It’s truly fascinating to see how the Official Shakespeare Story necessarily involves all sorts of conspiracy theories and ignoring nearly all the actual evidence of the documented works, while the so-called “conspiracy theory” that Shakespeare was a lesser author who plagiarized Lord Thomas North is based in rock-solid evidence of every kind, from eyewitness observation to AI literary analysis:
We now know that Shakespeare penned lesser, collaborative works and inferior stage-renditions (i.e., the bad quartos) of the literary masterpieces because that is what all documentation—all relevant title pages printed while he was alive and within a few years of his death—explicitly declared. Moreover, as we shall show now, that is clearly what many of his fellow writers knew to be the case, with Robert Greene and Ben Jonson even deriding Shakespeare’s method of close adaptation as plagiarism. Incredibly, my one goal on this substack is to confirm that all relevant Shakespeare-era documents are accurate; that there were no devious, behind-the-scenes plots; that all the recorded observations and comments about the Stratford dramatist are factual; that large groups of playwrights, printers, and publishers were not concocting, wide-ranging, multi-decade schemes meant to fool future generations of researchers. Incredibly, and despite the significant amount of controversy that this will generate, I am merely urging readers, again and again, and accept what the title pages state and what his friends and rivals wrote about him. All you have to do is just believe your eyes.
The very first reference to Shakespeare in London as an “upstart crow, beautified” with the feathers of other writers evokes Horace’s description of a plagiarist as a crow who has decorated himself with the feathers of more beautiful birds
The first widely accepted literary allusion to Shakespeare appeared in the 1592 satirical pamphlet, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, allegedly written by the playwright Robert Greene. It described the playwright as an upstart crow beautified with the feathers of other writers. Upstart refers to his sudden success, achieving wealth and power as a young man, and the tale of the crow that had been beautified with the feathers of other birds alluded to Horace’s classical allegory of plagiarism. The Roman poet compared a plagiarist to a crow who has decorated himself with the feathers of more beautiful birds. As New Cambridge editor J. Dover Wilson wrote about this passage, the pamphlet “was accusing Shakespeare of stealing and adapting plays upon Henry VI.” Similarly, Peter Berek agreed that the “‘upstart crow’ passage is accusing Shakespeare of being a plagiarist who takes credit for the work of other writers.”
Importantly, we have no examples of such accusations of plagiarism being hurled at any other prominent writers of the era. Indeed, we don’t even have any comments about Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Beaumont, John Fletcher, etc., that can even be confused as an allegation of plagiarism.
Ben Jonson lampoons Shakespeare as an ignorant country bumpkin
As is conventional, Ben Jonson spoofs Shakespeare in his satire Every Man Out of His Humor (1600), parodying the successful dramatist as the newly wealthy, satin-clad, uneducated, social-climbing rustic Sogliardo. Sogliardo aggressively pursues a higher social rank and purchases his coat of arms with the crest “Not without mustard”. As scholars note, Shakespeare’s social aspirations were well known, and he had recently obtained a coat of arms with the crest “Not without right.” In substituting “mustard” for “right,” Jonson probably took his cue from the “mustard scene” in The Taming of the Shrew, in which the clown, Grumio, attempting to starve Katherina, refuses to serve her beef without mustard.H. N. Gibson, noting the similarity of the crests and the fact that “Shakespeare did aspire to gentility,” writes that “there can be little doubt that Shakespeare was one of [Jonson’s] victims in Every Man Out of His Humour.” James P. Bednarz agrees that Sogliardo is a caricature of Shakespeare, writing that Jonson was mocking Shakespeare’s “outlandish aspiration to gentility.” Katherine Duncan-Jones may have been succumbing to Stratfordolatry when she contended that “Sogliardo, a country bumpkin of manifest stupidity, could not possibly be construed as a portrait of Shakespeare,” yet she agrees that it is “impossible not to find a Shakespearean reference” in the arms, referring to it as Jonson’s “mockery” of “Shakespeare’s pursuit of gentility.”
It’s also informative to note that when modern scholars are presented with the evidence of Shakespeare’s actual writing, correctly attributed to him, they reject it because they recognize that it can’t possibly be written by the author of the works he plagiarized.