04-21-2011, 09:20 AM
this question has arisen in the spoken word forum, what are your views, below are some texts to give you something to work with:
the following has some highlighted parts that pertain to footnotes about a line borrowed and how they are irrelevant on their own
so the as stated, the question is; was shakespeare a thief?
there is a 2nd question which should be more relative to modern writers, and that is,
can we rewrite a line of someone else and use it in our own work, and if not how can we write new ad fresh poetry?
if we use a cliché should it not be classed as plagiarism?
and is it okay to use another's line re written or not and just tell of it in a footnote?
Quote:Was Shakespeare a Fraud?
Mystery of the 'Great Bard' suggests others may have had a hand in his masterpieces
Bhuwan Thapaliya (Bhuwan) Email Article Print Article
Published 2005-10-25 16:05 (KST)
The Globe Theater, London
Whether it's red, pink, yellow, or white, a rose is still a rose, right? Well, not always. There's something here to perplex not only ordinary minds, but also the best of minds. Was the work of William Shakespeare the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced in the history of the world?
Was Shakespeare a plagiarist who patched plays together from other writers' works? Or are these accusations against Shakespeare nothing but the critics own version of Einstein's theory of relativity.
A small but vocal group has emerged to prove that William Shakespeare could not have written the world famous plays that bear his immortal name. Their real authors have been identified as Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.
And the debate continues.
Michael H. Hart in his book, "The 100," a ranking of the most influential people in history, suggests that "Shakespeare" was merely a pen name used by a nobleman named Edward de Vere, but because writing plays was considered beneath the dignity of a nobleman, he took no direct credit for his work.
A new book entitled, "The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare," claims that the real Bard was Sir Henry Neville, a distant relative of Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself was just a front man, claims Brenda James and William Rubinstein in the sensational book.
James and Rubinstein, a professor of history at the University of Wales, dispute that Shakespeare could not have had enough knowledge of the politics, foreign languages and European cities described in the plays to have written them since he came from a modest background and did not attend University.
Neville, in contrast, was well-educated, had traveled to all the countries used as settings in the plays and had a life that matched up with what "Shakespeare" was writing about at the time, the book says.
James said that she began exploring the connection between Shakespeare and Neville about six years ago when she deciphered what she believes is a code on the dedication page of Shakespeare's sonnets. The code revealed the name Henry Neville.
Further research turned up more evidence pointing to Neville, who served for a time as ambassador to France. The authors said that Neville's life helps explain a switch in Shakespeare's plays, from histories and comedies to tragedies at the turn of the 17th century.
Neville was imprisoned in the Tower of London from 1601 to 1603 for his role in the Essex rebellion, which the authors say accounts for the more tragic tone of "Hamlet," written in 1601 and 1602, and the plays that follow.
Many Shakespeare experts, however, dismiss these serious accusations against Shakespeare.
"Like most previous theories that challenge Shakespeare's authorship of the plays, this claim makes the mistake of assuming his education and general knowledge of the world were very limited," said Roger Pringle, director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Johanthan Bate, a professor of literary studies at Warwick, and author of "The Genius of Shakespeare," defended Shakespeare by stating that there is not a shred of evidence in support of the argument.
Meanwhile, most Shakespearians are claiming that there is plenty of evidence to suggest Shakespeare received a thoroughly good classical education at the Stratford grammar school and then, for well over 20 years, was involved in artistic and intellectual circles in London.
But some experts are not letting Shakespeare be Shakespeare. Australian documentary-maker Mike Rubbo not only questions whether Shakespeare is credible -- he brings in another writer as a possible hidden hand, someone working from beyond the grave.
Rubbo's initial channel for the documentary was a rare, out of print book, "The Murder of the Man who was Shakespeare" by an American, Calvin Hoffman.
In his book, Calvin Hoffman puts forth the theory that Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's great rival, was not in fact murdered in 1593, but instead fled to Italy to live in hiding. There, says Hoffman, he continued to write plays that were released in England under William Shakespeare's name.
Like James and Rubinstein, Hoffman's arguments focused primarily on the Shakespeare's lack of formal education.
To find the legitimate fact, Rubbo traveled all the way to England to see what the Shakespearean establishment thought of this theory. Rubbo interviewed those on both sides of the literary fence -- the "Stratfordians" and "Marlovians" and discovers almost everyone has a passionate view about literature's most famous playwright. But he was unable to decipher who has truth on their side.
Nonetheless, the ongoing Shakespeare debates are gravely hampering Shakespeare and the literary world, but sadly, he has no way to defend himself against all these accusations and there is no Marlow or Henry Neville to state that Shakespeare is a fraud, either. Unfortunately, all of them are dead.
Meanwhile, neutral observers are saying that it is not only formal education that makes a man great, and just because Shakespeare didn't have a proper education like Marlow and Henry Neville, this however, doesn't mean he didn't write his works.
Although not completely convinced that Shakespeare was merely a pseudonym used to hide the real author's identity, the recent accusations against him, nevertheless, do offer some interesting speculation. As we all know, every coin has two sides. What do you think?
source:
the following has some highlighted parts that pertain to footnotes about a line borrowed and how they are irrelevant on their own
Quote:On Plagiarismjust two of numerous articles found on the web.
