First New Shakespearean Poem Found in Centuries (Part 1) [Transcript]

This post is the transcript of my earlier podcast on the “First New Shakespearean Poem Found in Centuries.”

Introduction

Okay, here we go. This is Dennis McCarthy and thank you for listening to the All the Mysteries That Remain Podcast. Now, as many know, especially anyone who has read Michael Blanding’s “North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work” (released in paperback as “In Shakespeare’s Shadow”), I have put decades of full-time work into my research and will now grant access to posts and podcasts only through a paid subscription. But since I do think the discoveries on this Substack are significant, I do not want to deny them to anyone over something as paltry as money, and if you feel you are not in a place financially to pay or have any other reason for not wanting a paid subscription, please just send me an email and I will send you a full-access subscription, no questions asked.¹

Now, as I’ve noted my most popular post so far has not been on North and Shakespeare but on “The Meaning of Life and the Greatest Sentence Ever Written.” But among my favorites are the ones on Donald Trump and the new concept of “malignant dominance hierarchies” (see here, here, and here)—where the cruelty of a leader, counter-intuitively, increases, loyalty and fanatical devotion—and inspires ruthless or criminal acts among the followers against outcasts or the leader’s enemies. We see this everywhere at different levels of iniquity. The bully or cruel boss with the overly devoted underlings (who in turn act nastily to those beneath them) is so familiar to us, it saturates our movies and television shows. Mean Girls, The Devil’s Wear Prada, etc., present the most obvious examples of the most harmless versions of malignant dominance hierarchies. Mr. Burns and Smithers in “The Simpsons” is another wicked boss and dedicated toadie. Then at the other end of the spectrum, you have Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. That’s cruel leader, with devoted underlings responding ruthlessly to outcasts or the other or perceived enemies.

Now, as I have advertised, in this and over the next few podcasts and posts, I am going to introduce a brand new Shakespearean poem—the first one discovered in centuries—and one that I will show was written by Thomas North. Eventually, as more and more academics come to grips with the North discovery, this poem will be included in the official canon. Again, yes, Shakespeare did adapt North’s old plays. But as we are going to discover over the course of this Substack and especially over the next few weeks, it really was North who was the genius.

In the introduction to this poem on this podcast, we are going to travel back to the 16th-century House of Valois—the French Court. And we will include stunning depictions of lavish banquets and spectacular palaces by a 19-year-old Thomas north—the young future translator, poet, and playwright who would end up creating the most celebrated literature of western civilization.

North traveled at least four times (and very likely five) to continental Europe, twice with an Embassy that was on an important diplomatic mission. And in this podcast, we're going to see Europe through North’s eyes—first through descriptions gleaned from historical sources and then in North’s own words—as French royalty welcomed his embassy in a grand fashion, and we will meet the alluring princesses and duchesses and their beautiful waiting women who would woo the visitors in hopes of courting English favor. We will also discuss the Siege of La Rochelle, the brutal St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, we will meet a 12-year-old Mary Queen of Scots,

We will also use this as an example to show how North’s travels explain many conundrums of the Shakespeare canon—helping provide the solution to the most significant literary mystery ever: Exactly how did Shakespeare’s plays originate? We will especially confirm how North used his travels to create among other plays—Love’s Labour Lost—a romantic comedy and satire on French courtly splendor. We will also document one of North’s first meetings with the French King, Henry III—which as we will see connects to this newfound poem of North’s. Again, yes, our historical discoveries have made news reports around the world before, but we believe this is a truly big one.

A performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Globe

The Uniqueness of North’s Verbal Parallels

Now, after the publication of my first book on biogeography, Here Be Dragons, people would ask me to cite the strongest evidence for evolution. Often, when hearing that question, I would pause. The reason for my hesitation was not that there are too few proofs, but that there are far too many. Myriad verifications of Charles Darwin’s famous discovery may be discussed —in homology, paleontology, biogeography, biochemistry, embryology—and it is not easy to pick the most compelling.

