This was a little tough for me because some of the authors claims seemed a far reach. The writing style was decent and I appreciate this topic search, but just a little off put by some of the claims and connections

As someone who coordinated university lectures, conferences, and special events for 15 years, I am so sick of the people (usually middle-aged or elderly White men) who show up determined to prove that they are smarter than the professor(s) who are receiving attention at the event. One professor I knew called them "culture vultures." Another called them "dilettantes." Sometimes, I just called the campus police, like when one of them tried to follow a female professor to her car, berating her all the way about some topic he assumed he would know better than she did. (He didn't, but he never shut up long enough to find that out.) There is such a fierce current of anti-intellectualism that people want to believe that you can, in your free time, maybe with a little bit of software, replicate years of full-time work. Well, sorry, would-be vanquishers of the ivory tower, you don't know more about viruses than Dr. Fauci. You don't know more about socialism than the people who lived under it. You don't know more about Shakespeare than a professor who has spent 50 years reading, writing, and teaching him. And people with PhDs don't know as much about whatever you do for work as you do. That's how professions work. /rant

So I disliked Dennis McCarthy from the minute he sidled up to the author at an event reception (classic culture vulture move), claiming to have become a self-taught expert on many topics. While Shakespeare's possible connections to George and Thomas North are interesting, the many leaps and assumptions McCarthy makes are unrealistic. And he ignores any subject matter that doesn't directly support his hypothesis, never even mentioning Thomas North's influence on "Caesar and Pompey," or many of Shakespeare's other possible co-authors/sources. Personally, I find the case for Emilia Bassano as a source/author for the Italian plays more compelling than most theories. She's not even mentioned here. Anyway.

There are moments that feel a bit like a buddy travel comedy between Blanding and McCarthy, kind of like Bill Bryson and "Stephen Katz," but not enough to make me forgive the subject matter. "Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail" was my gold standard in that genre because the buddies are taking on the already-ridiculous Da Vinci Code mania, not a serious subject that will probably never be solved anyway. But if North by Shakespeare makes people pick up a copy of Shakespeare's writings, I guess it's done its job.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a temporary digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

So riveting that I went out and bought my own copy after 50 pages. There's so much in the world of Shakespeare scholarship, but this book is distinctive in its choices and its voice. I was deeply in it, and found all of the research fascinating.

North by Shakespeare by Michael Blanding has such an interesting premise that I'm sure will be the talk of the theatre world.

This is a super fun read. I really enjoyed this one!

Many thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my ARC. All opinions are my own.

I love all things Shakespeare. He has always intrigued me, actually had me questioned whether he wrote all the odysseus, sonnets, etc them, had help, or if he was a pen name for several individuals. I found the use of plagiarism software interesting. And they did do a lot of traveling and analyzing original source documents. Mr McCarthy did end up finding some of what he felt to be convincing signs that point to Thomas North as being the main source of some of Shakespeare's plays. His main claim is that North wrote The originals and sold them to Shakespeare, who adapted them. I questioned that argument as I feel that theory is on shaking ground.

I think it's best for literature lovers, Shakespeare lovers, to read this book and come up with their own conclusions.

One of the things that I truly took away and enjoyed the most was learning more about the plays themselves.

This is a fun and interesting book that I encourage all Shakespeare lovers to check out. It’s about how researchers are using plagiarism software to test theories about Shakespeare’s authorship and test one particular theory that many of Shakespeare’s plays were actually adaptations (albeit, original and artistically brilliant adaptations!) of source plays by Sir Thomas North written decades earlier. Whether or not you buy the theory, it’s an interesting journey through the Renaissance era theater world and modern Shakespeare scholarship and very fun.

While I am intrigued by the hypothesis that Thomas North was the original source or collaborated with Shakespeare on most of the Bard's plays, this book put far too much emphasis on textural analysis. it mixes up several storylines: North's biography, the relation between works by both men, and the "rogue scholar,' McKinley's work, to be a clear argument for the cause.

Well Met, Bookworms!

