Shakespeare’s genius remains unbelievable, so unbelievable for a man about whom so little is known that a Bard-denying cottage industry flourishes on the outskirts of Shakespeare scholarship. Some say the Earl of Oxford actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays, others back Sir Francis Bacon. Amateur scholar Denis McCarthy has a new theory: Shakespeare put the words on paper all right, but borrowed many of them from Sir Thomas North, an Elizabethan courtier.
McCarthy’s quest for a seat at the academic high table is told by investigative journalist Michael Blanding in North by Shakespeare. The author met McCarthy at an academic conference and, somehow, became intrigued by his use of plagiarism software to connect Shakespeare’s plays—virtually his whole oeuvre—with North’s writings.
McCarthy is an outsider at a time when outsiders are much, perhaps too much admired. He comes across as the guy at the next barstool who won’t stop talking, the hobby zealot obsessing over the precise shade of gray when painting his model Messerschmidt. Blandings more or less concedes this but asks: Does that make him wrong, unworthy of consideration? But hedging, he adds: “Orthodox ideas become orthodox for a reason—they’ve been analyzed, challenged, and defended by generations of scholars and stood the test of time.”
With the lacunae in Shakespeare’s life and work remaining large enough for a drive-thru by a tourist bus of researchers, the question of how Shakespeare wrote with such understanding of places he’d never been and people he’d never met remains open. The well-traveled, highly connected North becomes a plausible source.
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Blandings likes his subject, the autodidact McCarthy, and admires his persistence in the face of rejection. Little by little, McCarthy’s theory gains a measure of acceptance as Blandings tags along, writing North by Shakespeare almost like a detective novel with McCarthy as the sleuth and the average Shakespeare scholar as the harrumphing, dismissive police inspector.
Spoiler alert: Blandings concluded that he found nothing “to dispute the notion that Thomas North wrote source plays for all of the plays in Shakespeare’s canon.” He adds, “Nor, however, have I found anything that definitely proves it.”
And if McCarthy is correct, it doesn’t diminish Shakespeare. We no longer entirely believe in the solitary genius myth—we know that DaVinci had a studio of helping hands and Thomas Edison delegated his ideas to a team of assistants. If Shakespeare borrowed words and plot lines from someone else, he had the brilliance to reassemble them, recontextualize them, so that they continue to speak. He may have admitted as much when he quipped that great artists don’t borrow, they steal.
