Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare's Plays (Ebook)

Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare's Plays

94,000 words; 327 pages; 16 chapters; 267 endnotes

(PDF and EPUB formats)

“The Steve Jobs of the Shakespeare community… A once in a generation–or several generations–find.” –The New York Times

Dennis McCarthy presents the gripping true story of Sir Thomas North, the scholar-knight who transformed the most thrilling and shocking moments of his life into plays later adapted by Shakespeare. Working from a series of manuscript discoveries that have garnered worldwide attention (including coverage in The New York Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe Magazine, U.S. News, etc.), McCarthy provides numerous proofs that North wrote more than thirty plays, mostly for the Earl of Leicester’s theater troupe, years before Shakespeare reached London. Then, in the 1590s and early 1600s, Shakespeare reworked North’s plays for the public stage.

Perhaps most significantly, Thomas North demonstrates that North actually lived the plays before he wrote them and that even many of the most iconic scenes in the canon derive from striking events that North actually experienced. The book also reveals for the first time North’s historical involvement in the Essex Rebellion and why neither he nor Shakespeare was punished for the treasonous play, Richard II.

Thomas North also examines many hundreds of lines and passages that have been taken from North’s published prose translations and recycled in Shakespeare’s plays, most of which are unique, occurring nowhere else in the history of English literature. As the book confirms, no one has borrowed more from an earlier writer than Shakespeare has from North, and it is not even close. In truth, scholars have always known that Shakespeare frequently adapted old plays. They just never knew who had written them.

With Thomas North, the mysteries that have plagued Shakespeare studies for centuries now finally have an answer.