In the wake of recent scandals some distinctions are in order
By Richard A. Posner
Recently two popular historians were discovered to have lifted passages from other historians' books. They identified the sources in footnotes, but they failed to place quotation marks around the purloined passages. Both historians were quickly buried under an avalanche of criticism. The scandal will soon be forgotten, but it leaves in its wake the questions What is "plagiarism"? and Why is it reprobated? These are important questions. The label "plagiarist" can ruin a writer, destroy a scholarly career, blast a politician's chances for election, and cause the expulsion of a student from a college or university. New computer search programs, though they may in the long run deter plagiarism, will in the short run lead to the discovery of more cases of it.
We must distinguish in the first place between a plagiarist and a copyright infringer. They are both copycats, but the latter is trying to appropriate revenues generated by property that belongs to someone else—namely, the holder of the copyright on the work that the infringer has copied. A pirated edition of a current best seller is a good example of copyright infringement. There is no copyright infringement, however, if the "stolen" intellectual property is in the public domain (in which case it is not property at all), or if the purpose is not appropriation of the copyright holder's revenue. The doctrine of "fair use" permits brief passages from a book to be quoted in a book review or a critical essay; and the parodist of a copyrighted work is permitted to copy as much of that work as is necessary to enable readers to recognize the new work as a parody. A writer may, for that matter, quote a passage from another writer just to liven up the narrative; but to do so without quotation marks—to pass off another writer's writing as one's own—is more like fraud than like fair use.
"Plagiarism," in the broadest sense of this ambiguous term, is simply unacknowledged copying, whether of copyrighted or uncopyrighted work. (Indeed, it might be of uncopyrightable work—for example, of an idea.) If I reprint Hamlet under my own name, I am a plagiarist but not an infringer. Shakespeare himself was a formidable plagiarist in the broad sense in which I'm using the word. The famous description in Antony and Cleopatra of Cleopatra on her royal barge is taken almost verbatim from a translation of Plutarch's life of Mark Antony: "on either side of her, pretty, fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth the god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her" becomes "on each side her / Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, / With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem / To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool." (Notice how Shakespeare improved upon the original.) In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot "stole" the famous opening of Shakespeare's barge passage, "The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water" becoming "The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble."
Mention of Shakespeare brings to mind that West Side Story is just one of the links in a chain of plagiarisms that began with Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe and continued with the forgotten Arthur Brooke's The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which was plundered heavily by Shakespeare. Milton in Paradise Lost plagiarized Genesis, as did Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers. Examples are not limited to writing. One from painting is Edouard Manet, whose works from the 1860s "quote" extensively from Raphael, Titian, Velásquez, Rembrandt, and others, of course without express acknowledgment.
If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism. They show that not all unacknowledged copying is "plagiarism" in the pejorative sense. Although there is no formal acknowledgment of copying in my examples, neither is there any likelihood of deception. And the copier has added value to the original—this is not slavish copying. Plagiarism is also innocent when no value is attached to originality; so judges, who try to conceal originality and pretend that their decisions are foreordained, "steal" freely from one another without attribution or any ill will.
But all that can be said in defense of a writer who, merely to spice up his work, incorporates passages from another writer without acknowledgment is that the readability of his work might be impaired if he had to interrupt a fast-paced narrative to confess that "a predecessor of mine, ___, has said what I want to say next better than I can, so rather than paraphrase him, I give you the following passage, indented and in quotation marks, from his book ___." And not even that much can be said in defense of the writer who plagiarizes out of sheer laziness or forgetfulness, the latter being the standard defense when one is confronted with proof of one's plagiarism.
Because a footnote does not signal verbatim incorporation of material from the source footnoted, all that can be said in defense of the historians with whom I began is that they made it easier for their plagiarism to be discovered. This is relevant to how severely they should be criticized, because one of the reasons academic plagiarism is so strongly reprobated is that it is normally very difficult to detect. (In contrast, Eliot and Manet wanted their audience to recognize their borrowings.) This is true of the student's plagiarized term paper, and to a lesser extent of the professor's plagiarized scholarly article. These are particularly grave forms of fraud, because they may lead the reader to take steps, such as giving the student a good grade or voting to promote the professor, that he would not take if he knew the truth. But readers of popular histories are not professional historians, and most don't care a straw how original the historian is. The public wants a good read, a good show, and the fact that a book or a play may be the work of many hands—as, in truth, most art and entertainment are—is of no consequence to it. The harm is not to the reader but to those writers whose work does not glitter with stolen gold.
source:
so the as stated, the question is; was shakespeare a thief?
there is a 2nd question which should be more relative to modern writers, and that is,
can we rewrite a line of someone else and use it in our own work, and if not how can we write new ad fresh poetry?
if we use a cliché should it not be classed as plagiarism?
and is it okay to use another's line re written or not and just tell of it in a footnote?
(i only came to poetry in my 2nd childhood)
Thanks for sharing that Leanne
