Latest news with #BardofAvon
Time of India
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Monkeys, metaphors and made-up minds: A history of literary hoaxes from Shakespeare to AI
Long before digital tech enabled us to create deepfakes, there had been a lot of funny and phoney business doing the rounds in literary circles. Perhaps having a prophetic inkling of this, Plato wanted to banish poets from his ideal republic because, through metaphor and rhetoric, they concealed truth under the cloak of illusion. Shakespeare is, perhaps, the best-known case of our seeming inability to tell write from wrong. While the Bard of Avon is unarguably the most celebrated poet and playwright in the canon of English literature, there continues to be much controversy as to who exactly authored the works believed to be those of the man who bequeathed to his wife his 'second-best bed'. Shakespearewallas have argued that the authorship attributed to Shakespeare was really the work of his contemporaries, such as Christopher Marlowe, or Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere, or more recently, a minor English poet called Emilia Lanier, imparting a feminist twist to the tale - which implies that the Bard of Avon should really be called the 'Bird of Avon'. Play Video Pause Skip Backward Skip Forward Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration 0:00 Loaded : 0% 0:00 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 1x Playback Rate Chapters Chapters Descriptions descriptions off , selected Captions captions settings , opens captions settings dialog captions off , selected Audio Track Picture-in-Picture Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Unsold Container Homes in Bataan - Prices You Won't Believe! Shipping Container Homes | Search Ads Search Now Undo The candidacy of dozens of possible ghostwriters who could have been Shakespeare has been put forward, prompting mathematicians literally to go ape and calculate that if X number of monkeys were given X number of typewriters, in X number of years they would reproduce the entire Shakespearean corpus which, statistically speaking, might claim to be, if not rhyme and reason, then at least rhyme and rhesus. Literature is replete with all manner of monkey tricks. The 18th century Scottish poet James Macpherson rose to fame by publishing a cycle of epic poems. These, he claimed, he had translated into English from the original ancient Gaelic, and which were composed by the legendary Irish bard, Ossian, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill, or in its anglicised avatar, Finn McCool. Though several critics saw through this McCool con, Macpherson had the last laugh by being interred in the hallowed sanctum sanctorum of Westminster Abbey. Live Events His English contemporary, the child prodigy Thomas Chatterton, wasn't so lucky. When he tried to pass off his poems as having been penned by a fictive 15th c. poet called Thomas Rowley, his ploy was denounced in print as fraudulent, causing him to commit suicide at 17. Lamenting the untimely demise of the 'golden boy', Byron wrote: ''Tis strange that the brain, a most fiery particle/ Should let itself be snuffed out by an article'. On a less sombre note, literary fun and games were had in 1969 with the US publication of an erotic novel, Naked Came the Stranger, authored by a Penelope Ashe. Ms Ashe, upon scrutiny, turned out to be a team of 24 journalists who collaborated to take the mickey out of the American cultural establishment. With the advent of AI, there'll be no limits to such highbrow high jinks, as already evidenced by the publication of Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the Architecture of Reality. Originally published in Italian as Hpnocrazia: Trump, Musk e La Nuova Architettura Della Realta, and translated into English in December 2024, the book is purportedly the work of a made-up philosopher, Jianwel Xun, invented by Italian philosopher-essayist Andrea Colamedici. The book, which describes how digital technology shapes public perception through 'hypnotic narratives', gained widespread readership in German, French, and Spanish translations, and was lauded by top technocrats. However, Hypnocracy is itself a 'hypnotic narrative' in that Colamedici created it by using two AI tools. Unmasking himself, Colamedici said that the book is aimed at combating ' cognitive apathy ' by revealing the pitfalls of progressively delegating our thought processes to machines. An AI-generated book acting as a caveat against the overuse of AI? A circularity of logic that squares the sphere of literary lampoonery. What next? A book aimed not at humans but AI readers to warn them about human-created hoaxes? Why not? And the question as to who would author it, answers itself. Bring on the monkeys with the typewriters.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Best Amazon deals this week: I combed through thousands of sales and found savings of up to 80%
