Claude.ai Concludes Thomas North Wrote Plays Later Adapted by Shakespeare
I typically use Chat.gpt. But I noticed that Vic Froelicher had published an article on Medium that documented his interactions with Claude.ai (from Anthropic) on the view that Thomas North wrote plays that Shakespeare later adapted for the stage. (Froelicher shows his interest in and support for the North view here.) What I found interesting is that while Claude.ai lacked important information about the theory—indeed it seemed innocent of all the smoking gun proofs—it did give the standard, intelligent objections to the theory. So I decided to see how Claude.ai would interact when I fed it the info on North’s outline to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, which was found in the marginal notes of a North-family history book.
Specifically, I copy and pasted the information from this particular Substack article:
FOUND: North’s Handwritten Outline of Shakespeare's 'Cymbeline'
In October 2021, Michael Blanding drew my attention to another book from the North family library that included Thomas North’s marginal notes. It was a 1533 edition of Fabyan’s Chronicle that had belonged to Roger, 2nd Lord North and is now at Harvard’s Houghton Library.
Now, it is relatively easy to push LLMs into saying what you want it to say, but I did especially enjoy Claude.ai’s conclusion because it did not just paraphrase mine. After assessing all the evidence, it expressed the implications of the finding of North’s outline to Cymbeline in new and powerful ways. The following is the back-and-forth between Claude.ai and me: