Tag: history

The Return of the Mercenary

Which raises the natural question: if mercenaries are back, is the return of the City-State next?

At my Australian High School, there was a weekly assembly of all students and time was always set aside for us to sing the national anthem. Yet almost no one sung it. Some would mouth it, others hum, while many did nothing at all. At most someone would start to sing it, lasting about 10 seconds before folding back into the hum. The only exception was our principal, who had served in the military. Even he struggled, and not for lack of memory of the lifeless lyrics, but in the battle against the apathy of everyone around him. This is emblematic of the loss of national consciousness that has occurred in Western countries, though I doubt we Westerners are the only ones. The loss of national consciousness makes the current political order and all others that have been seen since the French Revolution untenable. German-speakers of the 13th century cannot fight for anything but God, family, their local lord or money. The national consciousness simply does not exist.

Shortages of military recruits is a common problem to many Western countries. Despite generally offering salaries + benefits equal to or in excess of what would be found in private industry for an average young man there is a deficit of applicants. The flag simply isn’t motivating enough to die for anymore. This calls in to question the viability of even the professionalised state militaries that are supposed to fight the post-Vietnam Cabinet’s War. Indeed, the United States has been afflicted with an enduring shortage of recruits, this is despite replacing much of their front-line soldiers with mercenaries (Private Military Contractors). The significance of the use of mercenaries can be most clearly seen through their share of total combat deaths. As of 2020, total US military service-member (government soldier) fatalities in Iraq numbered at 4586, while total Private Military Contractor fatalities in Iraq numbered at least 3413. So as at least 43% of total American fatalities in Iraq were American Private Military Contractors. 2009 was the point when American Private Military Contractor fatalities year-on-year surpassed those of US government soldiers. Such a ratio of mercenary to state soldier fatalities in an army is more reminiscent of a medieval campaign than what would have been considered a “modern” war for the last 250 years.


Any attempt to fight the long-term trend of neomedievalism by forcible conscription will end as Vietnam ended. Additionally, any attempt to “change the culture” to get more volunteers will have the same effect as my school principal awkwardly singing the national anthem. The pressure or emotion to “answer the call” of the nation-state has been lost due to multiple factors. The key complaint is “what are we fighting for”. It’s an important one. What precisely a Brit, Australian, Frenchman, American, Canadian etc. is has lost much definition since the end of World War 2, particularly in the last 40 years. Intra-country political and ethno-religious differences now trump inter-country hatred. People also do not trust the media as they once did, so the media does not have a monopoly on truth which it once had. Use of the media is a crucial tool in rallying the masses for secular wars, without it the need for coercion multiplies. Coercion, which the outcome of Vietnam in the United States showed cannot be supplied. I don’t think that there is anything that would cause majority of Western male Zoomers to be out on the streets protesting, rioting or otherwise actively resisting the government; with the sole exception of military conscription to a war. Gen Alpha will be much the same.

Somehow, I don’t think neo-medievalism and all of the incumbent serfdom was what most people had in mind when they bought into the lies of Clown World.

DISCUSS ON SG

Publisher, Not Author

While it’s hard for some to accept that the Bard of Avon didn’t write the plays that are attributed to him, it’s not as if he had no relation to them. But the evidence has been there all along.

I note that the seminal inspiration for the authorship questions was Samuel Astley Dunham’s 1837 biography of Shakespeare, which appeared in the Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Great Britain and Ireland. Quoting Dunham:

… we must observe, that in the beginning of his career—for years, indeed, after he became connected with the stage—that extraordinary man was satisfied with reconstructing the pieces which others had composed; he was not the author, but the adapter of them to the stage. Indeed, we are of opinion, that the number of plays which he thus re-cast, as well as those in which he made very slight alterations, is greater than any of his commentators have supposed.

Later in the work, Dunham repeated this claim: “In fact there is no one drama of our author prior to 1600—perhaps not one after that year—that was not derived from some other play.”