Happy birthday, William Shakespeare! As the Bard of Avon once wrote, "Money is a good soldier," and in honor of history's favorite playwright, I'd like to help you make the most of your hard-earned cash by sharing the best Amazon deals I'm seeing today. Markdowns of up to 80% abound, including discounts on everything from comfy bedding and outdoor essentials to tech finds and beauty favorites. Even sought-after brands like Apple, Vitamix, iRobot and Sony are on sale, so might I recommend making some space in your cart? Top Amazon deals iRobot Roomba Robot Vacuum for $129 (was $250): Near all-time low; nearly 50% off Fiskars Bypass Pruning Shears for $10 (was $21): Over 50% off New Apple iPad, 11-inch for $320 (was $349): All-time low Cozsinoor Bed Pillows, Queen, 2-Pack for $25 (was $120): Nearly 80% off Vitamix 5200 Blender for $349 (was $500): Best price in years Amazon Fire TV Stick HD for $18 (was $35): All-time low Spring is all about rejuvenation, and if your tired eyes could use a little refresh, our beauty editor approves of this CeraVe eye cream, marked down to a rare $11 (from $20). On the spring cleaning front, I spotted a top-rated Roomba that's down to just $129 (nearly 50% off). And if you plan on flexing your green thumb this season, one Yahoo editor swears by these Fiskars pruning shears, which cut through tough branches like nothing and can be yours for just 10 bucks. With savings like these, we'll be able to get over that midweek hump like it's nothing — happy shopping! In this guide: Rare Amazon deals | All-time low prices | Best home deals | Best outdoor deals | Best kitchen deals | Best tech deals | Best fashion deals | Best beauty and wellness deals If you have Amazon Prime, you'll get free shipping, of course. Not yet a member? No problem. You can sign up for your free 30-day trial here. (And by the way, those without Prime still get free shipping on orders of $35 or more.)
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Bombshell New Study Suggests Shakespeare Might Not Have Written 15 of His Famous Plays
This story is a collaboration with Popular Mechanics William Shakespeare is undeniably one of the most famous writers in human history. The 39 shows attributed to the 'Bard of Avon' have been performed, adapted, and studied innumerable times in the centuries since they debuted, and his 154 sonnets are some of the most quoted poems in the world. The very name Shakespeare has become synonymous with the dramatic arts. But for a segment of the literary community, it shouldn't be. Not because they believe the plays themselves, like Hamlet and Julius Caesar, are incorrectly placed within the literary canon. Rather, they think they're simply incorrectly labeled—specifically on the author page. This contingency, known as the Anti-Stratfordians (in reference to Shakespeare's home of Stratford-upon-Avon), argue that The Bard's lack of education and modest upbringing doesn't line up with the vast vocabulary on display in Shakespeare's celebrated plays. 'They note that both of Shakespeare's parents were likely illiterate,' previously explained about the stance of the Anti-Stratfordians, 'and it seems as if his surviving children were as well, leading to skepticism that a noted man of letters would neglect the education of his own children.' The Anti-Stratfordians also claim that 'none of the letters and business documents that survive give any hint of Shakespeare as an author,' and raise questions like, 'Why was there no public mourning for him when he died?' But these claims can all be refuted to one degree or another by people who believe in Shakespeare's authorship. Shakespeare's modest background is ultimately not dissimilar to that of Christopher Marlowe, a peer of Shakespeare's whose authorship of celebrated plays like Doctor Faustus has never been in doubt. In response to the claim of a lack of contemporary records, noted before that, 'Tudor officials responsible for ascertaining authorship of plays attributed several works to Shakespeare.' And the claim of a lack of mourning is undercut by no less than Jacobean author Ben Jonson, whose esteemed poem 'To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, William Shakespeare' reads: 'To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;While I confess thy writings to be suchAs neither man nor muse can praise too much' These debates of authorship tend to treat inference as evidence, and as such, can never really be conclusive. But a new study published by Oxford University Press offers new insight into the authorship debate—and it does so by taking the human element out entirely. The study from Zeev Volkovich and Renata Avros, titled 'Comprehension of the Shakespeare authorship question through deep impostors approach,' set out to see if a deep neural network could do what centuries of scholars could not: conclusively identify works attributed to, but not written by, William Shakespeare. The duo refer to their methodology for the analysis as 'Deep Imposter': 'The approach uses a set of known impostor texts to analyze the origin of a target text collection. Both the target texts and impostors are divided into an equal number of word segments. A deep neural network, either a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) or a pre-trained BERT transformer, is then trained and fine-tuned to differentiate between impostor segments.' After a process which converted these segments into numerical signals, the tested texts were clustered into two groups, which