North Authorship Theory in Context: “AROUND(30)” So What?

North Authorship Theory in Context Series:

• The Exchequer and Stage Directions.
• A Different Set of Parallel Columns.
• “AROUND(30)” So What?

So then, Dennis McCarthy asserts that Thomas North wrote a stage-direction to Shakespeare's Henry VIII out of a journal he once kept. We have seen, on the other hand, why history has declared the scene in question from Shakespeare's Henry VIII to have been taken directly out of George Cavendish's Life of Cardinal Wolsey. [link] 

What we haven't seen is on what basis McCarthy claims it is mathematically highly probable that Thomas North wrote the original scene. What does entering '"After them" AROUND(30) "next them with"' into the Google search engine have to do with anything?

Numerous contiguous word-strings shared between two short texts has long been known to be strong evidence that one was taken from the other or both from a shared source. But what specific evidence do nondescript word-pairs located “AROUND(30)” words apart in a text provide?

Read carefully, McCarthy does not say that North consulted Cavendish's Wolsey in writing Henry VIII. He says that North used Cavendish to write his travel journal entries from which he later wrote the passage in Henry VIII.

North frequently relied on two historical texts—an unpublished manuscript version of George Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey (1555-56) and chapters on Henry VIII in Edward Hall’s Union (1548)—in order to help add knowing details to his journal entries. He even borrowed from Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey when crafting the entries describing the cardinal’s procession and consistory. North then took these very same source-passages that he used for his journal and reused them in Henry VIII, all the while echoing the language of his journal and modifying the actual historical events so that they more closely resembled his experiences in Italy.

In this way, the fact that Henry VIII copies text directly from Cavendish is transformed into the claim that North borrowed from Cavendish for his journal entries and then borrowed from his journal to write Henry VIII. This because entering '"After them" AROUND(30) "next them with".' in Google Search produces only entries for Henry VIII and the travel journal entry — or, to be more precise, Henry VIII and the ellipses-filled excerpt from North's travel journal that McCarthy provides us on his web-pages.

But what evidence is there that North “frequently relied on” these (or any) “two historical texts” to “add knowing details to his journal”? How is this anything but evidence of a desperate attempt to manufacture a connection between Shakespeare's works and North private papers?

This all accomplishes one thing. A passage in Henry VIII that any literate Tudor can have copied out of Cavendish, under the name Shakespeare, has allegedly been discovered to be a passage that — by virtue of '"After them" AROUND(30) "next them with"' — can only have come from Thomas North's private papers thus only from Thomas North. Shakespeare, then, did not borrow liberally from the works of North but he was North. The common nature of all such Catholic rituals in Western Europe at the time notwithstanding. The lack of word-string matches in the journal text notwithstanding.

The scholarly world has been aware for centuries that the writer known as William Shakespeare borrowed massively from Thomas North's translation of the Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans for his Roman history plays. Already hundreds of lines from North's work, published in 1580, are known to have been drafted into Shakespeare plays.

Having that much of an historical head start, Dennis McCarthy has staked out his bit of Shakespeare Authorship territory claiming that North wrote early originals of the Bard's plays, later adapted by William Shakspere of Stratford under the now world famous name. He has sought to expand the amount of text in the plays attributed to the pen of North through the use of internet search tools. His goal, in doing this, is to establish North as the playwright who wrote the original versions of the plays all of which he then somehow licensed to the Stratford man.

The strongest talents McCarthy brings to the task are: networking to get credentialed partners to order to gain access to commercial publishing venues, to the occasional academic journal and to high-end publicity venues. He clearly has a degree of charisma, delivered with a booming, confident, paced voice and the perpetual five-o'clock shadow always popular with television fans. His sales-pitch is convincing. Outside of building these talents he seems barely to have worked a day in his life (for which I congratulate him as much as anything).

He has some moderate computer-user skills, as well, and has developed a personal approach to collecting data via search engines. His methods, inasmuch as they are known (and that's not much), hold promise in the abstract. In practice not so much. His grasp of the underlying mathematics seems to be conveniently intuitive.

There being hundreds of lines that Shakespeare lifted from North, to begin with, McCarthy's concurring search engine results are guaranteed to stand up to scrutiny. Some number of his great many additional claims will almost certainly prove out if anyone has the time and inclination to tie themselves to that plow while the star does the podcast circuit.

Where the North thesis runs into seemingly insuperable difficulties is in the fact that there is no substantial evidence that he ever wrote a play or poem. History knows him only as a translator. Equally insuperable is the time line that the allegedly twice composed plays would have to meet and the unheard of and impracticable contractual arrangement that would have been necessary. Attempts to torture narratives and search engine data so that North can be claimed to have a history in those ways, or such that his private papers display an exclusive relationship with the works, fail for the fact that they don't remotely conform with the Tudor context in which he lived.

Does this indicate that Thomas North absolutely did not write the works of Shakespeare? It is all but certain that he did not write all or nearly all of them. The reasons are legion. It is not hard to believe, however, that he had some idea that Shakespeare had coöpted his translation work. It is not at all impossible that both saw him as something of a co-author for portions of those plays based on the Plutarch translations. But I suspect that such a possibility cannot capture enough attention and market-share to meet Dennis McCarthy's needs.

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Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• On Shakespeare's lameness and historical-fiction biography, etc. August 5, 2023. “Those who support Sogliardo of Stratford and other authorship candidates generally stop by from time to time to remark...”

• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”
• Robert Greene and the Construction Shakespeare Never Used. August 9, 2022. 'Our first foray “staring intently into” the texts of Robert Greene has noted that his work utilized far fewer feminine endings than Shakespeare’s.'

• A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years.  Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship 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.

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