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 yo…
> 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. I'm genuinely curious what makes a post "on topic" for HN. Are each of these sufficient criteria? - Being about someone "we've never heard of". - Having a great quote by a famous person.
The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
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Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
#12All: 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 yo…
> 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. I'm genuinely curious what makes a post "on topic" for HN. Are each of these sufficient criteria? - Being about someone "we've never heard of". - Having a great quote by a famous person.
Not sufficient, but relevant. If an article contains lots of new information about an intellectually interesting theme, then it's on topic here.
Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
#13A 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.
Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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.
Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
#16A 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.
>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.
Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
#17All: 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 yo…
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Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
#19But 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.
Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare
#20All: 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 yo…
I've flagged the piece as wild speculation. Baffled what part of the article stimulated your intellectual curiosity. Remarkably, the article itself rests the case of relationship between Shakespeare's plays and the respective lady, as well as the the motivations of the author, in two phrases out of the hundreds meandering mostly around the subject. To save everyone else's time:
> Her writing style bears no obvious resemblance to Shakespeare’s in his plays, though Hudson strains to suggest similarities. The overlap lies in the feminist content.