Did I just go all Renaissance Faire on you? I did. And for reasons. I have finally conquered the non-fiction book that I've been reading at a tortoise-like pace and I am here to tell you all about North by Shakespeare by Michael Blanding. I received a digital galley of this book because Michael Blanding asked really nicely if I'd be interested in reviewing it. I don't take on many ARCs these days because I'm just running around reading whatever I feel like, but I do make exceptions from time to time. Anyway. I got the book for free, I will still give you my honest opinion, and so on, etc.

It's no secret that I don't read much non-fiction. I simply find that my mind saunters through fiction more quickly and I enjoy getting sucked into a story. However, even my ultra-fictional self is not immune to the charms of Shakespeare and Tudor England. I've read more than my share of novels surrounding various Tudors (I went through a major Phillipa Gregory phase.) I also read a book a few years back, The Bookman's Tale (review), that dealt with people questioning the true identity of one William Shakespeare. So, while non-fiction may not be my go-to, I was definitely intrigued by the subject matter behind North by Shakespeare. Look, some of us were born to be scholars, others of us learned about the wonders of the Bodleian Library by reading A Discovery of Witches (review), OK?

North by Shakespeare highlights the research of Dennis McCarthy. McCarthy is a fascinating character unto himself, a sort of enigmatic brilliant researcher with no formal training who loves Ultimate Frisby. There has been debate in the Shakespearean community for decades- centuries even- over whether or not William Shakespeare, son of a glover, from Nowheresville, England, could realistically have crafted all the brilliant plays he's credited with. I mean, the guy didn't have a ton of education, money, or courtly connections, but he wrote masterpieces featuring political intrigue and an uncanny number of Italian backdrops for someone who most likely never visited the country. Some have argued that he had a co-writer, others have attributed his works to any number of other potential authors. Armed only with some plagiarism software, McCarthy set out to unearth the truth behind Shakespeare. And, he actually may have succeeded.

The book takes us through McCarthy's research techniques and concludes that many of Shakespeare's most popular plays were, in fact, adaptations of earlier works by one Sir Thomas North. This isn't completely out of left field- for years scholars have agreed that North's work Plutarch's Lives greatly influenced the writing of Shakespeare's Roman tragedies. Once McCarthy began running comparisons on Shakespeare's plays and works attributed to North, he began finding more and more similarities. We are taken play-by-play (literal plays, not sportsball) through some of Shakespeare's best known works within the context of what is known of North's life, and there's some pretty compelling evidence that North may have had a hand in things.

Of course, there's always doubt, because when you're talking about 500 year old manuscripts, there's a LOT that's been lost to the ages. Life in Tudor England was precarious for everyone. Plague, pestilence, wars, and the regular beheadings of people who said the wrong thing about the wrong powerful person didn't exactly endear people to keeping accurate records of all the things. Plus, stuff just burned down all the dang time, and Elizabeth I, the actual QUEEN OF ENGLAND likely died of tonsillitis (my kingdom for an antibiotic!) Can we prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Thomas North, second son of a nobleman living in relative poverty at the will of his brother (Roger was a dick to his little brother. GIVE THE MAN A REASONABLE ALLOWANCE, YOU TOAD!) was actually a playwright who composed the framework, if not the flowery language, of some of the best known masterpieces of English theater? Of course not. And does this fact pose some hurdles within the Shakespearean academic community? Absolutely. Will McCarthy's theories ever achieve mainstream acceptance? I have no idea.

However. I, Katie Kelly, reader of books and scholar of nothing in particular, am totally sold on the idea that Thomas North sold his plays to Shakespeare, who then re-worked them into the canon we know today. Audiences today are eating up reboot after reboot of older TV shows and movies, I see no reason to believe the Elizabethans wouldn't have recycled material. Plus, the inside jokes and ulterior play motives seem to line up better with North's timeline than they do with Shakespeare's. Like I said. Compelling arguments abound.

If you have any interest in the subject of Shakespeare, Elizabethan England, or eccentric scholarly pursuits, I'd recommend that you read North by Shakespeare.

North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar's Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard's Work by Michael Blanding is a very highly recommended, and apparently controversial, examination of who may have inspired Shakespeare in the writing of his plays.

