Both Strafordians and Anti-Stratfordians have been arguing about this for a century, but the mystery has been solved
[I have moved all my writings on William Shakespeare and Thomas North onto my substack: “All the Mysteries That Remain.” You can subscribe there for free–no credit card or anything–but after 7 days, a free subscription only allows access to only the first section of new articles (and none of the archives.) This is a reproduction of a post that was posted there on 11/14/2024: https://dennismccarthy.substack.com/p/the-long-debated-mystery-of-shakespeares: ]
To subscribers more focused on the North/Shakespeare discovery, I do realize that four of the last five posts on “All the Mysteries That Remain” had Trump in the title. ATMTR will likely be more balanced in the future, but I do think that 11/5 just might turn out to be the most consequential global event of our lifetimes—and not in a good way. Indeed, the recent nomination of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General fits perfectly with my podcast-warning, Trump and his Parliament of Psychos.
I have also not forgotten about the brand new Shakespearean poem—the first one discovered in centuries—and, yes, it was written by Thomas North. A full presentation on that poem will be coming within a few weeks. And I have already provided an introduction discussion about in the podcast:
First New Shakespearean Poem Found in Centuries (Part 1)
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Aug 30
And here is a transcript of the “First New Shakespearean Poem Found in Centuries (Part 1)” podcast
My next podcast will be on intellectual revolutions, and the reason they take decades to become accepted, even after they have been proved, and even among intellectuals. But relevant to the dispiriting delay in acceptance of new paradigms is the fact that the North/Shakespeare view has also answered many long-debated literary questions—questions that are not remotely dependent on authorship-identity—but that people still seem hell-bent on refusing to acknowledge. The reason for this reticence is likely unease over the fact that it is North-researchers who are the ones making these discoveries. But these scholars are only hurting themselves. Everyone who still works on such Shakespearean difficulties without accounting for our new information are wasting their one precious life on this earth writing works doomed to be soon obsolete.
As an example, there really is no more doubt as to when and how the Shakespeare authorship question originated in the nineteenth century. The impetus began with Samuel Astley Dunham’s 1837 essay on the life of William Shakespeare, which laid out an extensive case that Shakespeare’s modus operandi was to adapt old plays. This is simply indisputable.
Many academics who address the history of anti-Stratfordianism try to focus on Delia Bacon as the original Shakespeare-denier. Bacon first published her skepticism of his authorship in an 1856 issue of Putnam Magazine. But perhaps one reason that orthodox scholars concentrate on Delia is that in 1858 her family had forced her into what were then called “lunatic asylums,” and scholars can use that to cast ad hominem shadows: “See? No one ever denied Shakespeare’s authorship till Delia Bacon, and, well, we know what happened to her.”
But the fact is, doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship had preceded Delia’s 1856 essay. Joseph Hart, for example, had devoted a section of his 1848 book on boating, “The Romance of Yachting,” to the authorship problem in which he angrily denounced the Stratford playwright. He argued that Shakespeare lacked the education and experiences to create the plays attributed to him, ranting, “It is a fraud upon the world to thrust his surreptitious fame upon us.” He then asked: “The enquiry will be, who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him?”1
But Hart’s specific claim was not that Shakespeare was illiterate or a frontman—but a reviser of old plays: “[Shakespeare] merely adapted other people’s works to the playing stage, like a Theatrical Factotum, as Greene calls him [in Groatsworth of Wit],” wrote Hart, “and he was nothing else.”2
And where did Hart get this claim? From Dunham’s 1837 essay, which Hart repeatedly quoted, referenced, and paraphrased. In the original article, Dunham wrote:
“[W]e must observe, that in the beginning of his [Shakespeare’s] career—for years, indeed, after he became connected with the stage—that extraordinary man was satisfied with reconstructing the pieces which others had composed; he was not the author, but the adapter of them to the stage. Indeed, we are of opinion, that the number of plays which he thus re-cast, as well as those in which he made very slight alterations, is greater than any of his commentators have supposed.”3
Later in the work, Dunham repeated this claim: “In fact, there is no one drama of our author prior to 1600—perhaps not one after that year—that was not derived from some other play.”4
But literary insiders had been making the same point about Shakespeare’s use of old plays both while he was alive and in the decades and centuries afterward. And all this testimony by insiders and experts is reinforced by numerous pre-Shakespeare references to these plays which confirm their existence—as well as the evidence in the plays themselves that they were adaptations.5 Even the first title-pages of the plays that carried Shakespeare’s name (or initials) gratuitously indicate they were adaptations too.
