In Shakespeare's Shadow

It was the greatest party of Elizabeth’s reign—nineteen days of gut-busting feasts, minstrel performances, bear-baiting, Italian acrobats, and jaw-dropping fireworks. All of it was designed for a single purpose: to woo a queen. When Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, planned the festivities at his estate of Kenilworth Castle in July 1575, he was getting desperate. After fifteen years of vying for Queen Elizabeth’s hand, he was no closer to a promise of marriage than when he’d begun.

The Kenilworth festival was his last-ditch attempt at winning the queen’s affections, and Leicester spared no expense to impress her, spending lavishly on new gardens, gifts, and performances. As the party raged, nobles and gentry from across the realm—as well as commoners from the countryside—guzzled forty barrels of beer and sixteen barrels of wine a day as they pursued wanton encounters in the surrounding woods and fields. Leicester kept his eyes on the queen, anxiously watching for signs that she was enjoying the elaborate masques and other entertainments he had dreamed up in her honor.

On several nights, Leicester unleashed firework displays created by an Italian pyrotechnician over a man-made lake that lapped against the western wall of the castle. The spectacles lasted for hours, including dazzling dragons, fighting dogs and cats, and rockets that seemed to shoot out of the water itself. A contemporary observer described them as a “blaze of burning darts, flying to and fro, leams of stars coruscant, streams and hail of fiery sparks” of such intensity “that the heavens thundered, the waters surged, the earth shook.”

Another night, the earl staged a giant water pageant as Elizabeth was making her way across a long bridge over the lake. An actor dressed as the sea-god Triton rode across the water to her on a mechanical mermaid. Sounding a trumpet in the shape of a whelk, he commanded the seas to still, shouting: “You waters wild, suppress your waves and keep you calm and plain!” After his speech, another actor dressed as the fabled Greek musician Arion serenaded her from atop a twenty-four-foot-long mechanical dolphin. Music emanated eerily from the dolphin’s belly, where an ensemble of musicians had been secreted inside.

There’s no record of how the queen received the performance—whether she stood stony-faced, or smiled and clapped with joy, or felt a rise of love in her heart for the man who had gone to such extravagant lengths to please her. But the moment has been immortalized, after a fashion, in William Shakespeare’s most beloved play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In one scene, Oberon, King of the Fairies, reminisces to his underling Puck while in a jealous fit over the Fairy Queen Titania. “Thou rememb’rest since once I sat upon a promontory, and heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath that the rude sea grew civil at her song, and certain stars shot madly from their spheres to hear the sea-maid’s music?” he says to Puck. “That very time I saw, but thou couldst not, flying between the cold moon and the earth Cupid, all armed. A certain aim he took at a fair vestal thronèd by the west, and loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow as it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.”

For more than a century, those lines have been read as an allusion to Leicester, who shot a love arrow at his own vestal—England’s famous “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth—at a pageant complete with dolphin, mermaid, and fireworks. It’s less clear how Shakespeare, then a boy eleven years old, could have witnessed the spectacle; or why he would have included it in a play written around 1595, some twenty years after the event. In his book Will in the World, Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt allows that “it is certainly conceivable” that Shakespeare’s father may have taken him from their home in Stratford-upon-Avon, fourteen miles away, to see the display. If so, then perhaps Shakespeare stood with his father upon a promontory overlooking the lake to catch a glimpse of the entertainments, and perhaps the sight made such an impression on him that he remembered it for the next two decades, and perhaps he found a moment to work it into a play performed before the queen to remind her of her youthful wooing by her favorite courtier.

Those are a lot of “perhapses.” It’s not the only explanation, however, for how the Kenilworth water pageant could have inspired Shakespeare’s comedy. The playwright could have heard a report from someone who attended, or read about it in a letter circulated after the event. Or there is another possibility: perhaps, another person wrote those lines—someone who attended the event as a guest and witnessed the pageant firsthand.

I FIRST HEARD the name Thomas North in October 2015. I had been invited to Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, to give a lecture about a book I’d written about a thief of rare maps. The weather was unseasonably warm, and the foliage was in full array, with a spectacular red maple lighting up the picture window of the library lecture hall. Afterward, the lecture’s sponsors, English professor emerita June Schlueter and her husband, Paul, a literature scholar, took me to a dinner reception. Over a pasta buffet they introduced me to a scholar named Dennis McCarthy, a confident fifty-three-year-old who looked a decade younger than his age. McCarthy had attended my lecture with his adult daughter, Nicole Galovski, and only later did I learn that the two positioned themselves around the last remaining seats so that I would sit next to one of them.

