you don’t need fancy software to realize that.)
I just don‘t buy into the idea that shakespeare just invented the words, and if he copied them from someone else, is it likely they invented them? I think it more likely they were the first to write it down.
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