The Man Who Solved the Mystery of Shakespeare

Richard Hanania's Newsletter

Last month, I had a meeting with Dennis McCarthy (newsletter here), who is one of my readers. He encouraged me to read the two books he had written. At first, I thought it was highly unlikely that I would simply based on probabilistic reasoning, since I get way too many reading suggestions to take them all up. But as I talked to Dennis, I realized that this situation might be different. His first book, Here Be Dragons: How the study of animal and plant distributions revolutionized our views of life and Earth, supposedly provided a novel method to prove the truth of evolution.

I had read a lot of books on Darwinism when I was younger, and always found inspiring the idea that of all the living beings that have ever existed, I could be part of the small fraction of one species that is able to understand the incredible story of how we got here. Besides providing a new perspective on evolution, Here Be Dragons was filled with fascinating tidbits about life on earth, including why mammals isolated on islands tend to get smaller while reptiles don’t; how some islands have probably seen dwarf humans, miniature elephants, and giant lizards all duking it out at the same time; the close relationship between the elephant and the tiny elephant shrew; the platypus as something in between reptiles and mammals; and microscopic bacteria that get energy from chemicals rather than sunlight and are the basis of an ecosystem at the bottom of the ocean (thread with screenshots here for X subscribers). I couldn’t put it down. This is the rare book that not only was highly enjoyable, but has changed my reading habits, making me realize that I need to go back to works on evolution as they still have the power to affect me very deeply.

McCarthy’s second book is Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare's Plays. When someone tells you that he knows for certain who the real Shakespeare was, it certainly gets your attention. Most people who make claims like this tend to be cranks, but Dennis mentioned that, despite not being an academic, his discoveries have been published in journals and covered in The New York Times. I’m not a big Shakespeare guy, but thought the book was worth taking a look at, and I can recommend it as a detective story and biography of Thomas North, whose exciting life in effect provided the source material for the most important literary canon in the history of the English language. Having been born into aristocratic luxury, then falling into poverty and fighting as a soldier after he is cut off from his family estate, losing political favor, and devoting himself to the life of the mind, North’s story itself is a kind of Shakespearian tragedy that could make for a captivating movie.

The real Shakespeare. Source.

Dennis’ book left no doubt in my mind that he has solved the Shakespeare question. He found countless phrases that appear in both North’s books, notebooks, or the marginalia of his books and Shakespeare’s plays, and never at any other time before or after in the history of written English. To take just one of many examples like this, McCarthy notes the similarities between the notes North made in the margins of Fabyan’s Chronicles and passages in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

In the 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, the play’s first known publication, the queen refers to an earlier British king who fought the Romans as “Cassibulan.” The playwright’s Cassibulan is a misspelling of Cassibelan, a king who, according to Fabyan, died 23 years before Cymbeline’s reign. In fact, though there is no known historical text prior to the First Folio that uses that spelling, the playwright also misspells the name in the same way all four times that he refers to the king. For example, in the passage below, the Roman consul Caius Lucius refers to the amount of Cassibulan’s payment of tribute. It is clear from North’s annotation that he is responsible for both the misspelling of the name and the peculiar phrasing of the amount of that tribute…

Tellingly, the playwright uses North’s language. Where North refers to “tribute granted” “to Rome” by “Cassibulan,” who “paid yearly 3000 li [three thousand pounds],” Cymbeline has “Cassibulan … granted Rome a tribute, yearly three thousand pounds.” EEBO [Early English Books Online, a search engine - RH] shows that by the date of the First Folio, only one other work includes the four-word string “yearly three thousand pounds.” That work, published in 1612, post-dates the first known performances of Cymbeline in 1610–11. Even more significantly, EEBO also confirms that no work prior to the First Folio has the spelling Cassibulan. North has written out a near-quotation that would be put into the play.

This is simply a few phrases in one play. The entire book is McCarthy doing this over and over again, both for Cymbeline and dozens of Shakespeare’s other plays. One chapter is literally called “80 Shakespearean Passages Borrowed Nearly Verbatim from North.”

Either McCarthy has committed fraud, or the Shakespeare debate should have ended with the publication of his book.

I was therefore shocked when I went to the Wikipedia page on the Shakespeare authorship question and learned there was a scholarly consensus that Shakespeare was indeed the author of the plays he has been credited with. The name of Thomas North is not even mentioned on the page, although he does appear as one of 87 in the entry for “List of Shakespeare authorship candidates.” There is no way that Shakespeare scholars can read McCarthy’s book and not be convinced by it; the only way that his theory will not win out is if it is ignored.

I want to make sure that doesn’t happen. For that reason, and also because I wanted to talk to him about biogeography, I invited McCarthy on the podcast to discuss his two books. We had a great conversation, including on what motivates him and what it is like to work as an independent scholar. If you have a platform, I recommend featuring Dennis’ work yourself and helping spread the word about Thomas North’s fascinating life and the debt that civilization owes him.

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