McCarthy immediately pulled me into conversation, asking me about my book and telling me about his own research. “I bet you are the only other person here who knows where the words ‘Hic Sunt Dracones’ come from,” he said. Of course, I replied—they’re on the Hunt-Lenox Globe at the New York Public Library. Translated “Here Be Dragons,” they are the words cartographers supposedly used to designate uncharted territory—but McCarthy had a different theory, speculating the words marked the location of giant lizards known as Komodo dragons. Here Be Dragons was also the name of his book on biogeography, he told me, and before long, we were spiritedly discussing maps and geography.

As the reception wound down, he invited me to continue talking over drinks with his daughter and her fiancé. It took me a half a second to decide. I was alone on a Thursday night in a small college town, and the thought of going back to my B&B was infinitely less appealing. I figured I could have a few drinks and continue an enjoyable conversation. I had no idea how this chance meeting would start me down a path to trace a literary mystery that I’d follow, along with McCarthy, for the next five years.

We headed to the College Hill Tavern, a bar with old sports memorabilia framed on the walls (GO LEOPARDS!) and students and locals drinking liquor from plastic cups. We sat at a chipped wooden high-top, straining to hear each other over the impromptu karaoke of nearby patrons. I don’t know whose idea it was to order martinis, but amid conversation of maps and Galovski’s impending wedding in the Azores, I was a bit foggy by the time McCarthy finally leaned across the table and told me he had a story for me.

“You know how Shakespeare used other sources to write his plays?” McCarthy asked over the din of amateur Bon Jovi. “Sure,” I replied, trying to remember anything about Shakespeare’s sources from my first-year college class. “Well, I found a source no one ever knew about before,” he said. This unknown manuscript, he continued, was a treatise by a sixteenth-century courtier named George North. The work, he claimed, influenced some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, including Richard III, Macbeth, and King Lear.

But Shakespeare never even read the manuscript, McCarthy continued, as I struggled to follow his argument through a haze of classic rock and booze. Instead, George’s relative, Sir Thomas North, had used it to write his own plays. Oh, he is one of those, I thought to myself—a conspiracy theorist who thought Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. But McCarthy hurriedly added that in fact he believed the Bard of Avon wrote every play attributed to him during his lifetime. He also believed, however, that Shakespeare had used these earlier plays by Thomas North for his ideas, his language, and even some of his most famous soliloquies. There was something about a murder involving North’s sister, and an affair Queen Elizabeth may or may not have had with North’s patron, the Earl of Leicester, and a tale of familial exile uncannily like Prospero’s story in The Tempest.

I didn’t believe any of it. Where are North’s plays now? I asked. “Lost,” McCarthy said—but so were most manuscripts written in the Elizabethan era. Why hadn’t anyone discovered this before? “Because no one had the right tools to do so,” he said, arguing excitedly that his computer-assisted techniques had the potential to finally solve the mystery of how—and why—Shakespeare’s plays were written. I vaguely knew about the conspiracy theories that Shakespeare was a fraud, and the plays were really written by the Earl of Oxford or someone else. But this was something different. McCarthy’s theory was more akin to saying Shakespeare plagiarized or collaborated with another writer. The theory seemed outlandish, but I liked McCarthy, and was somewhat amused by the lengths to which he’d gone to pitch me. I promised to look at whatever he sent me.

IN MORE THAN two decades as an investigative reporter, I’ve learned not to dismiss any story out of hand. Years ago, as a writer at Boston Magazine, I’d been contacted by a sixty-five-year-old man incarcerated for allegedly setting fire to his own store. The arson investigation turned out to be junk science, and he was freed after more than four years in prison. Soon after I wrote my article, the prosecution dropped attempts to retry him. More recently, I wrote an article for The New York Times about a rare copy of the first map to name America, which was expected to sell at Christie’s auction house for $1 million. A map dealer came to me claiming it was fake, printed in the twentieth century on four-hundred-year-old paper. The giveaway was a spot where the map had been printed over the centuries-old glue that had bound the paper into a book. I contacted Christie’s, which pulled the map from auction before my article even hit the newsstand.

So I wasn’t opposed to considering McCarthy’s theories—though I wasn’t inclined to believe them, either. When I finally dug into the document he sent me six months later, I was surprised to find a persuasive amount of evidence pointing to the use of the manuscript as a source for nearly a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays. I was intrigued enough to order McCarthy’s self-published book about Thomas North, titled North of Shakespeare, and meet with him again—this time at a table by the water in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I listened as he spelled out his theories in a torrent of words, as if he couldn’t get them all out fast enough.