That Shakespeare revised old plays and that this is what led to the authorship question is simply a fact—and it is a fact that needs more widespread acknowledgment.
Another example involves the mystery of Shakespeare’s knowledge of Europe. For example, as is well known, the playwright seemed peculiarly obsessed with Italy and all things Italian.
He somehow had access to all sorts of obscure information about continental Europe that did not appear in books at the time (I will include a post on this soon). But if he were so knowledgeable about Europe, then what explains the occasional but thumping geographical errors in the plays, particularly those in The Winter’s Tale about Bohemia and Sicily? How, for example, could such an evidently widely traveled playwright give Bohemia, a landlocked region in northeast Europe, a coastline?
June Schlueter and I answer this in our book: Thomas North’s 155 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare (I understand that this book, like most academic books, is extremely expensive, so if you want additional info email me—or check out summaries of it in “Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare’s Plays.”)
But as we note in Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal, the mistakes in The Winter’s Tale go far beyond Bohemia’s notorious coastline:
These seeming religious inconsistencies are intertwined with strange geographical errors: although Bohemia was a northeastern region located within the modern-day Czech Republic, Shakespeare notoriously gives it a coastline and a desert, when it has neither. Dis’s kidnapping of Proserpine and the twin dangers of the man-eater on the coast (like Scylla) and a ship-destroying maelstrom just off-shore (like Charybdis) are all set in or near Bohemia when they are clearly Sicilian. Moreover, the Prince of Bohemia is somehow involved in a Mediterranean conflict with a noble and warlike Governor of Libya, a region that had never directly interacted with Bohemia and had been firmly in the hands of the Ottoman Empire for more than five decades when Shakespeare staged the play in 1610 or 1611. And just as Bohemia seems to be confused with a southern Mediterranean country, Sicily appears bizarrely Bohemian. Its court is surrounded by a “tuft of pines,” and the Sicilian queen is somehow a daughter of the Emperor of Russia. Even the names of the kings suggest they are ruling the wrong lands. Pitcher writes: “The national symbol of real Bohemia was a lion, but in Shakespeare it is the King of Sicily who is called Leontes (Leo, Latin for ‘lion’), while the King of Bohemia has a Greek name, Polixenes, thus associated with Sicily and the Mediterranean.”6 Indeed, as various scholars have noted, the Bohemian king’s name is taken from the Sicilian Polixenes in North’s Plutarch’s Lives. The name of Polixenes’ son, Florizel, derives from a knight in the Spanish romance Amadis de Gaul, once again linking the prince of Shakespeare’s Bohemia to Mediterranean adventurism. (Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal, 84)
But a reading of Thomas North’s journal instantly rectifies all these errors. Indeed, as we show, this handwritten travel-diary is itself a “kind of ‘Winter’s Tale’”:
“The one seeming connection among all these features is that they are all fantastic and surreal, or, as Ros King points out, “Everything about the story of The Winter’s Tale from its geography to its statue is impossible. …”7
Why, near the end of his career, did Shakespeare cram all these whimsical, archaic, confusing, and unrelated elements into the same play? What could possibly explain such a mixture of these fantastic parts? Remarkably, Thomas North’s 1555 Journal solves all these mysteries. For North’s Journal is a kind of Winter’s Tale, a mixture of the same exotic ingredients that adorn the tragicomedy, evoking the same sense of the outlandish and darkly magical. When one reads North’s Journal as The Winter’s Tale’s prooftext, the play’s loose ends are tied up, its errors rectified or explained, and the purpose of every mysterious element made clear. In fact, the play is perfectly coherent; nothing is extraneous, and the underlying story that it relates is true. (Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal, 85)
For example, North’s journal explains why the playwright set the locations in Bohemia and Sicily—and made the two Kings of these regions the main characters in the play:
As will be shown in future posts, North’s journal explains not just the choice of the Kings, but essentially all the characters in “The Winter’s Tale”— as well as its fabulous pagan feast of the lesser Gods in Act 4, and the famous Act 5 miracle involving a painted lifelike statue of Giulio Romano (yes, North expresses wonder at the painted, lifelike statues of Romano in his journal.)