Literary geniuses cannot help but write about the types of people, places, and events that have moved them—and their familiarity with their subjects allows them tantalizing insights and intricacies. So, as is inevitably the case, rural geniuses pen rural masterpieces, seafaring geniuses pen seafaring masterpieces, Yukon-wilderness geniuses pen Yukon-wilderness masterpieces, New-York high-society geniuses pen New York high-society masterpieces, etc. This is what all prodigies throughout the history of literature have done. They have written about lands that had dirtied their shoes and got under their fingernails, about climes that caused them to shiver or sweat, and about people whom they loved or hated and with whom they had worked, dined, or fought. No other great literary artist has ever tried to attempt what Stratfordians must believe.

But this classic case against Shakespeare is even stronger than this. While all the evidence suggests that the author of the canon required first-hand experience with the court, law, Italy, and military; it is still not even clear how Shakespeare could have managed even second-hand knowledge of these subjects. The true-crime story of the murder of the Duke of Urbino—which would become the subject of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play that he called The Murder of Gonzago—not only appears nowhere else in English in the 16th or 17th centuries, scholars have been unable to find the murder discussed in any published Italian work either. Stunningly, Hamlet is the first printed work to contain the story. What is more, the Duke’s murder occurred in Villa Pesaro in Urbino, which also had housed Titian’s famous painting of the victim. And the painting is used as both the model for Hamlet’s father and the description of the painting of Hamlet’s Father.

And that is just one of dozens of examples of insider information on Italy that we find in the plays—which includes accurate descriptions of Padua and Venice, the reference to St. Gregory’s Well just outside of Milan, the life-like statues Giulio Romano, etc.

Consider also all the other expertise flaunted throughout the plays. Did Shakespeare really read Plowden’s Reports in Law French just for fun or to seem more lawyerly? Did he really peruse now-lost manuals on falconry to seem more aristocratic? Did he read travelogues on Continental Europe to seem more traveled? Did he, on his own, learn Italian, French, and Spanish, so he could read the original sources of plays he was adapting? Did he study all of the required military pamphlets in order to add esoteric military details to his work? Did he really, while in his early 30s, assume the guise of an old man when writing personal sonnets to friends and lovers? Did the man from Stratford, at the age of eleven, actually manage to sneak onto Leicester’s grounds at Kenilworth Castle and witness the private water pageant and other entertainments that the Earl provided for the Queen, enabling him to work these visions into A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Fortunately, we can now accept the obvious answer to all of these questions and rid ourselves of the wide and troubling gap between the knowledge exposed in the masterpieces and the life of William Shakespeare. As all other analyses clarify, particularly a careful study of title page attributions, contemporaneous references, and satires by fellow playwrights, Shakespeare was not the original author of the masterpieces. He merely adapted them for the stage.

I think it’s very difficult for most people to accept two contrary things.

  • That the historical figures they were told to have been world-class genuises were considerably less exceptional than they were told.
  • That the figures of their time were actually more exceptional than they believe them to be.

I suspect it’s because we know more about the latter, and just as no man is a hero to his wife or his valet, it’s harder for an genuine intellectual to be highly regarded by people of his own time who can’t fully understand what he’s accomplished. Which, of course, is why it’s the frauds that are useful to the modern powers who are celebrated even though their accomplishments are both false and barren.

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You Don’t Get What You Pay For

Mercenary companies always sound very impressive. G4S is the flavor of the day, apparently

With roughly 800,000 employees, G4S maintains its own rapid response units – essentially private strike teams supported by in-house intelligence operations. Many Western PMCs now have access to reconnaissance aircraft, satellite data, and cutting-edge surveillance tools. “They work with corporations that provide satellite imagery, which has been used by PMCs in Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” Todorovski explains.

Alexander Artemonov, a defense analyst at the Eurasia Heritage Foundation, estimates G4S maintains a fighting force of 250,000–280,000, equal to the number of troops Russia deployed in Donbass. The rest of the workforce consists of support staff, prison guards, and logistical teams.

G4S’s arsenal includes everything from AK-47s and Glock 17s to MP5s, sniper rifles, Uzi submachine guns, and even Israeli Hermes 450 drones. Their operatives have access to anti-personnel mines, grenade launchers, and portable anti-air systems. For mobility, they rely on armored Land Cruisers, Humvees, and military-grade carriers like the Cougar and RG-33.

“Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe” – Niccolo Machiavelli

As Machiavelli pointed out in his works, mercenaries are actually good at one thing and one thing only: getting paid. They’re not getting paid to fight and die, they’re getting paid to put on a good show and provide deterrence. The ideal mercenary operation is to get paid to defend a location or an individual, deter any attacks from taking place, and go home considerably richer in return for doing nothing.

