Monothematica

Shakespeare and Aliens

A promising young scholar once observed:

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare... but I really shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable. - Sam Bankman-Fried

I'm sure the boldness and invention on display in this passage have served its author well.

To put his point another way, it seems like it isn't all that hard to make a Shakespeare. After all, it only took a million literate Englishmen before we got our first one. The same applies to Dantes, or Homers, or Cervanteses. We didn't need to roll the dice that many times before an Italian/Greek/Spaniard turned into a great author, so the odds of it happening can't be that low.

But if the odds are so good, where are all the other Shakespeares? We've had a few billion literate English speakers since Shakespeare, and some of them are alright, but the world-historical geniuses still seem pretty thin on the ground.

The obvious explanation for this is, of course, that Shakespeare was an alien.

To unpack that a little:

  1. There are so many English speakers born every minute, it seems like the world should be absolutely teeming with Shakespeares. But it's not.
  2. There are so many habitable planets out there, it seems like the galaxy should be absolutely teeming with aliens. But it's not.
  3. (left as an exercise to the reader)
  4. Q.E.D. Shakespeare = alien.

So why do we see so few Shakespeares/aliens walking around?

Hypothesis One: They're out there, we just can't detect them. Maybe the aliens are out there, but our telescopes just suck. Maybe Shakespeare Two is alive today, but we haven't noticed and canonised them yet.

Firstly, this is boring. Secondly, it only took us ~150 years to recognise Shakespeare as the GOAT. Unless we've gotten much worse at canonising people, we should've had time to uncover a few more Shakespeares by now, even if it does take 150 years.

Hypothesis Two: They are watching us, they just won't say hi. Maybe the aliens all have a treaty not to freak out the hairless apes by doing fly-bys. Maybe Shakespeare Two prefers posting on /lit/ to submitting to the New Yorker.

Eh. For the aliens, sure, I get it. But Shakespeare Two? Why would they be actively trying to hide? If Shakespeare Two is a poaster, we would have found them already. Even if they're locking away all their writing in an attic, Dickinson and Kafka still got found out. This leaves only one option. Maybe Shakespeare Two is publishing, but they're just hiding the quality of their work. The possibility that Shakespeare Two is already famous for their exoterically shit (but esoterically sublime) work is something I'm excited to explore in next week's post on Ruby Dixon.

Hypothesis Three: They walk among us. For aliens: it's the UFOs, stupid. For Shakespeare Two: it's the Clare/Hopkins/Bunting/Bishop/Murnane/Carson, stupid.

This is true.

Hypothesis Four: The great filter. For aliens: something systematically kills off civilisations before they can expand and become detectable. The tech tree has a poison apple. Maybe it's nukes, maybe AI, maybe something we don't know yet. For authors: something systematically kills off would-be Shakespeares before they can mature into Shakespeare Two.

For authors, the great filter is other, previous authors.

To continue the tree metaphors, it's not surprising that the Shakespeare and co. of history cluster so early in their respective traditions if you assume that artforms each come with their own low-hanging fruit. If the epic, the novel, the tragedy already contain their best ideas in latent form, it makes sense that the first decent writers working in a medium will immediately notice these ideas and use them all for themselves. The low-hanging fruit of each medium have been plucked, and giraffes can't write.

There's something to this, but of course it's nonsense. You can't eat an apple twice, but all you need to write another Lear is infinite monkeys, or if you're short on time, an English Pierre Menard. Once you notice this, the early clustering of Shakespeare and co. suggests something different. If it only took a few million literate Spanish-language writers to get a Cervantes, but hundreds of millions to get a single, fictional Menard, being a Cervantes must be pretty easy. It's being a Menard that's hard.

In other words, originality is easy. Unoriginality is the real challenge, and it should be praised as such.