This is a very interesting investigation that summarizes Dennis McCarthy's closely scrutiny of the works of William Shakespeare compared to the life and works of Sir Thomas North. "McCarthy’s contention, that Shakespeare borrowed his material from Thomas North - a gentleman and scholar who moved in the uppermost levels of Queen Elizabeth’s court - provides an intriguing and wholly original solution, in which the playwright could have legitimately put his own name on his rewritten plays, at the same time borrowing their essence from someone who fit all of the requirements for writing them. In addition to being a translator, North was a lawyer, soldier, diplomat, and courtier - a sixteenth-century Zelig who participated in some of the most crucial events of the age, and brushed shoulders with the brightest minds of the Renaissance."

Dennis McCarthy is a self-taught Shakespeare researcher who has relentlessly worked on his theory and looked into the true origins of Shakespeare’s works for fifteen years. He uses plagiarism software and has found links between the plays and North's published and unpublished writings. At the end of the narrative in Appendix B, Blanding's includes a section showing examples of McCarthy’s "techniques for using plagiarism software to explore parallel passages between Thomas North’s prose translations and William Shakespeare’s plays."

North by Shakespeare is a summary, but it is also a dense book and not a leisurely read. To cover the theory McCarthy sets forth, Blanding's tackles topics that could fill several volumes, but manages to succinctly organize and integrate Shakespearean literary criticism, Elizabethan history, a modern-day travelogue, and McCarthy's research into a fascinating and compelling presentation of the theory that Shakespeare based his plays on the work and life of Sir Thomas North. Included is Appendix A, which " includes Dennis McCarthy’s estimated chronology of Thomas North’s plays versus the conventional chronology proposed by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust," Appendix B, the example of using plagiarism software, a bibliography, and notes.

I found this whole theory and the presentation of it engrossing and was irresistibly pulled into the intriguing investigation McCarthy sets forth. I am not a Shakespearean scholar and, although I know about several of them, I haven't closely followed any of the various conspiracy theories over the years about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. They will always be by Shakespeare, even if he was inspired by or freely rewrote the work of someone else. At this point it is an interesting historical exploration of how he came to write so knowledgeably about places and experiences he would not have had access to or experience with in his life.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Hachette Books in exchange for my honest opinion.
The review will be submitted for publication on Amazon, Edelweiss, Google Books, and Barnes & Noble.

From the opening pages, it’s clear that NORTH BY SHAKESPEARE is the tale of two privileged, arrogant men puffing each other up on their shared sense of falsely assumed mutual excellence. It does not improve from there.

This book is a heap of confirmation bias piled on top of logical fallacies piled on top of factual errors and omissions. At least, it is when it isn’t just fabricating stories outright. Cover all that in a sauce of smug self-congratulation and sprinkle it with toxic masculinity, and you’ve got a sense of how much value there is to find within these pages.

I’m not going to knock down the very silly premise of this book point by point. That’s a waste of my and your time. Anti-Stratfordians demand we play that game, but I have a blanket policy of not engaging with sea lions. Suffice it to say that this book shouldn’t be shelved in nonfiction. It is utterly without credibility. The historical record is really quite clear and unambiguous. Any alternate proposal requires wild contortions, fanciful inventions, and a refusal to acknowledge fact.

So let’s take the book on its own merits — or lack thereof. It’s difficult to take seriously something which gets very simple facts about Shakespeare’s plays straight up wrong. Plot things. Simple things. Things that SparkNotes could correct them on. Historical facts about the era are also just straight-up wrong.

We must wonder: If North wrote so many plays, why is there literally no record of them? We have record of the existence of literally hundreds of plays from the era for which no copies survive — but somehow, not a mention of a single one of North’s? They weren’t performed at court; the court kept excellent record of performances. They were never submitted to the Master of the Revels for public performance nor to the Stationer’s Register for printing. That would leave as the only possibility that North wrote a few dozen plays merely as closet dramas, performed in private with friends. In which case — How on earth would Shakespeare ever have known about them?

