Shakespeare-Plagiarism Software and Genius

Plagiarism Software’s New Discovery About Shakespeare Is an Opportunity to
Rethink His Genius
By ISAAC BUTLER
The Bard of Avon wasn’t a plagiarist, but genius isn’t born in a vacuum. This week,
scholars Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter announced that they had discovered a new major
source of Shakespeare’s plays. Using plagiarism software and literary analysis, McCarthy and
Schlueter are preparing a new book in which they argue that the forgotten A Brief Discourse of
Rebellion and Rebels by the even-more-forgotten George North was a key point of inspiration
for 11 of his major works. As reported by the New York Times:
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 a 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.”
The article, and the book, have many more examples of places where the words of
Shakespeare and North intersect. Even though plagiarism-detecting software was used to make
this discovery, McCarthy and Schlueter want to make clear that they are not accusing
Shakespeare of plagiarism. Instead, they’re simply arguing that North’s writings were an
inspiration for him.
They needn’t bother. By our standards, Shakespeare, who lived before modern ideas of
authorship, plagiarized constantly. The discovery of North’s influence on Shakespeare is a
welcome opportunity to remember how the Bard of Avon’s genius actually worked, and how
much his methods are at odds with our own ideas of artistic greatness.
Shakespeare is not Western literature’s great inventor but rather its great inheritor. The
Bard borrowed plots, ideas, characters, themes, philosophies, and occasional passages from
sources ranging from Plutarch’s Lives and Holinshed’s Chronicles to Montaigne’s Essays and
plays by his contemporaries. He returned again and again to ancient Rome, finding inspiration in
Ovid, Seneca, Plautus, and others.
His inheritance also goes beyond the textual. When he began working in the London
theater scene, its component parts were there waiting for him. There were already professional
theater companies, outdoor amphitheaters, plays in five acts, iambic pentameter, and conventions
surrounding comedies, tragedies, and history plays.
None of this should make us think less of Shakespeare’s achievements and neither should
the increasing evidence that he sometimes used uncredited collaborators and occasionally served
as one himself. Shakespeare didn’t just faithfully reproduce his sources—he argued with and
subverted them, he combined them in unconventional ways, and he made substantial changes to
them. King Leir, the anonymous source text for Shakespeare’s King Lear, ends with Leir
restored to the throne and everyone still alive. Shakespeare frequently expands roles for women
in his plays and removes many passages where characters share their motivations. Shakespeare
also often makes his plays more complicated than his sources, both ethically and logistically. He
even went so far as to add an extra set of identical twins to The Comedy of Errors.
He didn’t just faithfully reproduce his sources—he argued with and subverted them.
This is, generally speaking, not how we think about Shakespeare or, given limited
classroom time and the emphasis on close textual reading, how he is taught. Many of his
predecessors’ plays are lost, and his peers among Elizabethan playwrights aren’t read, taught, or
produced nearly enough, making it harder to see the connections between his work and his
contemporaries. Even when Shakespeare’s sources are mentioned, rarely is much time spent on
reading them to see the influence clearly.
Thus, we look at Julius Caesar and marvel at the incredible rhetoric but don’t see it as in
dialogue with plays about Rome by other Elizabethans such as Thomas Lodge’s The Wounds of
Civil War, and we don’t look at Plutarch’s accounts of Brutus and Mark Antony’s lives, which
served as the source for both Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The result is that our
understanding of both Caesar and Shakespeare is impoverished. By looking at his sources, we
can see what he kept and cut and changed. By looking at his context, we can see the debates and
cultural moments that he was responding to.
What emerges when you do this is a richer appreciation of the plays and a more
down-to-earth view of their writer. Shakespeare wasn’t a God, and he wasn’t unique, even if he
was the best. He was an artist responding to his time the way artists actually do, through opening
themselves up to influence and creating out of the materials around them. There’s a practical side
to his work as well. He wrote for a company, which means he wrote to the particular skills and
limitations of his actors. He wrote prolifically, which necessitated recycling ideas, themes, and
bits of dramatic business. As a part owner of his company, he also had to respond to practical
matters like trends, government censorship, and the need to fill up to 3,000 seats a night.
A grubby businessman furiously writing plays and ripping off whatever he could get his
hands on hardly fits our model of artistic genius. We think of geniuses as tormented rock stars,
breaking new ground with sui generis innovations that spring from their minds like Athena from
the brow of Zeus. In movies like Amadeus, this myth of artistic genius makes for delicious art in
its own right, but it’s not how artistic creation really works. Creating a work of art is part of an
endless dialogue that reaches both back thousands of years and out into the world around us.
This is what Shakespeare did, and he didn’t do it alone. If it worked so well for him, perhaps we
should stop being attached to ideas of originality that have no bearing on how art is actually
made.

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Plagiarism Software’s New Discovery About Shakespeare Is an Opportunity to

Rethink His Genius

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