Why North's Original Authorship of the Shakespeare Canon Matters
It completely transforms our understanding of the plays
One of the most common questions I get about the North discovery is: “Who really cares who wrote the plays? Didn’t Hamlet say ‘The play’s the thing’”?
In fact, it is remarkable how many people quote that very line of Hamlet in their discussion of the North discovery. It is the play, after all, that moves us, so isn’t that all that matters? Aren’t all of Shakespeare’s plays self-contained works of genius, each of which can be enjoyed in its own right? Playgoers do not need to know about North’s involvement in the canon to enjoy a performance of Hamlet. Why, then, should we care that he was the one who first wrote it? Who cares whence it came?
One of the main reasons the authorship of Hamlet is so important is that it gives us a new and deeper understanding of the tragedy. Knowing that North wrote Hamlet when he did immediately reveals why he wrote it. And once we realize the dramatic and momentous events that drove North to craft this masterpiece, and especially to borrow from his own past writings on death, we will be able to understand Hamlet in a way that we never could before. Suddenly, we will see how personal the play was for him and find the origins of many of its plot points and soliloquies in the gripping circumstances in which he penned it. We will discover that this most epochal of all plays was meant to reflect England’s most epochal of all moments. And similar comments may be made for essentially every play in the canon. They all take on a new meaning and relevance once we understand why North wrote them.
Even when we examine the context of Hamlet’s line “The play’s the thing,” we soon learn why knowledge of authorship and topical context is often necessary for genuine comprehension of a work. The prince makes the comment after he happens upon a plan that will determine whether his uncle Claudius has actually murdered his father, the old King Hamlet. Hamlet intends to write a scene for a visiting theater troupe to perform before Claudius—one based on an old Italian tale that the prince calls The Murder of Gonzago. (In December, 2023, June Schlueter and I published an article in The Times Literary Supplement on Hamlet’s play-within-a-play showing evidence indicating Thomas North wrote the original Hamlet.) In this play-within-a-play, a king falls asleep in a garden where his nephew sneaks up on him and pours poison into his ear. This is, according to the ghost of old King Hamlet, exactly how Claudius murdered him, and the prince hopes the staged reenactment will jolt his uncle into an incriminating reaction: “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (2.2.605–6).
In other words, when Hamlet says “the play’s the thing,” he does not mean to suggest the play is the only thing. He does not mean that his play is an isolated work of creativity whose meaning is fenced-off from authorial context and must be considered independent of Hamlet’s intent. In fact, the truth is the opposite. While The Murder of Gonzago may be interesting in its own right, its entire significance derives from the fact that Hamlet has refurbished an old continental tale so that it recreates Claudius’s murder of Hamlet’s father. Context and authorial intent are all. If you do not understand that the prince deliberately chose and then revamped the true-crime story to match his own particular circumstances, then you do not truly understand The Murder of Gonzago.
This is not an incidental point. It is not a coincidence that Hamlet takes on the role as playwright, shaping an Italian legend so that it reproduces a recent event that had both personal and political significance. With this scene, the playwright was purposefully revealing precisely how and why he wrote plays as well. He took relevant histories and legends—frequently from the Italian—and transformed them into dramas that reflected the current events that were relevant to his own life and to England.
Hamlet even warns Polonius that he should be kind to the theater troupe because they help record and communicate the significant moments of the era: “let them be well used,” says Hamlet, “for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.523–4). Hamlet is using abstract as a noun—a synonym for summary, and we find a similar line in Richard III: “Brief abstract and record of tedious days” (4.4.28). Hamlet means that the actors and their plays are the summary and brief history books of the era. They are, in a sense, the first newspapers and they help preserve important current events. And this is not just a throwaway line; it is a conspicuously self-referential comment. Hamlet is not simply providing an advance description of The Murder of Gonzago; he is describing the tragedy of Hamlet itself—and, for that matter, the rest of the canon. All of North’s plays are “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time,” recording and commenting upon the relevant Tudor political events in which North became embroiled.
These backstories to the plays always add something fascinating and relevant, a new way of appreciating them. And in many cases, the backstory to one of North’s plays is so significant that a serious understanding of the work is simply not possible without it. Consider watching The Crucible while innocent of Joseph McCarthy’s “witch-hunt” for communists. Or better yet, imagine reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm without the knowledge that it is an allegory of the Russian revolution, that the dictatorial pig Napoleon represents Joseph Stalin, and Snowball, Leon Trotsky. Yes, these are enthralling tales in their own right, but an awareness of the historical events that they signify intensifies the drama, adds new insights, and ennobles the lesson. You don’t really “get” these works without this knowledge. In short, no matter how much we may like Shakespeare’s plays, we cannot fully appreciate them unless we recognize the circumstances, both political and personal, that pushed North to write them in the first place or understand the larger point he was making with his carefully crafted, topically relevant alterations.
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