Sure, I can give mitigating factors — the piece arguing it was in the Atlantic! Steven Pinker had tweeted it apparently approvingly! I included a lot of verbiage about how it might still be “utter garbage” and how I thought it was very unlikely to be true! But, still, I found it convincing enough to tweet it out, publicly and positively.

The thing was, there were some interesting hints. There is, apparently, a strange shortage of surviving manuscripts in Shakespeare’s own hand, unlike other playwrights of the time. And in the same year of Shakespeare’s first public work, an Elizabethan literary critic wrote cryptically about an anonymous “Gentlewoman” who had written sonnets and a comedy, “in her tongue & pen a divine Rhetoric … [a] beautiful and allective style, as ingenious as elegant”. 

A rival playwright wrote, again cryptically, of an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers”, who considers himself the “onely Shake-scene in a countrey”. The Atlantic piece says that in classical literature the crow was a thieving bird who stole other birds’ feathers, and that for “anti-Stratfordians”, ie Shakespeare truthers, it was a coded accusation that Shakespeare was a plagiarist. Ben Jonson wrote a satirical poem which was widely believed to be about Shakespeare, and in which he accused the subject of “[making] each man’s wit his own”.

The piece also asked: how come a man who had never apparently had much education or left England knew so much about northern Italy, or astronomy, or foreign languages? Bassano, apparently an exiled Venetian noblewoman, would fit better. The author of the Atlantic piece was also much baffled by how Shakespeare could write women so well and so sympathetically.

Anyway, it turned out to be complete toss. The piece ended up needing significant corrections; the author had ignored scholars who had given her info she didn’t like; it cited material from someone who also believed that ley-lines were landing markers for alien spaceships. The Atlantic ran five ‘responses’ to it from Shakespeare scholars, most of them utterly panning it (the one that didn’t was by Mark Rylance, who is an excellent actor but not a historian).

I’m reminded of this because I came across a study in the journal Science Advances, which provides (it says) evidence against the cross-channel version of this conspiracy theory, that Molière’s plays were in fact written by someone else, probably a rival playwright called Pierre Corneille.

By the same author

Let loose the lynx!

By Tom Chivers

I had never heard of this conspiracy theory, but it seems to have the same sort of structure: he wasn’t acknowledged as a writer in his own time, he lacked education necessary to write the material he purportedly wrote,  there aren’t many surviving original manuscripts, etc. I don’t have the necessary expertise to critique the study, but it essentially looked at the entire body of written work by Molière along with that of several contemporary French playwrights, including Corneille, and found no similarity of the kind you would expect if any of it was written by the same man.

As I said: I don’t know whether the study really does nail the coffin shut on Molière truthing. But my bet, nonetheless, is that the Molière truthers are wrong, simply because it is much easier to come up with conspiracy theories than it is to debunk them.

For instance: did you know that the latitude of the Great Pyramid of Giza is the same as the speed of light in a vacuum, to nine significant figures? Seriously. The Great Pyramid’s latitude: 29.9792458°N. The speed of light in a vacuum, in metres per second: 299,792,458. Check it out. Ancient Egyptians did not know the speed of light in a vacuum. How do you explain a coincidence like that –  a one-in-a-billion coincidence! – without admitting that aliens built it?

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Statistically, you shouldn't believe the news

By Tom Chivers

Well, you do it by pointing out that it’s less of a coincidence than you think. Scott Alexander does a wonderful job of it, but here are a few basics. For one thing, the precision is spurious. If you only did it to seven significant figures, your coordinates would be slightly closer to the very centre of the pyramid. So it’s really only a one-in-10-million coincidence.

For another, the longitude of the Great Pyramid appears to be cosmically meaningless. Also, all the latitudes 2.99792°N, 2.99792°S, and 29.9792°S would also match the speed of light to the same precision, but there’s nothing super interesting anywhere along those lines of latitude that I’m aware of. Likewise for longitudes with those numbers. And – there’s not just the speed of light to look at. How about the Planck length or the Hubble constant? Or – why did you use the Great Pyramid and not the Sphinx? You’ve got several more tickets to the lottery, and none of the others win anything. (It’s also a bit weird that ancient aliens are using the metre, a measure invented in revolutionary France.)

More generally, you just have to ask: why pick the Pyramids? Why not Stonehenge or Machu Picchu or the Nazca lines, or the Lascaux caves, or – whatever? Why pick a landmark at all, or latitude and longitude – why not a code written in the Bible, or in the DNA of fish? The world is full of billions of things; if you want to find a billions-to-one coincidence, you’ll find it, and you’ll be able to add all sorts of corroborative detail, as well. 

You don’t need to go all the way to aliens building the pyramids to find this sort of thing going on. In much more prosaic forms it goes on all the time — it’s the basis for the replication crisis in science, in that you can see interesting-looking patterns in noisy data that let you find all sorts of spurious things, like literal psychic powers, if you don’t constrain what you’re looking for in advance. It lets you find frightening social trends which probably aren’t real, if you’re allowed to pick when your data series starts and ends and which subset of the data you look at. But you can also do it to let you find that Atlantis was real, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that we never went to the Moon.

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The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

The trouble is, sometimes there is a conspiracy. Lt Col Oliver North really did sell weapons to Iran and illegally use the proceeds to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The CIA really did run a fake vaccination programme (in Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden). How do we know when the coincidences aren’t coincidences and there’s really something there? God knows – sometimes it’s just really hard.

In science, things like preregistering your hypotheses before gathering your data can avoid the “degrees of freedom” that let you find spurious patterns in noise. Maybe with conspiratorial thinking, you need to be aware of the possible coincidences that didn’t happen: all the people who didn’t leave the North Tower just before it fell, all the photos of the lunar landscape that don’t look like a Hollywood film set.

But I don’t know if that would have helped me with my Shakespeare conspiracy problem. What would I be looking for — all the Elizabethan authors who didn’t write cryptic notes about how some Shakespeare-like character might or might not be a plagiarist? All the things that Shakespeare wrote about that he could plausibly have written about?

Maybe the answer is simply that, if someone presents you with some complex but plausible-sounding explanation for why almost everyone is wrong about something, your first instinct should be to distrust it. But then I’d be telling you to disbelieve a lot of the things I write. Maybe all you can really take away from this is that Shakespeare probably wrote Shakespeare, Molière probably wrote Molière, we almost certainly did go to the Moon, and generally, the most boring explanation is probably the most likely.

Anyhow – I relate this conversation because of what my acquaintance said next. “The problem is, Douglas,” he replied, “the theatre is not the theatre.” This is the sort of thing that catches the attention.

“So what is it then?” I asked back.

“It thinks that it is a think tank,” he said. An insight that very much made my evening.

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

Once you realise this, you can see why so many theatre people are involved in rather histrionic forms of politics (see Vanessa Redgrave, Mark Rylance et al). If you believe that you possess exceptionally important insights into political affairs, then it is possible that being restricted to a short run at a small and unpacked theatre may frustrate you. You may even come to ruminate that the medium through which you have chosen to communicate with the world is not the perfect medium for the transmission of political ideas.

It got me thinking about what else might be said to fall into a similar category — to consider which sectors are not doing what people on the outside think they are doing. I could reel off a long list of such institutions, but foremost among them is the publishing world.

It is perhaps inevitable that people see trends most clearly in sectors that they know. It is for that reason, among others, that I was not surprised to read that Professor James Flynn’s new book on free speech has been cancelled.

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It's your fault newspapers don't tell the truth

By Douglas Murray

Those interested in the full story can find Flynn’s own account published by the excellent Quillette. But the nuts and bolts are that Flynn had written what sounds like a rigorously scholarly work called In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor and Emerald Press had scheduled it for publication in its September 2019 catalogue.

There the publishers had said:

“In Defense of Free Speech surveys the underlying factors that circumscribe the ideas tolerated in our institutions of learning. James Flynn critically examines the way universities censor their teaching, how student activism tends to censor the opposing side and how academics censor themselves, and suggests that few, if any, universities can truly be seen as ‘good’.”

But, then, in June Professor Flynn received an email from his publisher saying that they were regretfully no longer able to publish his work.

“Emerald believes that its publication, in particular in the United Kingdom, would raise serious concerns. By the nature of its subject matter, the work addresses sensitive topics of race, religion, and gender. The challenging manner in which you handle these topics as author, particularly at the beginning of the work, whilst no doubt editorially powerful, increases the sensitivity and the risk of reaction and legal challenge.”

Emerald then gives two main reasons for refusing to publish the manuscript. First, that the work “could be seen to incite racial hatred and stir up religious hatred under United Kingdom law”. Though keen to stress that they were aware that there was no such intent on the part of the author, the publisher did add that because of “modern means of digital media expression…The potential for circulation of the more controversial passages of the manuscript online, without the wider intellectual context of the work as a whole and to a very broad audience — in a manner beyond our control —represents a material legal risk for Emerald.”

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Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

That is an extraordinary thing in itself. For it is true that the online world can pick up a piece of anything and make it into a worldwide social media storm. But the simple job of all grown-ups — let alone grown-ups who believe in free speech — in such a situation is not to bow to the storm, but to say, “So what?”

Emerald had another justification at hand.

“Secondly, there are many instances in the manuscript where the actions, conversations and behaviour of identifiable individuals at specific named colleges are discussed in detail and at length in relation to controversial events. Given the sensitivity of the issues involved, there is both the potential for serious harm to Emerald’s reputation and the significant possibility of legal action.”

The only possible interpretation of these words is that in recounting the outrages at various colleges and universities in recent years (such as the assault and hospitalisation of Professor Allison Stanger at Middlebury College in 2017), some of the authorities who had culpability for such actions might have been named. And some of them might have minded being named. And some of them may have sued.

This is familiar terrain. In 2006, the book Alms for Jihad by Millard Burr and Robert O Collins was published in America but not in the UK; it was believed that Britain’s libel laws would make it possible for at least one of the wealthy individuals named in the book as having provided material support for terrorism to sue. That may have been a legitimate fear then (since the slight reform of the libel laws in Britain it is a slightly less serious fear today). And it may be an illegitimate fear now (just how many millions will an American academic be willing to burn in the UK courts to deny something that is true?). But it is also a pusillanimous decision and one which any publisher should be ashamed of themselves for conceding, let alone kow-towing to.

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Why are publishers pandering to the mob?

By Sam Leith

But that returns me to the point I started off at. Which is that what Emerald’s weaselly communication actually offers is a weaselly reminder that to a great extent the publishing industry has stopped being a place for the fair and free exchange of ideas. It has instead, in significant part, become a body which believes that its job is in some way to hold the line on what is acceptable discussion and what is not.

If that line were put around, say, Holocaust denial materials (as it is) then that may be all well and good. But in recent years much of the publishing industry in countries such as the UK, US and Australia has seen fit to attempt to anathematise views which are held by large swathes – even majorities – in the general public.

I happen to be fortunate enough to be published by a publisher (Bloomsbury Continuum) which is most certainly not subject to such censorship or self-censorship. Indeed Bloomsbury publishes writers ranging from me to Laurie Penny, who could not in any way be described as bedfellows. Which is as it should be. But in the publishing industry this is no longer the norm.

When my book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, was published in 2017, I heard from a very wide range of people in the publishing business. One of the most telling (but not unusual) tales came from someone who worked at one of the other major publishing houses. This person asked their boss whether he had seen how well The Strange Death of Europe had been selling. Yes, he conceded that he had noticed. And did he remember this person mentioning to him some time before that they really should have published something on the immigration question? Yes, the boss conceded. But they still wouldn’t do so. Why, he was asked, since the profits were obviously there? “Because we,” he stressed, “wouldn’t want those readers.”

I suggested that this person tell their boss to inform their shareholders at the next shareholder meeting that they were not, in fact, running a ‘for-profit’ organisation but rather some sort of NGO which aimed to police the borders of the culture.

That is not the case with all publishers, thank goodness. But it is the case with some. And Professor Flynn seems to have had the misfortune to have been made vulnerable to one. May he be successful in finding another publisher who wishes to live up to that tradition of true dissent and dispute which is one of the finest traditions of all.