This is also the case for Thomas North’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. So many proofs have been found in his writings, his journal, his marginal notes, his biography, and contemporaneous comments by literary insiders that it is difficult to choose the most convincing. Perhaps the quickest answer would be: the thousands of unique or rare verbal borrowings. For, if you accept the veracity of forensic linguistics—a well-regarded science that follows from the basic math of probability theory, holds up in courts of law, and has been used successfully to identify unknown writers—then there is little left to argue. The case for North is proved. Indeed, forensic linguistics can provide greater levels of certainty than DNA or fingerprints can, and DNA and fingerprints provide far more compelling testimony than do witnesses. Witnesses, after all, can lie or get confused. DNA and fingerprints, in contrast, provide proof positive that no one can dispute. The same is true with linguistic DNA.

And it does not matter what quantity or concentration of verbal parallels one feels is necessary to establish authorship. Whatever that number is, the North-Shakespeare correspondences surpass it. Quite simply, North and Shakespeare share more distinctive verbal parallels than have ever been used to establish authorship identity in any circumstance. Indeed, North and Shakespeare share more distinctive verbal parallels than any other two writers ever.

Consider that James Fitzgerald was able to use forensic linguistics to identify Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber out of a suspect pool that splayed across the breadth of the United States, finding several dozen truly distinctive similarities with the Unabomber’s 35,000-word manifesto and Ted Kaczynski’s writings. And among these dozens of peculiar connections, astonishingly, a few of the parallels were even unique. No one else had written such lines before except the Unabomber and Kaczynski. What is left to argue? As Fitzgerald excitedly realized the moment he discovered these parallels, they had their man.

But North and Shakespeare do not just share a few unique verbal parallels but thousands—thousands of lines and phrases that occur nowhere else in any other known text in the English language. And these linguistic matches do not come from just a few chapters in Plutarch’s Lives; they are found in every chapter in the book—and in every section of The Dial of Princes, The Moral Philosophy of Doni, and Nepos’ Lives. And, most significantly, they come from personal writings that North never published—and that Shakespeare would have no reasonable way of obtaining and no rational reason for trying to assimilate into a play. The playwright has even based entire scenes out of North’s journal entries and constructed plays out of North’s marginal notes.

And, of course, it is not true that if you compare any two corpuses, you will find they uniquely share parallel lines and passages just by coincidence. Of course, they will share common phrases, but they will not share unique lines and word-strings.

And that is where we come to anti-Stratfordians, who, I will discuss in later podcasts for all of the important elements they have brought to Shakespeare studies, and who were always, in essence, correct that there's far more to the story of the plays and poems than Shakespeare just being a lone genius crafting everything in a candle-lit room in London. Yes, orthodox scholars had all the facts and are right that Shakespeare of Stratford did indeed write the plays—or at least adapt, direct, and produce them. But anti-Stratfordians are correct that Shakespeare is an unlikely person to have originated the canon.

But the problem with anti-Stratfordians—aside from over-the-top conspiracy theories—is just how often they have cried, wolf. And this makes it all the more difficult for legitimate discoveries and more scientific analyses to get any oxygen. For example, one of the more common comments I get about the North-Shakespeare passages is from anti-Stratfordians, who will reasonably say, “Yeah, but all the other candidates also have thousands of verbal parallels too.” THIS … IS …. NOT … TRUE. Their verbal parallels are merely commonplaces, each of which appears in dozens or hundreds of works at the time. Oxford has written no distinctive lines or phrases that occur in the Shakespeare canon; Oxford/Shakespeare share no seven-word strings, no six-word string, and the only five-word Oxford/Shakespeare string worth mentioning is “I am that I am” – and that’s from the Bible and appears in over 500 texts in Early English Books Online. Other than anti-Stratfordians have to rely on two words near each other—especially ones evoking metaphors that were actually common in Shakespeare’s time but are rare today—like rose in cheeks or honey tongue. And the same is true with Bacon and Neville.

Now, Marlowe and Shakespeare do have a small number of shared phrases, lines, and word-groupings that are distinctive (and can't be dismissed as coincidence)—but Marlowe was a fellow playwright who wrote for and with Shakespeare, and most of the Marlowe connections are with *adaptations* of Shakespearean plays that Marlowe himself worked on (like The Taming of A Shrew [not Taming of the Shrew], and the bad quartos of Henry VI, parts 2 and 3). The other verbal connections, which are few, are the result of Marlowe borrowing from North's plays (with which he was familiar), or Shakespeare (likely not North) advertising Marlowe's plays that Shakespeare also produced. We find advertisements of other Lord-Chamberlain's/King's Men plays throughout the canon.

