It might have been more of a surprise if North had not
been advanced after one or another fashion. It has long been acknowledged that
Shakespeare lifted a considerable number of passages — many verbatim — from his
Plutarch. Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter gained wide-ranging
attention for detecting close correspondences between Shakespeare’s plays and A
Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels by Thomas’s likely relative, George
North.
Michael Blanding’s North by Shakespeare now being
issued has the considerable advantage of release by Hachette, a major
publisher. The New York Times is among the venues in which he has previously placed
articles on the matter. The quality of the media in which McCarthy and Schlueter’s
claims have received gratifying amounts of space immediately sends the pair to
the head of the class. The book is an account of their adventures in crunching
publicly available data software in pursuit of evidence for North’s authorship.
First, let me say that I am delighted to see a vigorous
attempt to use verifiable data toward the study of Shakespeare Authorship. Still
more so open access data tools. An investigation into McCarthy and Schlueter’s
background material on the web has even taught me a search engine trick I had
not been aware of for all the effort I have invested in developing those skills. The promise of these tools will
surely be realized in time.
On the other hand, analysis software has been used to study
various aspects of the works of Shakespeare for years now. They have generally
been applied to shutting down the Authorship question and have predictably yielded
the data necessary in order to arrive at the desired results.
The most common reason that software analysis has arrived at
incorrect and/or pre-ordained outcomes is that neither the developers nor the
users know much of anything about Tudor times or literature. They have little
context and feel that it is sufficient. Presumably, all the programmers need to
know is computer algebra. All the users need is to harvest an input-data set they
understand to be valid for the task at hand — generally, by setting Internet
search engine time parameters to the historical window in question and plugging
in words and phrases.
McCarthy and Schlueter, for just one example, have declared
an irrefutable match between the 1592 quarto publication of the play Arden
of Feversham and a passage he specifically underlined in his personal copy
of his own Diall of Princes (1557).
Wherein is expressed the great malyce and litle pacience of
an evil woman…
But the passage in Faversham, is not in the play but
on the title page of the book. If M&S have in actuality proven anything
irrefutably it is that Sir Thomas North wrote the title-page blurb of the 1592
quarto the text of which contains possible close correspondences to his Diall .
The two also cite a number of other “matches” within the
play text itself. But Faversham is not uniformly accepted by scholars to
have been written by Shakepeare (The 2016 Oxford Shakespeare notwithstanding).
So then, they have proven that North wrote passages in the Diall of Princeses
that may later have been included in a play possibly (re)written by Thomas Kyd (Shakespeare perhaps having put his hand to a number of lines).
Similar issues arise concerning the play Henry VIII.
A passage in the play bears a striking resemblance to a passage from North’s
journal of his travels through Italy. By M&S’s system of interpreting data,
the resemblance can only mean that the author of the original play had access
to North’s private journals — could only have been North himself. But the
flagship passage quoted is not in the text of the play. It is a highly detailed
stage direction.
In Tudor and Jacobin plays, playwrights did not provide
their texts replete with extensive, highly detailed directions. They noted when
characters entered and exited and often they failed to do even that. The
playhouse had the company scribe add the directions to the playhouse copy. And
the directions often changed markedly from production to production. The Folio text of Henry VIII has long
been identified as a particularly exemplary playhouse copy. If anything, M&S have resoundingly proven that a member
of some playhouse staff wrote a stage direction from out of Thomas North’s
personal travel journal — that North occasionally provided directions to stage
productions gleaned from his personal papers.
And, again, it is widely accepted that the play was written by Shakespeare and Fletcher. If
Shakespeare was only dressing an old Thomas North play, why did he need
Fletcher? Or, if Fletcher was doing the dressing, why did he call on
Shakespeare for assistance? Because the old pro was particularly known as a
dresser of old North plays?
The weakest link of M&S’s theory, however, is the two
pieces of evidence they provide that Thomas North was ever even a playwright. First
is cited a single mention in a preface to Thomas Heywood’s translation of
Seneca’s Thyestes declaring that his friend North, for all his talents,
has not yet written a translation of a Seneca play. Second is cited the
irrefutable fact that only a tiny percentage of Tudor plays or their metadata have
survived. North was surely a playwright, it turns out, because the absolute lack
of any record of the fact is only to be expected.
While I genuinely congratulate M&S on applying a
rigorous method such as is sorely lacking in Shakespeare Authorship at-large, it
is abundantly clear that they’ve made insupportable conjectures throughout. There
is not likely to be an astonishing discovery of some letter or manuscript that
settles these matters with absolute certainty. It will be solved through patient archaeological
sifting of often tiny bits of evidence, identification and addition to the collective
data in the field such that the patterns become ever clearer.
While they did not show me that Shakespeare rewrote the old
plays of Thomas North, the horde of information they’ve provided trying to do
so expands my archaeological digs to my considerable benefit. So much so that I
will surely write more about it soon.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- King’s Place: home of the Earl and Countess of Oxford, 1596-1604. November 10, 2020. “In 1596, Elizabeth Trentham received King’s Place, in Hackney, from the estate of one Sir Rowland Hayward. She and her husband, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, moved in shortly afterward.”
- Shakespeare and Painter’s Palace of Pleasure. May 19, 2020. “…there is no richer source for clues to who was Shakespeare.”
- What About Edward de Vere’s Twelfth Night of 1600/01? January 28, 2020. “Leslie Hotson, who brought the Orsino-Orsino coincidence to the attention of the Nevillians seems to have made one particular mistake that is all to our point.”
- A Most Curious Account of the Funeral of Queen Elizabeth I: April 28, 1603. April 28, 2019. “Once it was clear that James I would face no serious challenges, Cecil and the others could begin to give attention to the matter of the Queen’s funeral.”
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
3 comments:
Having been accused by a Srratfordian 'so you're a conspiracy theorist' I could not help but fantasize briefly that the North book, bound expensively, in my opinion not very coherentie written, was subsidies by the SBT. I think is was well criticized by Ross Barber as deficient in arguing.
Here's the response to Barber's claims -- as well as helping correct a few of the many mistakes made above by Purdy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gunid1Tiwc
Dennis has also shown a payment made by Lord North (Thomas' much more elevated brother, Roger) in his accounts to Thomas for the exact amount traditionally paid to the person putting on a play. tis of course does not show he wrote the play but is not no evidence at all for playwriting. I do believe, however, that a lot of the argument rests on word similarity and subject matter similarity. Both North and de Vere were in a position to have known Amyot, spoke, read and wrote French fluently and were in Paris in the year 1575 (around the time of the Coronation of Henri III and Amyot had tutored him as a young prince, dedicating his own Plutarch to henri's older brother whose demise had made way for him to be crowned and Amyot was raised to very high office during his reign). The stories of traitors Jack cade and Oweb Glendower in George North's manuscript were well known at the time - literally infamous, like more recent cases such as OJ Simpson now. For me it needs to be shown that Thomas North wrote good poetry, was lame and knew and loved the Earl of Southampton (North actually received a pension for some not fully clear role in putting down the Essex rising), or if Dennis' take on it is true that Stratford Shaxper was.
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