It’s when they actually have to deliver results that mercenaries tend to show their true colors, as G4S already has:

G4S has also assumed control of prison facilities traditionally run by governments. In the UK, the company managed two immigration detention centers and six prisons, including those in Oakwood and Birmingham. In 2018, the Birmingham facility was returned to government control after inspectors uncovered appalling conditions: inmates roamed freely while staff locked themselves in offices; cells were filthy, infested with rats, and reeked of bodily fluids.

If they can’t manage a prison successfully, what are the odds that they’re even going to show up to fight Russian regulars?

Some might point to the successful use of the Wagner Company by Russia in the Donbass. But first, they were more convict conscripts than mercenaries proper, second, they were utilized as urban warfare cannon fodder, and third, they too showed the expected lack of reliability when Prigozhin staged the short-lived revolt against Moscow that ended his career with an accidentation.

DISCUSS ON SG

Commentary Question

One of the common forms of medieval analysis was the commentary. Hence Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten of Titus Livy, which is just one of many examples of the form.

If I was to write a commentary of that kind, almost certainly with my new best friend, what author and what work would be of the most interest? Darwin, Dawkins, and anyone modern is out, unless you can make a very convincing case for consideration.

Throw your ideas out there. I’m not saying I will, I’m just saying that some of the experiments I’ve been doing with The Legend are making new possibilities of many kinds apparent to us.

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The Man Who Loved His City

A lovely little essay on Niccolo Machiavelli and his love for his native city of Florence:

The tradition of political realism has a reputation for being pessimistic—that is, for seeing and expecting the worst from the world, its individuals, and its states. Yet, despite all his realism, Niccolò Machiavelli was a romantic about his city. He famously said in a letter to his friend, diplomat Francesco Vettori, “I love my city more than my own soul.”

In 1512, the Medici retook Florence from Piero Soderini, and removed Machiavelli from his diplomatic position. The following year, they accused him of conspiring against them and tortured him for three weeks. After this, Machiavelli retired to his family home in Sant’Andrea, and never ceased to lament his “great and continued malignity of fortune” of not being able to contribute to his city’s administration.

Exiled from praxis, Machiavelli theorised about politics. He wrote two historical works—Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories—to speak to the ways in which he thought that the Italy of his day should aspire to the glory of ancient Rome and the ways in which it failed to do so. He never rejected his being a modern man, and he did not believe that Renaissance Italy could imitate ancient Rome in all respects. However, he pushed his fellow citizens to take inspiration from it and to consider carefully that they share something with their past: it’s not “as if heaven, sun, elements, and men had varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity.”

In what you may rightly suspect to be closely related news, Castalia Library has announced the April-May-June book for the History subscription.

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Immigration and Empire are Degenerate

This is not news. Consider the following three paragraphs quoted from a book published more than a century ago, in 1911.

The unification of the inhabited world which forms the meaning and the greatness of the Roman Empire, is a process presenting two different sides to the observer. Kelts, Iberians, Rhaetians, Moors, Ulyrians, Thracians were to some extent civilised by the culture of Greece and Rome, and achieved by its help a great advance in economic and civic organisation as well as in education; Syrians, Egyptians, the inhabitants of Asia Minor only modified to a certain extent their manners and views in order to meet the requirements of the Empire. But if the intermixture of tribes and their permeation by Graeco-Roman culture was in one sense a great progress, it was at the same time, but from another point of view, a decline; it was accompanied by a lowering of the level of the culture which exerted the civilising influence. While conquering barbarism and native peculiarities, Graeco-Roman culture assumed various traits from its vanquished opponents, and became gross and vulgar in its turn. In the words of a biographer of Alexander Severus: good and bad were promiscuously thrust into the Empire, noble and base, and numbers of barbarians (Hist. Aug. Alex. Sev. 64).

The unification and transformation of tribes standing on low grades of civilisation leads to consequences characterised by one common feature, the simplification of aims — degeneration. This process is concealed for a while by the political and economic advantages following on the establishment of the Empire. The creation of a central authority, upholding peace and intercourse, the conjunction oft he different parts of the world into one economic system enlivened by free trade, the spread of citizenship and civil culture in wider and wider circles of population — all these benefits produced for a time a rise of prosperity which counterbalanced the excess of barbarous, imperfectly assimilated elements.

