Dennis McCarthy provides a useful summary about the facts concerning the true authorship of the plays supposedly written by the actor William Shakespeare, but were actually written by Thomas North.
Here’s a brief summary of the North/Shakespeare Story:
- Thomas North (1535- ~1604?), 29 years older than Shakespeare, wrote plays for decades for Leicester’s Men (from late 1550s to 1588). These plays were performed in front of small, noble audiences and were never published. But sometimes these early Shakespearean plays (like a Romeo and Juliet in 1562, before Shakespeare was born) were recorded by the original spectators or in records of payments for plays at court—though the author remained unnamed.
- In the 1590s and 1600s, Shakespeare published his own adaptations of older plays in quarto form: These include briefer, swifter, inferior staged renditions of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V (all originally written by Thomas North for Leicester’s Men). Shakespeare also wrote the “good quartos” of The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1 and 2 Henry IV—plays he adapted but are deemed “good” only because North’s originals were never published and have now been lost. Shakespeare also produced other mediocre, differently-styled plays like A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, and Locrine that Shakespeare had written with (or adapted from) other playwrights. For example, orthodox scholars have concluded that Thomas Middleton is a very likely coauthor or originator of A Yorkshire Tragedy, while they attach Robert Greene to Locrine. The bad quartos, apocrypha, and makeshift “good quartos” compose the true Stratford canon.
- When the publishing syndicate of Edward Blount, William Jaggard, William Aspley, and John Smethwick decided to produce a collection of Shakespeare plays now known as the First Folio (1623), they got into squabbles with the publishers who owned the rights to the Shakespeare plays that had already been published. So in many cases, they printed North’s original versions—as they did with Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, etc., which were still in the possession of Shakespeare’s theater troupe. Indeed, the First Folio even advertised that the plays had been “Truely set forth, according to their first ORIGINALL,” and the printers added special emphasis to the word “ORIGINALL,” putting it in all caps and a kind of italics. Still, many of the plays in the First Folio, especially the comedies, are indeed Shakespeare’s adaptations of North’s originals.
- For centuries, scholars had studied and praised the plays of Shakespeare’s First Folio, leading them to associate him with the masterpieces therein. It was not until the 19th century that researchers began rediscovering the “bad quartos.” For example, Shakespeare’s rewritten, staged version of Hamlet, published in 1603, did not come to the attention of researchers until 1823, long after faith in Shakespeare’s genius had become traditional, universal, and unyielding. Researchers faced with such lesser renditions “by William Shakespeare” found it less onerous to try to explain them away one at a time—rather than abandon their view of Shakespeare. Editors and academics never stopped to assess all the evidence as a whole, looking at all the documents “by William Shakespeare” to determine what he had really written. Conventional scholars also shrugged off the clear statements from contemporaries that derided Shakespeare for getting too much credit for other people’s plays, as we find in comments about Shakespeare in Groatsworth of Wit, Jonson’s On Poet Ape, etc.
In summary, if you still believe that William Shakespeare wrote the versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet traditionally attributed to him, you might as well believe in the theory of evolution by natural selection and that Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, walked on it, and then returned to Earth.
The historical evidence against it is, quite simply, overwhelming.
But if you want to know why I, personally, am convinced of the truth of Mr. McCarthy’s claims, it is because I am an editor. I know exactly how recognizable any writer’s writing is. And the AI analyses of the various works make it very, very clear which author’s work is the original of the high-quality plays that we still revere today.