Fresh from conclusively proving that Thomas North is the true author of William Shakespeare’s most celebrated plays, Dennis McCarthy is now tackling the authorship of the Sonnets.
Over the last two centuries, and especially in recent decades, we have made astonishing progress in biology, physics, chemistry, medicine, technology–in all fields of intellectual inquiry—except for Shakespeare studies. And while, yes, most of you reading this do know the origin of the plays, the First Folio, Ben Jonson’s Ode, etc., have now been answered. But there’s still another origin story that I have avoided till now: the Sonnets.
First, consider how strange it is we know so little about them. Shakespeare is the most well researched figure in literary history, and he has written the most oft-analyzed sequence of poems. Yet out of his 154 sonnets, we still have not discovered the addressee of a single one. New books appear every few years raising swords before new candidates. Some have declared them inscrutable; others have dismissed them as mere literary exercises. To put this in perspective: while we have solved the origin of life, cured bacterial infections, invented computers, detected gravitational waves, imaged black holes, landed robots on Mars, unraveled the genetic code for life, and are at the dawn of AGI, we still have no idea whom the world’s most famous poet was comparing “to a summer’s day.” We still don’t know whose eyes were “nothing like the sun.”
But shouldn’t all our new information-tech be able to help here? Can’t our new inventions finally illuminate the identities of the subjects of the world’s most famous poems? Of course, they can, and they have. The dates and the purpose of the sonnets, as well as the identities of the Dark Lady, the Fair Youth, and the Rival Poet have now finally been solved—as have the identities of other subjects of the poems that no one suspected.
I have no opinion on the sonnets, except to say that I have always doubted that all of them were authored by the author of the plays. They simply never struck me as written by the same individual. But I would characterize that as more of an impression than an opinion, it’s certainly never been something I’ve been inclined to suggest, let alone defend.