can be simplified into a score of 1 or 2. Those works in cluster 1 would be labeled as 'imposter texts' not composed by the author in question. When Shakespeare's works were run through the aforementioned CNN neural network, a staggering 15 titles were placed into cluster 1. This included not just the usual suspects of 'Shakespeare Apocrypha' (works with no clear author sometimes attributed to Shakespeare) like A Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Faversham, but also some of the most beloved staples of the Shakespeare canon like The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. But before you go scribbling out Shakespeare's name from your copy of King John, understand that this isn't an ironclad system, nor do the study's authors claim it is. Instead, they note that this study was intended to introduce 'a novel methodology for investigating the stylistic fingerprints of authorship' in a way that 'goes beyond analyzing isolated words, encompassing intricate patterns across multiple linguistic structures.' Earlier tests the authors cite in their study show that a work appearing in cluster 1 doesn't mean with absolute certainty that it's not written by its attributed author. For example, an early test fed the neural network some works by the authors Charles Dickens and John Galsworthy. 'The distribution of works within the clusters accurately reflects their original authorship,' the team behind the study wrote. 'Specifically, two of the three sections of A Christmas Carol are attributed to Charles Dickens.... In contrast, only one of the six parts of Flowering Wilderness is included in this category.' But nobody should come away from reading this study becoming a 'one-third of A Christmas Carol' truthers or anything like that. Dickens' authorship of that famous story isn't in doubt, nor is the aforementioned Galsworthy's of Flowering Wilderness. So, what could be causing this misidentification? The study cites another test run, this one feeding the neural network the works of essayist Francis Bacon and Shakespeare's contemporary Marlowe, also a playwright. This found a number of Bacon's essays falling into cluster 1. Their explanation? Not some second, false author posing as Bacon, but rather Bacon's own 'literary journey.' Bacon reworked and refined his Essays from 1597 to 1625, such that they 'span a spectrum of styles, from the straightforward and unadorned to the epigrammatic.' Therefore, a departure in literary style from one work to another doesn't necessarily mean a different authorial hand but rather an artistic development playing out over years of trial and error, as well as personal growth. Few authors with any prolific volume will sound identical to themselves from years earlier, especially if their work undergoes heavy revisions over time. Particularly in the case of a dramatist, revisions, rewordings, and entire reworkings of plays can occur based on rehearsals, collaborator suggestions, and audience reactions. So, while this method can point out that A Midsummer Night's Dream is linguistically distinct from the bulk of Shakespeare's other work, it can't say for sure whether that's because the play was written by an unknown second author or just a case of throwing in a riff on Apuleius' The Golden Ass to get an extra giggle or two out of an audience—even if it wasn't Shakespeare's usual style. 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Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Bombshell New Study Suggests Shakespeare May Not Have Written 15 of His Famous Plays
This story is a collaboration with William Shakespeare is undeniably one of the most famous writers in human history. The 39 shows attributed to the 'Bard of Avon' have been performed, adapted, and studied innumerable times in the centuries since they debuted, and his 154 sonnets are some of the most quoted poems in the world. The very name Shakespeare has become synonymous with the dramatic arts. But for a segment of the literary community some might call 'conspiracy theorists,' it shouldn't be. Not because they believe the plays themselves, like Hamlet and Julius Caesar, are incorrectly placed within the literary canon. Rather, they think they're simply incorrectly labeled; specifically, on the author page. This contingency, known as the Anti-Stratfordians (in reference to Shakespeare's home of Stratford-upon-Avon), argue that The Bard's lack of education and modest upbringing don't square with the vast vocabulary on display in Shakespeare's celebrated plays. 