Arts
In North by Shakespeare, Michael Blanding presents the twinning narratives of rogue scholar Dennis McCarthy, called “the Steve Jobs of the Shakespeare community,” and Sir Thomas North, an Elizabethan courtier whom McCarthy believes to be the previously undiscovered source for Shakespeare’s plays. For the last fifteen years, Dennis McCarthy has obsessively pursued the true source of Shakespeare’s works—with fascinating results. Using plagiarism software, he has found direct links between Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and other plays and Thomas North’s published and unpublished writings—as well as Shakespearean plotlines seemingly lifted straight from North’s colorful life. McCarthy’s wholly original conclusion is this: Shakespeare wrote the plays, but he adapted them from source plays written by North decades before—many of them penned on behalf of North’s patron, Robert Dudley, a longtime suitor to Queen Elizabeth. That bold theory answers many lingering questions about the Bard with compelling new evidence, including a newly unearthed journal of North’s travels through France and Italy, filled with locations and details appearing in Shakespeare’s plays. North by Shakespearealternates between the dramatic life of Thomas North, the intrigues of the Tudor court, the rivalries of English Renaissance theatre, and McCarthy’s attempts to air his provocative ideas in the clubby world of Shakespearean scholarship. Through it all, Blanding employs his keen journalistic eye to craft a highly readable drama, upending our understanding of the beloved playwright and his “singular genius.” Michael Blandingis a Boston-based investigative journalist, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Slate, the Boston Globe Magazine, Bostonmagazine, and other publications. He is the author of The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps (2014), which was a New York Times bestseller and an NPR Book of the Year, and The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World’s Favorite Soft Drink (2010). A former journalism fellow at Brandeis University and Harvard Law School, he has taught feature writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, and GrubStreet Writers. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/steve-richards/support