In Janeites, Jane Fox wrote:
“In this group's discussions of what Austen read, I don't remember
seeing reports of anyone using the software mentioned in this article, or
similar software. You may find description of the technique interesting.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/books/plagiarism-software-unveils-a-new-source-for-11-of-shakespeares-plays.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Diane Reynolds replied: “This article is quite fascinating and I am very glad, and frankly not
surprised, to see McCarthy is a self-taught scholar.”
Thank you
very much, Jane, for posting that link, I was not aware of McCarthy’s research and
I am as interested in all things Shakespeare as I am in all things Austen. This
really is a big deal, for exactly the reasons stated in the article – there may
well be more unpublished sources for Shakespeare’s plays than have previously
been identified, some as significant as North’s book, and knowing those sources
could shed fresh light on Shakespeare’s sometimes cryptic authorial meanings.
I have
a couple of additional comments:
First,
as Diane pointed out, it is indeed extremely gratifying to see another “eccentric” self-taught
independent scholar (who, per the article, spends 12 hours a day on his
research—that’s more than I’ve spent over the past 13 years, but not by that
much) make an impact. It gives inspiration to the rest of us!
Second,
in terms of scholarly approach, I really resonated to the following excerpt
from the article:
“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.”
That is
exactly the kind of argument I’ve made a hundred times regarding the importance
of very specific verbiage in establishing a non-explicit allusion by Jane
Austen to a prior author. It’s all about the clustering of relatively common
words around a related theme, and it is as much an art as a science in determining
if the allusion is real or not, and what it means.
That’s
why I am so certain, e.g., that Jane Austen, via the wording of her “Henry and
Emma” allusion in Persuasion, was
very specifically alluding to the passage in Sarah Fielding’s “Remarks” about the character of Richardson's Clarissa,
in which Fielding’s fictional readers discuss “Henry and Emma” vis a vis
Clarissa. There is common verbiage and content which takes us out of the realm
of lucky coincidence and into intentional allusion, via a kind of “tagging”.
Here’s what I wrote in that recent post:
“I assert that Austen
seized upon Mr. Dellincourt’s statement that
“nothing
less than the lovely Emma's Passion for Henry would be any Satisfaction to [LOVELACE],
if he was a Lover",”
and
tweaked it into noticeably parallel phraseology in Anne Elliot’s passing thoughts in Persuasion:
"Without emulating the feelings of an
Emma towards her Henry, she would have attended on Louisa with a zeal
above the common claims of regard, for [Wentworth's] sake."
McCarthy’s
discovery illustrates that Shakespeare did much the same thing – it is not
plagiarism, it is deliberate tagging, so that anyone familiar with the source
text would read through the lens of the work alluded to – and as the examples
listed in the article illustrate, that lens is often ironic.
I really
look forward to reading McCarthy’s (and Schlueter’s) book, so thanks again,
Jane, for bringing it to our attention!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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