The book has no answer to this, because throughout, the North theory betrays considerable ignorance about how both playhouses and printing worked in the era. That’s true of most of the conspiracy theorists, though; the researcher/fabulist isn’t as special as he thinks he is. When it does attempt to engage with the world of the playhouses, the book both underexamines and overgeneralizes: witness calling Jonson’s comedies of humours “wholly original” when that form has its roots in Aristophanes, Plautus, and a lot of medieval drama. Jonson popularized the form, along with the oft-overlooked George Chapman, but to credit him with its invention betrays ignorance of historical tradition. What the author and researcher/fabulist don’t know, they invent rather than examine. They pursue only chains of logic which they can then twist around to point at those inventions, falling prey to confirmation bias at every opportunity.

This pervasive devotion to their thesis at all costs causes them to miss some pretty basic counterarguments to their conspiracy. (I’m not sure how you talk about North’s translation of Plutarch and its influence on the early modern stage, for example, without mentioning George Chapman’s Caesar & Pompey. But that doesn’t fit their narrative! So, even if they’re aware of that play, they cannot permit it to intrude upon their fiction). When it comes to chronology, the author outright admits that the researcher/fabulist “has reversed the chronology of sources at times when it suits him”. Oh! Had we all but known it was so easy!

It’s all the more maddening that the men go through this process with a palpable assumption of their own infallibility. The book reeks of unexamined privilege (hefty chunks of it are just the two men traveling around the world so that the researcher/fabulist can stare smugly at statues; I’m not even slightly kidding) and includes phrases like “testicular fortitude” being necessary to do this very brave work. Gross. The author breathlessly relates the researcher/fabulist’s self-absorbed panic about the movie Anonymous, his scramble to publish afterwards, and his fully ludicrous belief that it was somehow akin to Mark Zuckerberg launching Facebook. (That’s just one of the many famous men — always men — that the researcher/fabulist believes himself intellectual kin to). The author also peppers in references to his subject’s smirks and smiles, particularly with regard to his imperviousness to contradiction; I can easily picture it. I’ve known plenty of insufferable men just like him. (“One may smile and smile and be a villain”, after all).

I quarrel with the book’s early stated premise about experts not being suitable to examine their own fields (a trend in modern thinking which is how we ended up with a multi-bankrupted reality TV host as president), particularly since it *also* relies on faulty evidence. The book claims: “One thing [the researcher had] learned from his forays into the history of science, it’s that generations of people tend to look in the same place for answers. It takes a Darwin in the Galápagos to really change what we think we know—and make a new truth seem as though it had been obvious all along.” Except that Darwin *was* a trained biologist and evolutionary theorist before he went to the Galapagos. He trained at Edinburgh *and* Cambridge. He was already an expert in his subject matter!

Seriously, how are we meant to respect a book and a theory that are so obviously rooted in false presumptions rather than facts?

This book is also almost satire of itself in that while writer and researcher/fabulist both sneer at actual Shakespeare experts for all the supposed holes in the traditional biographical narrative, their own hypothesis is nothing BUT holes. They simply invent a story that pleases them, often in either ignorance or outright defiance of the historical record. When the author quotes the researcher/fabulist as saying “it would be really ridiculous to invent a complete story—write a book on a climate you’ve never been in, a town you’ve never seen, the types of people you’ve never met”, it is with no apparent awareness that this is exactly what they themselves are doing. (Nor with any awareness of how fiction writers work, for that matter, unless he believes George Lucas actually met Chewbacca on Tatooine).

The subject of the book also seems blissfully unaware of how textbook a conspiracy theorist he is. Absence is considered evidence, and coincidence is exaggerated to be declared incontrovertible proof — the researcher/fabulist expects us to find it odd that two writers covering a similar topic in the same language would use similar vocabulary. When you realize few of his supposed ~discoveries are anything that would even cause a high school plagiarism auto-checker to ping, his whole premise falls apart. Presented with jarring information that doesn’t fit the narrative, he simply declares, “That’s what you have to look for, the modifications. Especially when it doesn’t really work that well, and it’s just forced in there.” Ah well, of course. If we simply assume all contradicting evidence is, secretly, supporting evidence, then it all falls together!