But relevant to the point here are the geographical errors involving Bohemia and Sicily:
The reasons behind North’s choice of Bohemia and Sicily—with Bohemia as the reformation sister to England and Sicily as a synecdoche for Charles’s (and then his son, Philip’s) southern Catholic empire—become obvious with a reading of North’s journal. Indeed, the subtitle of the journal could read “North’s Journey through the Dominions of the Kings of Bohemia and Sicily.”
In 1555, the brothers Ferdinand I and Charles V controlled the northern and southern realms of the Hapsburg Empire. In terms of number of mentions, both kings were main characters in North’s journal, with North referring to Ferdinand eight times and Charles V more than 20, even stressing they were brothers. North would discuss their various political activities, relationships, and histories—and he especially noted these when he traveled into their kingdoms. Along the Brenner Pass, between Sterzing and Steinach, North records the place where the two brothers reunited in 1530, after eight years of being apart. (Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal, 90-1)
The Winter’s Tale has a similar reuniting of the Kings of Bohemia and Sicily, after being many years apart. True, in the play, the kings are not technically brothers. But the playwright makes it clear that the two Kings have grown up with each other and makes them repeatedly refer to each other as “brother.”
In their first appearance on stage together, Polixenes immediately addresses Leontes as his “brother.” Within 13 lines, Leontes uses the same sobriquet for Polixenes, while begging him to extend his visit. They continue this throughout the scene: “our brother,” “best brother,” “my brother,” “our brother’s welcome.” Again, in 5.1, when Leontes first sees Polixenes’ son, he says: “Your father’s image is so hit in you, / His very air, that I should call you brother, / as I did him” (5.1.127-29). Florizel makes the same point back to Leontes, noting that Polixenes had commanded him to “Give you all the greetings that a king … / Can send his brother” (5.1.140-41). Leontes then thinks about the wrong he has done to Polixenes and calls out “O my brother!” (5.1.147). Again, in the final scene, Paulina refers to Polixenes as Leontes’ “crowned brother” (5.3.5). A few lines later, Polixenes addresses Leontes as “Dear my brother” (5.3.53). And in the final passage of the play, Leontes asks the resurrected Hermione to “Look upon my brother. Both your pardons, / That e’er I put between your holy looks / My ill suspicion” (5.3.149-51). We do not need to search hard for the identities. The only time in history when the King of Sicily was the brother to the King of Bohemia was with Charles V and Ferdinand I—and this ended in 1554, when Charles abdicated the throne of Sicily to his son Philip for the sake of his marriage to Mary. Of course, within the storyline of The Winter’s Tale, the playwright cannot make the kings actual brothers as this would make Perdita and Florizel first cousins … . (Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal, 93-4)
So if North knew so much about these kingdoms, why did he make all those errors? He didn’t. In North’s original version, the kingdoms were reversed. It was Shakespeare who transformed the King of Bohemia into the King of Sicily—and vice versa. But Shakespeare didn’t similarly transfer any of the corresponding features of their respective kingdoms, making Bohemia seem like Sicily—and Sicily like Bohemia. Moreover, we know for a fact that Shakespeare did switch the kingdoms because Robert Greene also wrote a novelization of North’s version of The Winter’s Tale in 1585—25 years before Shakespeare would adapt it—and in Greene’s version the kingdoms correspond to their correct positioning in North’s original play (and so are the opposite of the way they are in Shakespeare).
[I]t is important to understand that when Shakespeare adapted The Winter’s Tale in c.1610, he transposed the settings of Sicily and Bohemia, likely for political reasons. Scholars accept the geographical swap as well as Shakespeare’s responsibility for it because, in Robert Greene’s early version of the tale Pandosto (1585, published in 1588), Sicily and Bohemia are reversed, and they know that Greene’s work had to have preceded Shakespeare’s. In reality, both Greene and Shakespeare were adapting the same North play, but the upshot in either case is the same: Shakespeare switched the kingdoms.
