Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

#51

Post by dang »

pacala wrote: post #39
dang wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're treating the article as if it's claiming proof when it's really just exploring a question. Is that really so hard to see? or so bad? A literary review article is perfectly welcome on HN if it's interesting and curious. We could use more of those.

You're absolutely right. I expect[ed] articles on HN to make a credible attempt at being true, ideally independently verifiably so. "Did Emilia Bassano ghost-write Shakespeare works? Most likely not." would be a slightly more intellectually honest presentation, given the extraordinarity of the claim, the paucity of positive evidence, the presence of negative evidence, and it being 1 out of 66 other competing claims a…

This may be the problem. That's not the standard that applies to HN. The standard is much broader: is it intellectually interesting? Does it gratify intellectual curiosity.

Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

#53

Post by dang »

Finnucane wrote: post #52

"Shakespeare couldn't have written those plays because [insert cultural bias here]."

Sorry, but this is bad manners, breaks several of the HN guidelines, and is no way to treat a guest.

If you're going to engage with an author who probably isn't familiar with HN (or any reader, really), please do better than a snarky one-liner.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19908505 and marked it off-topic.

Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

#54

Post by [deleted] »

pacala wrote: post #20
dang wrote: post #6

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…

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 re…

[deleted]

Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

#55

Post by [deleted] »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #8
dang wrote: post #6

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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

#56

Post by dang »

dwb wrote: post #43
dang wrote: post #6

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…

> triggered Please don't misuse this word, it does not mean "annoyed", it is something serious that can happen to someone with PTSD. Unfortunately socially-challenged people with alt-right leanings have co-opted the term to harass vulnerable people. (Not saying you're any of this, it has seeped out into more general usage too, but it would be considerate of us to avoid it.)

Words develop multiple meanings. This word has passed beyond specialized usage. When that happens, the arrow of time is irreversible. I know this is painful when it's a word you have close associations with—I've felt that many times myself—but I don't think anything can be done about it.

If the more general usage were malicious, I'd agree with you and stop using it, but I don't think it's malicious at all. It refers to a process that takes place in the human nervous system, one we all would do well to become more conscious of in ourselves. And it's the best word I know of for describing that. We can talk about activation as well, but that's a bit different and not always as clear.

Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

#57

Post by dang »

ErotemeObelus wrote: post #34
dang wrote: post #6

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…

So truth is not part of the Hacker News guidelines.

Of course not. Something can be interesting and wrong. Sometimes great things begin by being wrong. Nor do we have a truth machine that would allow us to distinguish wrong things and mark them off topic.

Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

#59

Post by dang »

Veen wrote: post #47
dang wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curiosity and speculation are compatible. The spirit that would banish speculation, not so much.

Would you consider ill-informed, poorly-argued, patently false nonsense on-topic if it concerned a science or technology topic? This “triggers” people with interest or expertise in literature because the “X wrote Shakespeare’s plays” has been discussed to death by experts and lay people alike. It’s the literary equivalent of crackpot amateur theories about the solution to cold fusion.

Putting the question that way stacks the deck a bit. Could an article be both interesting and mistaken on a technical topic? Sure it could.

Re: The case for Emilia Bassano as Shakespeare

#60

Post by dang »

nikofeyn wrote: post #41
ve55 wrote: post #14

Earlier 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.

this is one thing i hate about hacker news' policy of editing (and thus editorializing) titles and links. for one, nobody knows what you two are discussing because no one knows what the original title was, what the original change was, and how those differ from the current title. it just confuses things. and more often i can't find articles i had read earlier in the day because the title and maybe even link has chang…

If we change the title we usually say "submitted title was XYZ" in a comment, like so: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22submitted%20title%20was%22&....

If you don't see that, it almost always means the original title was just whatever shows in the article. That was the case with this one.

Post reply on HN