He also resorts to subterfuge more than once, misrepresenting his theory in order to get in the door with academics — who rightly aren’t pleased when they discover they’ve been catfished. (You’re not getting ignored because you’re threateningly brilliant; you’re getting ignored because your ideas have no merit and are not worth engagement. You’re not brave; you’re just really bad at this). It's a real shame. The researcher/fabulist somehow, got access to some of the most brilliant people working in Shakespeare and early modern theatrical studies today, but he wasn't interested in their skills or scholarship; he only wanted their endorsement so that he could piggyback off of their credentials. When some of them, demonstrating far more patience than I would be able to summon, attempt to steer the researcher/fabulist onto a more productive and less fictitious path, he simply turns away from them. That's just poor scholarship.

Had the author and researcher/fabulist *listened* to those professionals rather than dismissing them, and were their arrogance not an impenetrable shield to logic, they could have learned that many of the things they claim as inventions of the Stratfordian model do, in fact, have solid evidence behind them. Simple evidence, requiring no fabrications or contortions. Fascinating evidence, showing us the unique world of early modern theatre! They could have learned something real. They chose not to.

You, dear reader, can make a better choice.

I am begging you, do not read this book. Read James Shapiro’s CONTESTED WILL or Paul Edmondson & Stanley Wells’s SHAKESPEARE BEYOND DOUBT instead. Those books engage with the actual historical record, as well as examining the cultural context of why certain conspiracy theories fall in and out of fashion. Read anything by Tiffany Stern if you’re interested in early modern playhouse culture, the world Shakespeare lived, wrote, and worked in. You will learn things from those authors. You will learn literally nothing from NORTH BY SHAKESPEARE.

The topic this book presents is one that is immediately intriguing and perhaps less well-known among the average reader. But it quickly becomes a ridiculous notion: the idea Thomas North wrote at least some of the plays attributed to Shakespeare, including several published in the First Folio, which McCarthy claims were not even adapted by Shakespeare but ARE North’s plays, though McCarthy provides no concrete evidence.
Some issues with the book:
-the number one issue is simply that McCarthy claims North wrote many of the plays Shakespeare used to write his own—yet none of North’s supposed plays exist. McCarthy’s entire basis for his argument literally doesn’t exist.
-the piling on of praise for McCarthy as a non-traditional scholar who seemingly managed to get published in multiple fields with little to no formal education in them. I don’t take issue with his ability to get published but it does raise the question of if someone who was Black or a woman would be able to get published as easily as McCarthy.
-Time spent giving biographical details regarding McCarthy’s children with various women across multiple states seemed pointless.
Use of the phrase “testicular fortitude” in reference to the researcher slaps of misogyny.
-Factual inaccuracies: in the third chapter, the author notes that Mary was the only child Katherine of Aragon gave birth to which isn’t true—Mary was the only surviving child of that marriage, but Katherine birthed more.
-another factual inaccuracy: claims that Caesar dies at the end of Act II...in the actual play, Caesar dies in Act III, scene i.
Another factual inaccuracy: claims Shakespeare was the oldest of 6 children. Shakespeare had 2 elder sisters who died before his birth, then 5 siblings born after him, one who died at age 8.
The book jumps from one topic to another, no clear thread linking them. There’s little to no supporting research for many claims made; it mostly reads as a piece written trying to force the narrative of North rather than as a topic which has been thoroughly researched and questioned.
This book would have benefited from consultation with more early modern scholars who could have provided some insights, even on a very basic level, which would have tightened the writing and historical information included, some of which comes across as poorly researched or simply naïve. Even with the few scholars interviewed, it seems either Blanding or McCarthy (or perhaps both) elected not to listen to reason.
Overall, this book seems to be far-reaching in its attempt to credit another for the works of Shakespeare. It’s essentially pointless, and should not have been published.

I really tried to like this book. The author does everything in his power to make learning about Shakespeare easy, but there is only so much you can do when you are talking about researching historical documents/stories from hundreds of years ago. It was a good story, but it is definitely not an easy or a fast read. You will learn a lot but you really have to put some time and focus into this one.