Jonathan Bate has suggested a likely reason for the substitution: in 1610, England still harbored hatred toward Philip II, who led the terrifying Spanish Armada attack on England in 1588 and had been King of Sicily and Spain until his death ten years later, when his son, Philip III, took over the titles. Conversely, in 1610, James I was on friendly terms with Rudolf II, the King of Bohemia. As Bate remarks:
“Fictional and fanciful as The Winter’s Tale may be, the fact is that when the play was written the king of Sicilia was Philip III of Spain, and the king of Bohemia was the emperor Rudolf II. There were strong links between the courts of James in London and Rudolf in Prague. …
“Conversely … the residual English hostility to all things Spanish, dating back to the Armada and beyond, had not gone away. In these circumstances, it seems eminently plausible that on deciding to dramatize a story about the kings of Sicilia and Bohemia, and knowing that the play would at some point go into the court repertoire, Shakespeare thought it would be politic to make the monarch with Spanish, as opposed to Rudolfine, associations the one who is irrational, cruel, and blasphemous.”
Bate goes on to clarify that he is “not proposing that Leontes is in any sense a representation of Philip [III] or Polixenes of Rudolf.”8 Indeed, they would appear to have nothing in common with their dramatic counterparts other than their royal titles. These two Kings were not brothers but second cousins, and they did not grow up with each other. Rudolf II was 26 in 1578, the year Philip III was born in Madrid. As we shall see, it was their respective grandfathers, Ferdinand I and Charles V, whom North had in mind—a point made clear when we reverse the locations, which in turn mends essentially all the geographical disjunctions
Once we return the settings to their proper placement, the Lion, the symbol of Bohemia, links with Leontes (Latin for lion); Russia, the Bohemian Queen’s homeland, is now nearby; and a tuft of pines surrounds Leontes’ court. Meanwhile, all of the conspicuously Sicilian elements of Polixenes’ kingdom—its seacoast and desert; its Mediterranean conflict with Libya; the Dionysian feast; the names Polixenes, Sinalus, and Florizel; and the legend of Proserpine and Dis are now all rightly placed in and around Sicily.
Switching the kingdoms back also helps uncover another mythical analogy that gains clarity in the right setting. When Antigonus’s “ship hath touched upon the deserts of” Sicily (not Bohemia), the Mariner warns, “this place is famous for the creatures / Of prey that keep on it.” It is Sicily that is legendary for man-eating beasts, including Polyphemus (Cyclops) and Scylla.
Later in the scene, the Clown gives a dual description of the horrific “sights, by sea and by land!” And the clown’s back-and-forth accounts of the twin dreads facing those who sail near the coast of Sicily, with the turbulent sea threatening the mariners and the fearsome man-eater waiting on the coast, is, of course, a take-off on the same twofold horrors of Charybdis, the ship-destroying maelstrom, and Scylla, the man-eater, who endanger all who enter the Straits of Sicily. The dramatist follows the famous scene of Homer’s poem quite closely, recounting both events in the same order and matching numerous details. This includes screaming mariners, just off shore, first being pushed skyward, then sucked down to the bottom of the sea—interspersed with a gruesome depiction of a man on the coast being devoured alive, shrieking to the narrator for help as he is eaten. Odysseus and the Clown retell precisely the same story. Later, the Third Gentleman would describe the fate of Antigonus as “Like an old tale” (5.2.62). He was certainly correct about that: the Clown’s story, which we examine in Chapter 8, is a parody of Odysseus’s. (Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal, 88-90)
Even those who hate the North/Shakespeare view like poison and want to credit nothing to his journal, still can’t escape the documented fact that in Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the kingdoms of Sicily and Bohemia are reversed. And that when you switch Shakespeare’s settings to their original placements, all the mysterious disjunctions in the play instantly vanish.
This is just one example of many as how research into Thomas North has solved mysteries that had stumped both Stratfordian and anti-Stratfordian scholars for centuries.