Shakespeare and Thomas North.

In this Series:

• Shakespeare and Thomas North
• The Thomas North Theory Springs Leaks Under Scrutiny.
• More on Thomas North as Shakespeare and author of Arden of Feversham.
• On Claim that Thomas North wrote Arden of Faversham in 1550s.

Some time ago there began stirrings about a claim that Sir Thomas North, the translator of Plutarch’s Lives, from the 1559 French translation by Jacques Amyot, had been the author of plays later ascribed to or revised by Shakespeare. The recent revival of claims for William Stanley, the Earl of Derby, and, to a lesser extent, Francis Bacon, and the new claims for Henry Neville, have opened the Authorship flood gates of late. After the above manner North is added to the flood.

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.