But a series of political misfortunes set in rather rapidly in the third century: invasions of barbarians, conflicts between rival candidates to the throne, competition between armies and provinces put an end to order and prosperity and threatened the very existence of the Empire. In these calamities the barbarisation of Roman culture became more and more manifest, a backward movement began in all directions, a backward movement, however, which was by no means a mere falling back into previous conditions, but gave rise to new and interesting departures.

We’ve already seen the first step: the rise in global prosperity that accompanied the neo-liberal world order. We are now well into the second step: degeneration. The third step is collapse. The historical process is inexorable and cannot be stopped except by removing all of the sources of the dyscivilizational degeneracy.

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We Thought Wikipedia was Bad

Someone asked Deepseek about the founders of Psykosonik.

It’s almost impressive how it is completely incorrect in every way, except for the bit about Minneapolis.

  • Formed in: 1991 (Minneapolis, MN, USA)
  • Members:
    • Paul Sebastien
    • Theodore Beale
    • Daniel Lensmeier
    • Michael Larson
  • Label: Wax Trax!

We were on TVT, but they were our publisher, not our record label. Paul and I were the two founders of the band; we wrote three songs together, after which Dan, who was a DJ at our favorite club, The Perimeter, and Mike, the best friend of Paul’s younger brother, were asked to join the band so that we could play live shows. Paul and Dan were the main composers, I wrote most of the lyrics, and Mike contributed a lot of the sounds that Paul and Dan built the songs around, such as that rich wuah-wuah that begins Silicon Jesus.

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The Invention of William Shakespeare

The conception that most of us have of the playwright from Stratford-on-Avon is almost entirely a modern construction:

One of the book vendors proudly presents you with the first-ever collection of Shakespeare’s works, put together the previous year by the renowned printer, William Jaggard, for the publisher, Thomas Pavier. But as you excitedly look through the pages, you become even more confused. Only three of the nine plays in the collection seem authentic. One of the plays is A Yorkshire Tragedy, which you had already pruchases, and another, Sir John Oldcastle, is also unfamiliar and not part of any modern Shakespeare collection. Still another, The Whole Contention Between the Two Famous Houses, Lancaster and York, is a combination of two heavily revised renditions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI. Two other plays—Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor—are much simpler and briefer adaptations of the authentic versions of these plays. Another play, Pericles, is conventionally considered an inauthentic, slap-dash treatment of a longer, genuine form that has been lost. The only three that seem normal are The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

After you complete your visit of all book vendors in London, and are assured that these are all the plays ever printed that were ascribed to William Shakespeare, you now own only 22 plays—of which a dozen of them are either apocryphal, or they are brief, strange, less literary adaptations of more familiar plays. That’s 12 of 22 that are seemingly wrong. You ask sellers about Othello, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra—but none of these have been printed. And many Londoners have never even heard of these plays.

Giving up in frustration, you at least take some comfort in the thought that at least you get to see an authentic Hamlet. You rush across London Bridge with your assortment of plays under your arm to the Globe Theater, squeeze amongst the groundlings standing before the stage—and wait for that most famous of speeches in English theater history. And the actor playing Hamlet walks out onto stage, holding a book in his hand, and says:

To be or not to be. Aye, there’s the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye, all:
No, to sleep, to dream, Aye, marry, there it goes…

What?!? You know this quote is all wrong, even bizarre — a sort of brief, informal rendition of the opening to the real “To be or not to be” soliloquoy…

Who wrote this shorter, funnier, more action-packed Hamlet? Since the changes applied to this version are so inferior and differently styled from other Shakespeare plays, most scholars assume it was the result of a conspiracy. One or two of his greedy fellow actors supposedly created a briefer version of the play that they then sold to grasping printers and publishers eager to produce a work with Shakespeare’s name on the title page.

