Book review: North by Shakespeare

Recently I had the opportunity to take an advance look at North by Shakespeare, by Michael Blanding, which is now in print. It's an unusual work in some respects. For one thing, the author himself is something of an agnostic on the subject of Shakespearean authorship. More important, North by Shakespeare deals only in part with arguments pertaining to the origins of the plays, while devoting a good deal of time to the academic obstacles faced by anyone mounting a challenge to Shakespearean orthodoxy. As a study of the monolithic resistance of the professoriat to new ideas, it's applicable to many more areas than Shakespeareana. 

 

The hero of the book is Dennis McCarthy, a self-taught scholar who had already made respected contributions to the field of biogeography before becoming intrigued with the idea that Shakespeare's plays, in their original form, were authored by Thomas North. North is best known today as the translator of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, and his translation is demonstrably a key source for some of Shakespeare's historical plays, notably Antony and Cleopatra, which includes whole passages of North's translation, lightly revised to change North's prose into blank verse. North also translated The Moral Philosophy of Doni, a book of animal fables that proved immensely popular in his day.

 

Of course there are many claimants to the title of "the true author" behind the Shakespearean corpus. I've written elsewhere of the many reasons why it's unlikely that a provincial from Stratford-upon-Avon, educated in a one-room schoolhouse probably for no more than a few years, could have become the erudite, multilingual, aristocratically well-connected poet and playwright we know as William Shakespeare. But how good a job does North by Shakespeare do in presenting Thomas North as the man behind the curtain?

 

 

To begin with, I found the book fascinating, well paced, consistently compelling, and nicely balanced between open-mindedness and cautious skepticism. What I most related to were the accounts of the Shakespearean academics who simply refused to consider Dennis McCarthy's theory – for instance, one professor who averred stiffly, "I stand by William … I believe in William from Stratford-upon-Avon." This sounds less like a statement of objective scholarship than the recital of a religious creed.

 

McCarthy was surprised to discover that the Shakespearean academics were far more closed-minded than the biogeographers whose theories he'd previously challenged. This was no revelation to me. Sadly, the evasion and rationalization among Shakespearean professionals can be truly prodigious. I've been told in condescending terms that the identity of the author is irrelevant and unimportant, since the plays should be judged purely on their own merits. This — after more than a century of scouring every historical record for the slightest reference to the Stratford man. Even today, on the rare occasion when a new scrap of documentary information turns up about William's life, it's greeted as a discovery of historic significance. And yet, in a classic instance of doublethink, the same people who pore over every smallest archival document possibly connected to the Stratford man tell us that the details of his life are utterly insignificant.

 

In his initial enthusiasm, McCarthy was keen to insist that North wrote the plays, even publishing a quickie book on the subject. I read this book and discussed it here. Later, McCarthy quietly withdrew the book from publication and tried his best to memory-hole it, a decision I found baffling at the time. North by Shakespeare clarifies the situation, explaining that McCarthy learned that the book constituted an insuperable barrier to entry into academia.  

 

Blanding does an excellent job of acquainting the reader with the complicated ins and outs of the authorship controversy. I might have preferred a little more discussion of the aristocratic elements in Shakespeare's writing, such as his firsthand knowledge of falconry and bowls (two pastimes restricted to the aristocracy). I was a bit disappointed when Blanding repeated the old trope that partisans of the Earl of Oxford are motivated by snobbery, since I think the real motivation has more to do with the (to us) obviously aristocratic and court-insider elements of Shakespeare's works. If the author of Anna Karenina were unknown, we would certainly look for him among the Russian aristocracy, because the book is immersed in that world. On the other hand, if the author of Crime and Punishment were unknown, we would not look for him among aristocrats, because his book is set solidly in the world of the hoi polloi. It's not a question of snobbishness in the one case or egalitarianism in the other, but of divining the author's circumstances from the characters and incidents he chooses to portray.

 

But the book's focus, naturally, is not on Oxford but on North, and it is remarkably effective at making a case for him. I do think the case could be strengthened by an exploration of Shakespeare's two long narrative poems and especially his sonnets, mentioned only in passing. Though notoriously difficult to interpret, the sonnets appear to contain autobiographical content – for example, Sonnet 107 is conventionally seen as a commentary on the release of the Earl of Southampton from the Tower of London after the death of Queen Elizabeth. When I mentioned this issue to Michael Blanding, he informed me that Dennis McCarthy has done considerable work on both the poems and sonnets, but prefers to retain this material for his own publication down the line.

 

The parallels McCarthy has discovered discovered or, in some cases, conjectured between North's life and Shakespeare's body of work are consistently interesting, though perhaps not always 100% persuasive. McCarthy argues, for instance, that Hamlet's meditations on mortality were inspired by North's seemingly hopeless position at one point in his military career, when it appeared that he and his troops faced certain death at the hands of the invading Spanish. It's an interesting notion, but in truth, we don't have any idea what North may have been thinking under those circumstances. On the other hand, mainstream writers have imputed all sorts of connections between presumed events in the Stratford man's life and the content of the Shakespearean works. These connections are at least as tenuous as any that McCarthy suggests. (I would argue, however, that the connections between the life of Oxford and major characters and events in Shakespeare's plays are considerably more specific and convincing. But that's another story.)

 

I'm very much in agreement with McCarthy's idea that Shakespeare's so-called "late romances" (except for The Tempest) are actually early and rather primitive (even juvenile) works that were staged after the author's death, when he wasn't around to complain. It has always struck me as bizarre that serious scholars think Shakespeare descended from the heights of Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, and Macbeth to the comparative drivel of Cymbeline and Pericles. Ben Jonson called Pericles "a mouldy tale," which may imply that it was an old play exhumed from well-deserved burial.