So I am persistently battling two never-dying myths. The first is that other candidate authors have written distinctive Shakespearean lines and phrases. They haven’t. And the other is that verbal parallels really don't tell you anything, which is also obviously false. Forensic linguistics holds up in courts of law throughout all modern societies—and has successfully identified anonymous authors (like Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber).

Indeed, when you find, say, a unique seven-word string by author X in the pertinent text in the same pointed context, the analysis is now over. Now you have a fact—and that fact only has 2 explanations. 1) Some other writer has read author X’s work and put Author X’s line into the pertinent text; or 2) Author X is the original author of that pertinent text. There is no third explanation. Author X’s line was not miraculously reinvented by someone else and placed into an identical context. So either Author X is repeating himself—as authors tend to do especially when discussing a similar subject—or someone else is repeating Author X’s line.

Now, when you've necessarily confirmed that unique lines from many different works of author X are found all throughout the suspect text, then it becomes increasingly sillier to argue that some other author was the one planting them there. It becomes ridiculous to claim that some other person was an obsessive reader of Author X, had essentially a photographic memory for Author X’s lines, and was distributing all his lines from all his works throughout the suspected texts.

In other words, noticing a particular author’s lines found all throughout a text is akin to noticing a suspect’s DNA found also throughout a crime scene. In both cases, the only explanations are that the suspect is guilty or someone else has planted all this DNA, whether verbal or genetic.

But with the Shakespeare canon, we have  37 plays – that is, 37 different crime scenes spanning decades—and liters of North linguistic DNA are found all over every  murder-location: on the body, on the weapon, and in every room in the suspect’s house. And so now, the only explanation is that Shakespeare was planting North’s verbal DNA everywhere and was doing this for decades. Or North is responsible for putting his own language into the plays—and that he was the author of the source-plays that we know Shakespeare used. Again, no one denies Shakespeare frequently used source plays and now we know who wrote them.

But I digress. Let us go back to North’s first meetings with the French King, Henry III: This is 1574, the French Court at Lyons.

Thomas North’s 1574 Embassy to France

The Duke of Alençon, standing less than five feet tall, took the hand of his beautiful older sister, Marguerite de Valois, Princess of France, and led her to the center of the ballroom to dance, attracting the polite gaze of the powdered and glittering onlookers. As visiting diplomats, Thomas North and his brother, Roger, 2^nd Lord North, were guests of honor at this lavish French court ball, and they too watched the royal siblings as they formally stepped to the music of the minstrels, showing their well-practiced maneuvers. Catherine de’ Medici, mother of the pair and the most powerful woman in France, was sitting next to Roger, and she drew his attention from her pretty daughter to her small son, then 19 years old. “He is not so ugly nor so ill-favoured as they say, do you think so?” she asked.²

Like most comments that the Queen Mother addressed to the English ambassadors, this was not a casual question. A smallpox infection in youth had disfigured and pitted Alençon’s face and may have been responsible for stunting his growth. Making matters worse, his spine was slightly deformed, and his birth name had been “Hercules,” as if in cruel and prescient mockery of his distorted form. Catherine was seeking Lord North’s opinion because she had tried to arrange a marriage between Alençon and Queen Elizabeth. The French ambassador to England at the time, La Mothe Fenelon, had been attempting to court Elizabeth on behalf of the young Hercules, but it was becoming clear to nobles on both sides of the Channel that Elizabeth was somewhat hesitant to divide her power with a king, probably even more so with one who would have given the Machiavellian Catherine de’ Medici such extraordinary influence within the English court. Catherine, in the view of many Britons, was serpentine and barbaric, a sort of French Queen Tamora. Moreover, Elizabeth was a little put off by Alençon’s young age. At 19, he was 22 years younger than the English queen. He was also a Catholic, and, finally, Elizabeth was quite aware of his physical irregularities, referring to him as “my little frog.”