The truth is much simpler: William Shakespeare wrote it, which is why his name is on the title page. After all, we know Shakespeare did adapt an older version of Hamlet—and this first quarto of 1603 is the adaptation that Shakespeare’s company then performed. Of course, he wrote it. The original Hamlet, the one that Thomas Nashe referenced in 1589 as having been written by an “English Seneca,” is actually the authentic masterpiece that everyone is familiar with today. (And again, in an upcoming paper, Schlueter and I will show that Nashe was indeed referring to Thomas North as English Seneca—and that Jonson and Lodge also identified North as the original author of other Shakespearean plays too.)

What is more, Hamlet is not the only such example. Although this is not widely known, the plays Henry V, Richard III, Henry VI, part 2 and Henry VI, part 3 also exist in two very different versions: in the genuine, familiar literary form — and as a rewritten, briefer, less erudite, faster-paced staged adaptation. In each case, conventional scholars had always assumed that Shakespeare had written the longer masterpiece, yet it is only their lesser, rewritten theatrical renderings that had ever reached print during Shakespeare’s lifetime — and by 1620 each of these lesser adaptations had been attributed to the Stratford dramatist via the title page. Again, these rewritten versions are so inferior to the originals that orthodox scholars have had a difficult time accounting for Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. So, up until now, conventional scholars had blamed all these lesser works on a system of conspiracies, occurring over decades. Supposedly, various groups of unknown anonymous actors working within the Stratford dramatist’s theater companies rewrote these plays and then secretly sold them to corrupt printers with Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. In reality, of course, there were no conspiracies: These are actually the plays that Shakespeare really wrote—or at least adapted, directed, and produced.

As usual, the analyses of academic historians are fundamentally limited by their insistence on the relevance of their ontological ceilings. Consensus incredulity is an extraordinarily stupid and highly fallible metric, and yet, it’s actually codified into the academic and scientific worlds as “peer review”.

The problem is that most people are fundamentally unable to even imagine what a world without copyright, without mass market publishing, and without publishing gatekeepers would even look like. The ability to self-publish on Amazon and effectively imitate an author’s style using AI is just beginning to give us the faintest glimmerings of what a free-for-all writing, crediting, and publishing must have been in the early 1600s.

I find Mr. Mccarthy’s work on the real Shakespeare and the various elements that have gone into the mythical modern construction to be some of the most fascinating archeo-history that I’ve ever seen in my life. The fact that it is all document-driven rather than theory-driven makes it vastly more interesting as well as far more convincing than other efforts of this type.

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The Empire Never Ended

An altar is discovered in a massive abandoned city-state in Guatemala. And you’ll never guess what they were sacrificing there…

An altar from the Teotihuacan culture, at the pre-Hispanic heart of what became Mexico, was discovered in Tikal National Park in Guatemala, the center of Mayan culture, demonstrating the interaction between the two societies, Guatemala’s Culture and Sports Ministry announced this week.

The enormous city-state of Tikal, whose towering temples still stand in the jungle, battled for centuries with the Kaanul dynasty for dominance of the Maya world.

Far to the north in Mexico, just outside present day Mexico City, Teotihuacan — “the city of the gods” or “the place where men become gods” — is best known for its twin Temples of the Sun and Moon. It was actually a large city that housed over 100,000 inhabitants and covered around 8 square miles.

The still mysterious city was one of the largest in the world at its peak between 100 B.C. and A.D. 750. But it was abandoned before the rise of the Aztecs in the 14th century.

Lorena Paiz, the archaeologist who led the discovery, said that the Teotihuacan altar was believed to have been used for sacrifices, “especially of children.”

“The remains of three children not older than 4 years were found on three sides of the altar,” Paiz told The Associated Press.

“The Teotihuacan were traders who traveled all over the country (Guatemala),” Paiz said.

A collapsed empire. An abandoned city. Child sacrifice. And traders who traveled all over.

You don’t say.

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The True Author of Shakespeare’s Plays

Yes, we should have known. Ben Jonson was openly telling everyone who wrote all along, right at the front of the First Folio, that it was Lord Thomas North, the translator, among many other works, of Plutarch’s Lives.