 

Another point in North's favor is that he very likely attended the elaborate festivities at Kenilworth Castle in honor of Queen Elizabeth, festivities that were clearly referenced in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Oxford is known not to have attended, having been abroad at the time. I've always found his absence to be a distinct weakness in the Oxfordian thesis. Moreover, in North, we have a writer of established greatness (his translation of Plutarch has never been surpassed) who treated some of the same themes that obsessed Shakespeare – and who is also the only writer Shakespeare quotes nearly verbatim in his works; in contrast, the few surviving poems under Oxford's name are not of Shakespearean quality (Oxfordians excuse them as early efforts). And while Oxford died in 1604, obliging his partisans to redate The Tempest, North's date of death is unknown. 

 

A curious pamphlet posthumously attributed to the satirist Robert Greene, Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, as analyzed by McCarthy, provides further support for the North thesis. In the pamphlet, a gentleman scholar, strapped for cash, is enlisted by a traveling player-impresario to provide him with material. The pamphlet concludes with an animal fable, "The Ant and the Grasshopper," calling to mind the fable-filled Moral Philosophy of Doni and suggesting, perhaps, that the gentleman scholar is meant to be seen as the translator of that work. North is known to have had severe financial difficulties, which could explain why he stooped to the discreditable occupation of playwriting. (Oxford, too, had financial difficulties, but he lived on a larger scale, and I doubt that the revenue from the plays would have made a dent in his mountainous debts.)

 

One odd thing about North by Shakespeare is that it doesn't seem to fully acknowledge that it's about an authorship controversy. More than once McCarthy insists to Blanding that Shakespeare "wrote every word" attributed to him during his lifetime. This strikes me as bizarre, since his own theory directly undercuts this conclusion – unless by  "writing every word" he means copying over what North wrote. If it is true that the Stratford man served as a play broker and producer (à la Ben Jonson's "poet-ape"), and that the plays he acquired were lengthy, elaborate, sophisticated works originally intended for performance at court, then he must have had  them shortened and simplified for public performance, and may also have added vulgar comedy and action for the entertainment of the groundlings. Still, such revisions are a far cry from "writing every word." I doubt, in any case, that the Stratford man did the editing himself, any more than a movie producer sits down with the script and rewrites it. Then and now, this is the kind of work that's farmed out to a journeyman writer available on the cheap.

 

Most likely, this circumlocution is a defensive move on McCarthy's part, intended to shield him from slings and arrows launched by the Shakespearean orthodoxy. In a sense, he seems to want to eat his cake and still have it – to suggest strongly that North was the original author of the plays, while at the same time insisting there was never any cover-up or conspiracy and that the Stratford man deserves the credit. To me, it's a somewhat intellectually incoherent position, but these are the desperate lengths one can be led to when facing the brick wall of academic dismissal. 

 

Whether you take it as a new contribution to the authorship debate, an examination of the stubborn closed-mindedness of academia, or a portrait of an iconoclastic autodidact on a mission, North by Shakespeare is a lively and provocative read. Though I'm not necessarily convinced that North is the solution to the puzzle of Shakespearean authorship, I certainly think McCarthy's thesis deserves serious attention. I hope North by Shakespeare helps to spread his ideas to a wide and open-minded audience. 

 

Comments

[Paris Wilder]

Just throwing it out there in the wild, Shakespeare's romance, love, longing and emotions is hard to ascribe it to an average male, potentially more so in that era, for some reason, just a personal consideration. I'm curious to read more about why you think it's definitely Edward and why a female is rarely considered to ascribe to such talent and mastery in poetry in the academic debate. Michael I PM you on your facebook, let me know if you think there's any validity to it, it actually got me quite depressed initially it seemed so futile.

[Michael Prescott]

Almost everybody of any stature in the Elizabethan era has been suggested as the "real Shakespeare" at one time or another. This includes some women. But the case for most of these "authorship candidates" is weak to nonexistent.

Oxford (Edward de Vere) is a strong candidate because the plays often mirror and comment on events in his life. Some of these references are extremely specific. Even the Thomas North theory acknowledges this, suggesting that North was making fun of Oxford with these references. (Maybe. But mocking a powerful earl was not necessarily good for one's health.) Oxford also was known as an important literary patron, a European traveler, an amateur poet and lyricist, and a highly eccentric character apparently prone to violent emotional upheavals. On the other hand, he died in 1604, when arguably some Shakespeare plays were not yet written (dating the plays is hard), and some see him as too much of a silly fop to be the Bard.

I’m not 100% sold on Oxford — or North, or Sackville, or Derby, or ... The only thing I’m sure of is that Will Shaksper of Stratford did not have the erudition, life experience, or court connections to originate the works, though he may well have acquired them for popular performance and publication, and he may have made (or supervised) changes in the manuscripts. This would account for the so-called "bad quartos" that sometimes differ markedly from the First Folio versions (presumably based on the original, uncut manuscripts wherever possible).

[Roger Knights]

You should post the above as a comment / review on the Amazon site you linked to. It's better than any of the reviews there now.

[Adeimantus]

Blimey, I am here because I have followed your erudition in matters paranormal, and then I see you writing about Shakespeare’s identity which coincidentally happens to be another interest of mine. How serendipitous! For the record, I am an Oxfordian, convinced by the scholarship of Alexander Waugh (grandson of Evelyn Waugh)