Shakespeare and Aliens
23rd June 2026
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 served its author well.
To restate his point: it doesn't seem especially difficult to produce a Shakespeare. It only took a million literate Englishmen before one appeared. The same logic applies to Dante, Homer, Cervantes. Each tradition didn't require many rolls of the dice before yielding a world-historical genius, so the probability of one emerging can't be particularly low.
And yet, if the odds are so favourable, where are all the other Shakespeares? Several billion literate English speakers have existed since the seventeenth century. Some of them are adequate. The world-historical geniuses, however, remain conspicuously scarce.
The obvious explanation, naturally, is that Shakespeare was an alien.
To elaborate:
There are so many English speakers born every minute that the world should be overrun with Shakespeares. It isn't. There are so many habitable planets in the galaxy that it should be overrun with alien civilisations. It isn't. I leave the rest as an exercise to the reader. Q.E.D.
So why so few Shakespeares? Why so few aliens?
Hypothesis One: They exist; we simply can't detect them. Perhaps the aliens are out there and our telescopes are inadequate. Perhaps Shakespeare Two is alive right now, uncanonised and unnoticed. This is a boring hypothesis, and also probably wrong. It took us roughly a hundred and fifty years to anoint Shakespeare as the definitive case, and unless our capacity for canonisation has dramatically deteriorated, we've had more than enough time to surface a few more.
Hypothesis Two: They're watching, but won't make contact. The aliens maintain some interstellar non-interference pact. Shakespeare Two prefers posting on /lit/ to submitting to the New Yorker. The aliens I understand. But Shakespeare Two? Why hide? If they're posting, we would have found them. And even the ones who locked their work in attics (Dickinson, Kafka) eventually got found. Which leaves one remaining possibility: Shakespeare Two is already famous, hiding the quality of their work in plain sight behind an exoterically bad surface. This is something I intend to explore next week, in a piece on Ruby Dixon.
Hypothesis Three: They walk among us. For aliens, it's the UFOs. For Shakespeare Two, it's Clare, Hopkins, Bunting, Bishop, Murnane, Carson. This is simply true.
Hypothesis Four: The great filter. For alien civilisations, something systematically destroys cultures before they can expand into detectability: nukes, AI, some poison apple in the tech tree we haven't yet identified. For authors, something systematically destroys would-be Shakespeares before they can become Shakespeare Two.
For authors, the great filter is prior authors.
It isn't surprising that the canonical geniuses cluster early in their respective traditions if you accept that every artform arrives pre-loaded with its own low-hanging fruit. The epic, the tragedy, the novel each contain their finest possibilities in latent form, and the first capable writers to work in a medium will immediately perceive and exhaust them. The low-hanging fruit gets taken. Giraffes can't write.
There's something to this, but it's also nonsense. You can't eat an apple twice, but all you need to write another Lear is infinite monkeys, or if time is short, an English Pierre Menard. Once you notice this, the early clustering of Shakespeare and Cervantes suggests something stranger. If it only took a few million literate Spanish speakers to produce a Cervantes, but hundreds of millions to produce a single, fictional Menard, then being a Cervantes must be relatively straightforward. It's being a Menard that's genuinely difficult.
Originality, in other words, is easy. Unoriginality is the real achievement, and it deserves to be treated as one.
← back to blog