In 1623, Ben Johnson wrote one of the most famous odes one poet ever crafted for another—To the Memory of My Beloved the author Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us. The poem was prominently placed at the beginning of the first official collection of Shakespeare’s plays known as the First Folio. Yet some eight years later, the poet Leonard Digges wrote a scathing rebuttal to Jonson’s ode, denouncing it as an attack against Shakespeare. He was so furious that he wanted Jonson’s supposedly abusive poem removed for the publication of the Second Folio (1632)—and replaced with Digges’s own defense of the Stratford playwright, answering Jonson’s insults “point by point.” In 1693, the renowned Shakespeare enthusiast John Dryden responded similarly to Digges, labeling Jonson’s poem as “an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.” And Brian Vickers has noted that Dryden’s “judgment has been echoed many times.”

But no one has been able to explain what was so insolent and invidious about the poem—until now. As we shall see in this article, Jonson’s celebrated ode contains a shocking secret—a dead giveaway to the true origin of the canon. In other words, the answer to the most significant literary question in history—who was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays?—has been sitting prominently in the front of the First Folio for the last 400 years. Jonson was not being remotely subtle. And, at the end of this article, you are almost certainly going to be asking yourself the same question I think about daily: HOW ON EARTH DID EVERYONE MISS THIS?

Jonson.. is saying when we turn from tragedy to Shakespeare’s comedies, the great tragedians (and the reader) would be better served to ignore the Stratford dramatist altogether and focus instead on:

the comparison 

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

And the subject of these lines—the English author who rose from the ashes of a “comparison of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth” is not hard to determine.

Jonson chose his words carefully—carefully enough that his reference to North’s Plutarch’s Lives is unmistakable—or as its actual title reads: “The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED …” Not surprisingly, the signature feature of North’s translation is that it is not just a collection of biographies; rather its extremely peculiarizing feature is that Plutarch is writing “COMPARISONS” of Greek leaders with Roman ones. Each section of the book contains three chapters—a biography of a Greek, a biography of a Roman, and a chapter examining correspondences between the two.

All of the titles of these third-chapters in the section followed the same format: “The COMPARISON of [Greek] with [Roman]” – with “COMPARISON” in all-caps. For example, “THE COMPARISON OF Alcibiades with Martius Coriolanus.”

Moreover, Jonson, with his specific description of “insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” even appears to be hinting at the parallels between Alcibiades and Coriolanus as they are the lead characters of two parallel tragedies—Timon of Athens and Coriolanus—in the very Folio he is introducing. As shown in the following passages, according to North’s translation, the Greek Alcibiades, one of the main characters of Timon of Athens, was known for his “insolence,” while the Roman Coriolanus was known as “haughty.”

Howbeit in Alcibiades there was nothing, but his insolency and vainglory that men misliked.20

This Timon was a citizen of ATHENS, that lived about the war of PELOPONNESUS, as appeareth by Plato, and Aristophanes comedies: in the which they mocked him, calling him a viper, & malicious man unto mankind, to shun all other men’s companies, but the company of young Alcibiades, a bold and insolent youth, whom he would greatly feast.

This latter passage, referring to Timon’s great feasts and his relationship with Alcibiades, describes the main focus of Timon of Athens and again describes Alcibiades as an insolent Greek. And this is how he is portrayed in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Meanwhile, while the Greek warrior was known for his insolence, his Roman counterpart was a paragon of haughtiness. North’s translation of the story of Coriolanus emphasizes “the austerity of his nature, and his haughty obstinate mind.” More, all editions of the Roman tragedy mention his pride, condescension, and aloofness, with many editors describing Coriolanus as “haughty.” In fact, examples are so numerous that specific citations are pointless. A Google Book search for the phrase, “haughty Coriolanus,” yields more than 150 results. And it’s likely that the vast majority of all editions of the Roman tragedy describe him thusly.

Jonson’s remark in the front of a Folio that contains four tragedies based on Thomas North’s “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED” including two parallel plays that invite comparisons between the “insolent” Greek Alcibiades and the “haughty” Roman Coriolanus is not a coincidence. Rather, Jonson is not only exposing the author behind the Folio but emphasizing the intricate entanglement among North’s plays and his translations.

I found the evidence for North’s authorship to be entirely convincing even before this. The textual similarities indicated by the plagiarism analysis is simply too strong to deny. Nor do I find it remotely troubling to accept that this means that the sonnets were written by someone else; they never struck me as having been authored by the same individual and I wondered about that even back in high school.

But this evidence from the First Folio would, in itself, be sufficient. And it’s truly amazing that no one else ever clocked it.

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