'They note that both of Shakespeare's parents were likely illiterate,' states in further explaining the stance of the Anti-Stratfordians, 'and it seems as if his surviving children were as well, leading to skepticism that a noted man of letters would neglect the education of his own children.' The Anti-Stratfordians also claim that 'none of the letters and business documents that survive give any hint of Shakespeare as an author,' and raise questions like 'Why was there no public mourning for him when he died?' But these claims can all be refuted to one degree or another by those who believe in Shakespeare's authorship. Shakespeare's modest background? It's ultimately not dissimilar to that of Christopher Marlowe, a peer of Shakespeare's whose authorship of celebrated plays like Doctor Faustus has never been in doubt. In response to the claim of a lack of contemporary records, notes that 'Tudor officials responsible for ascertaining authorship of plays attributed several works to Shakespeare.' And the claim of a lack of mourning is undercut by no less than Jacobean author Ben Jonson, whose esteemed poem 'To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, William Shakespeare' reads: 'To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy book and fame; While I confess thy writings to be such As neither man nor muse can praise too much' These debates of authorship tend to treat inference as evidence, and as such, can never really be conclusive. But a new study published by Oxford University Press offers new insight into the authorship debate. And it does so by taking the human element out entirely. The study from Zeev Volkovich and Renata Avros, titled 'Comprehension of the Shakespeare authorship question through deep impostors approach,' decided to see if a deep neural network could do what centuries of scholars could not: conclusively identify works attributed to, but not written by, William Shakespeare. The duo refer to their methodology for the analysis as 'Deep Imposter': 'The approach uses a set of known impostor texts to analyze the origin of a target text collection. Both the target texts and impostors are divided into an equal number of word segments. A deep neural network, either a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) or a pre-trained BERT transformer, is then trained and fine-tuned to differentiate between impostor segments.' After a process which converted these text segments into numerical signals, the tested texts were clustered into two groups, which can be simplified into a score of 1 or 2. Those texts in cluster 1 would be those determined to be 'imposter texts' not composed by the author in question. When Shakespeare's works were run through the aforementioned CNN neural network, a staggering fifteen titles were placed into cluster 1. Those included not just the usual suspects of 'Shakespeare Apocrypha' (works with no clear author sometimes attributed to Shakespeare) like A Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Faversham, but also some of the most beloved staples of the Shakespeare canon like The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. But before you go scribbling out Shakespeare's name from your copy of King John, understand that this isn't an ironclad system, nor do the study's authors claim it is. Instead, they note that this study was intended to introduce 'a novel methodology for investigating the stylistic fingerprints of authorship' in a way that 'goes beyond analyzing isolated words, encompassing intricate patterns across multiple linguistic structures.' Earlier tests they cite in their study show that a work appearing in cluster 1 doesn't mean with absolute certainty that it's not written by its attributed author. For example, an early test fed the neural network some works by the authors Charles Dickens and John Galsworthy. 'The distribution of works within the clusters accurately reflects their original authorship,' the team behind the study wrote wrote. 'Specifically, two of the three sections of 'A Christmas Carol' are attributed to Charles Dickens. In contrast, only one of the six parts of 'Flowering Wilderness' is included in this category.' But nobody should come away from reading this study becoming a 'one-third of A Christmas Carol' truthers or anything like that. Dickens' authorship of that famous story isn't in doubt, nor is the aforementioned Galsworthy's of Flowering Wilderness. So, what could be causing this misidentification? The study cites another test run, this one feeding the neural network the works of essayist Francis Bacon and playwright Christopher Marlowe. This found a number of Bacon's essays falling into cluster 1. Their explanation? Not some second, false author posing as Bacon, but rather Bacon's own 'literary journey.' Bacon reworked and refined his Essays from 1597 to 1625, such that they 'span a spectrum of styles, from the straightforward and unadorned to the epigrammatic.' Therefore, a departure in literary style from one work to another doesn't necessarily mean a different authorial hand, but rather an artistic development playing out over years of trial and error, as well as personal growth. Few authors with any prolific volume will sound identical to themselves from years earlier, especially if their work undergoes heavy revisions over time. Particularly in the case of a dramatist, revisions, rewordings, and entire reworkings of plays can occur based on rehearsals, collaborator suggestions, and audience reactions. So, while this method can point out that A Midsummer Night's Dream is linguistically distinct from the bulk of Shakespeare's other work, it can't say for sure whether that's because the play was written by a secret second author, or just a case of throwing in a riff on Apuleius' The Golden Ass to get an extra giggle or two out of an audience—even if it wasn't Shakespeare's usual style. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