McCarthy wasn’t a trained academic scholar himself, he admitted; in fact, he hadn’t even graduated from college. Yet, by that point he’d devoted more than a decade to his research on Shakespeare. Most of it was done at home through scouring the Internet and using open-source plagiarism software to compare the text of Shakespeare’s plays with the works of Thomas North—an Elizabethan writer who’d translated Plutarch’s Lives, a book well-known as the source for Shakespeare’s Roman plays. But McCarthy saw something more in him—over an exceptional fifty-year literary career, he claimed, North had written dozens of plays, which Shakespeare had reworked to create the greatest canon of works in English literature. Many of them, he said, were written on behalf of his patron, the Earl of Leicester, as part of his never-ending quest to woo Queen Elizabeth.

Despite a decade of trying, however, McCarthy had only gotten one Shakespearean scholar to believe him—June Schlueter, my own patron for the Lafayette lecture. Interested enough, I told him that I would consider writing about him on two conditions—one, that he publish his research with a reputable publisher; and, two, that he get at least two more scholars to take his ideas seriously. Over the next three years, he met both those conditions. In 2018, he and Schlueter published the George North manuscript with the British Library as A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels, showing how Shakespeare borrowed from it, and winning endorsements from two prominent scholars. I wrote about that book for The New York Times in February 2018 under the headline: “Plagiarism Software Unveils a New Source for 11 of Shakespeare’s Plays.”

Both my article and McCarthy’s book were well-received—though mostly by people sniggering about the fact that Shakespeare was a plagiarist. But this was only a small part of the story. McCarthy had yet to reveal his larger theory—that while Shakespeare used George North as a source for some of his plays, he relied on Thomas North as a source for nearly all of his works, and that he wasn’t using prose works, but plays. As unorthodox as McCarthy’s ideas were, I thought that they at least deserved an airing.

Then again, orthodox ideas become orthodox for a reason—they’ve been analyzed, challenged, and defended by generations of scholars and stood the test of time. A whole industry has been built around Shakespeare scholarship, with thousands of books, articles, classes, and professors all arguing on behalf of the authorship of the plays by William of Stratford-upon-Avon. What kind of new evidence would it take for a scholar who has built a career around that Shakespeare to consider an alternative point of view? And how would they treat the person who espouses it? As I watched McCarthy struggle to get anyone in the Shakespeare community to listen to him, I started conceiving of another project, a book that would investigate and test his theories, but also examine how knowledge gets created, and what it takes to change established ways of thinking.

WE MAY WANT to believe in the idea of Shakespeare as a solitary genius—the Bard of Avon, the Soul of the Age. While even mainstream scholars now believe he had at least some help in writing many of his plays, they’ve held fast to the belief that the bulk of the language and inspiration behind them was Shakespeare’s and Shakespeare’s alone. Yet for centuries, mysteries about William Shakespeare have gone unexplained, such as how a glover’s son from Stratford could have had the intimate knowledge of Italy—a country he almost certainly never visited—or how he could have absorbed the experience of going to war, or used complex legal jargon, or read source material in French, Italian, Latin, and Greek.

Some of the reasons proposed to explain those mysteries are just as unsatisfying, relying on secret conspiracies in which an aristocrat such as the Earl of Oxford or Sir Francis Bacon actually wrote the plays, which Shakespeare then passed off under his own name. Besides the elitism implied by the idea that only a nobleman could have written such sublime works, such theories suffer from the obvious question of how, in the competitive world of Elizabethan theater, such a secret could have been held for so long. McCarthy’s contention, that Shakespeare borrowed his material from Thomas North—a gentleman and scholar who moved in the uppermost levels of Queen Elizabeth’s court—provides an intriguing and wholly original solution, in which the playwright could have legitimately put his own name on his rewritten plays, at the same time borrowing their essence from someone who fit all of the requirements for writing them. In addition to being a translator, North was a lawyer, soldier, diplomat, and courtier—a sixteenth-century Zelig who participated in some of the most crucial events of the age, and brushed shoulders with the brightest minds of the Renaissance. Understanding his inspirations and motivations, McCarthy contends, reveals hidden meanings and unfolds new depths of emotion in the familiar stories of Shakespeare’s dramas. He even, I would come to find, developed an explanation for why Thomas North might have sold his plays to Shakespeare to adapt for the public stage. Over the next two years, I continued my conversation with McCarthy begun in that Pennsylvania bar. We traveled together through England, France, and Italy to retrace Thomas North’s footsteps. Along the way, I began conducting my own research in overseas archives, teaching myself English secretary hand script to read old documents in an effort to prove or disprove McCarthy’s audacious theories. As I considered how and why Thomas North might have written the plays that he did, I began to glimpse a new story that could answer age-old questions about Shakespeare and his works—if it could be believed.