Sir Thomas North (28 May 1535 – c. 1604) was an English translator, military officer, lawyer, and justice of the peace. His translation into English of Plutarch's Parallel Lives is notable for being the main source text used by William Shakespeare for his Roman plays.
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "[i]t is almost impossible to overestimate the influence of North's vigorous English on contemporary writers, and some critics have called him the first master of English prose".
An excerpt from, "What’s In a Name? Tracing an Obsession with the Shakespeare Authorship Question" By Michael Blanding, Literary Hub, May 31, 2022:
Not for the first time, I wondered how I had gotten to this point. A longtime investigative journalist, I had published a book six months earlier called North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work. It profiles Dennis McCarthy, a 57-year-old polymath who has for years been obsessively trying to prove that William Shakespeare had based many of his plays on now-lost plays by Thomas North.
I know. I was skeptical too when I first heard his theory, thinking it another conspiracy theory claiming Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. As he showed me his evidence, however, I became intrigued by the idea. As it turns out, Elizabethan scribblers were constantly stealing and rewriting each other’s work, and even mainstream scholars believe William Shakespeare often rewrote earlier, now-lost plays to create his own. Among other plays, they’ve identified references to early versions of Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and even Hamlet in various courtiers’ diaries, satirical pamphlets, and revels records.
But academics have been curiously uninterested in trying to ferret out the identity of the playwrights who penned those works. McCarthy had used some novel techniques to reach his conclusion that the author of a great many of them was Sir Thomas North, a writer 30 years older than Shakespeare who was best-known for the English translation of the book Plutarch’s Lives (the undisputed source for Shakespeare’s Roman plays) as well as several other books of courtly wisdom.
McCarthy used plagiarism software to compare the text of North’s translations—about a million words in all—with the text of Shakespeare’s plays—another million words. When he did, his computer lit up like a Christmas tree, displaying thousands of phrases in common, many found in similar situations and contexts, and many unique in English. Some were up to eight words long, the equivalent of hitting every number in a Powerball ticket and then some.
There was other compelling evidence as well. McCarthy and his collaborator June Schlueter, a professor emerita at Lafayette College, found a manuscript once in the North family library at Kirtling Hall that they identified as a source for 11 of Shakespeare’s plays. They discovered a handwritten journal North had made on a trip to Italy that seemed to inspire scenes from Henry VIII and The Winter’s Tale, including details of locations Shakespeare never visited and scenes he never witnessed. They even discovered financial records suggesting North had been paid for plays along with the actors of the Earl of Leicester’s Men, a theater company with members in common with Shakespeare’s troupe.
Despite the potential bombshell of these findings, McCarthy had a problem—he was not a trained academic, never mind a Shakespearean scholar. In fact, he had dropped out of college at the University of Buffalo years ago, a few credits shy of graduation. Though he was a naturally gifted writer, who had published a book on the geography of evolution with Oxford University Press, he faced an uphill battle in getting any academic to take his work seriously.
Video Title: Proof for Sir Thomas North as Shakespeare by Dennis McCarthy. Source: Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. Date Published: May 18, 2021. Description:
Dennis McCarthy is an independent researcher and author of "Thomas North's 1555 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare". He pioneered the authorship candidacy of Thomas North by utilizing plagiarism software in 2018. His website is www.sirthomasnorth.com
He spoke to the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable about his discoveries.
