Shakespeare's Lost Library Found
A Treasure Trove of New-Found, Shakespeare-related Manuscripts From the North-Family-Library Forces Us to Rethink the Origins of the World’s Greatest Plays
It is one of those sad facts of history that Shakespeare’s personal library at his home in Stratford has been entirely lost. Yes, scholars have managed to determine the titles of many of the books that Shakespeare must have had on his shelf, but they have never been able to track down any of the actual copies of the texts he personally owned or borrowed. For centuries, one of the holy grails of literary research was to find an actual copy of a book or manuscript that Shakespeare held in his hands.
Remarkably, over the last five years, June Schlueter, Michael Blanding, and I have found no fewer than six such Shakespearean holy grails, all while searching for the holdings of the same little-known library, located at Kirtling Hall, the Cambridgeshire family manor of Roger, 2nd Lord North and his brother, Thomas.
Of course, the very reason that, in 2015, we began searching for books previously kept at Kirtling Hall library is that we knew that Thomas North was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays. Indeed, the previous year, Schlueter and I had published evidence in Shakespeare Survey indicating that Thomas North wrote Titus and Vespasian in ~1561, which Shakespeare would later adapt as Titus Andronicus. More importantly, we were also well aware of the following:
Shakespeare frequently adapted old plays—a fact that no serious scholar disputes. Indeed, for six plays—King John, King Lear, Measure for Measure, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V—early versions of these plays still exist. So you can’t challenge the fact that Shakespeare was not their original author, no matter how stubborn and motivated you may be. Moreover, there are indisputable allusions to early productions of Romeo and Juliet (1562), Two Gentlemen of Verona (in 1574 & 1585), The Merchant of Venice (1579), Timon of Athens (1584), and Hamlet (1589) — all before Shakespeare could have written them. Internal evidence also confirms the process of adaptation as we frequently find fossils of the old plays that remain within Shakespeare’s plays (e.g., ghost characters [characters who enter a scene but have no lines or action], references to scenes that no longer exist, accidental use of the old names of the characters from the earlier play.) Even contemporaries of Shakespeare—and literary insiders in the decades after his death—continued to describe Shakespeare as an adapter of old plays.
The satirists Ben Jonson, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Lodge—all of whom are well known to have parodied contemporary playwrights—spoofed a well-traveled, Italianate knight-translator (whom we have identified as North) as the original author of Shakespeare’s plays. Indeed, Schlueter and I have an article that will be published in 2025 confirming that the satirists were all targeting North—but we’ve known their subject was the Cambridge translator for more than a decade. This is the reason I started researching North in the first place. (In fact, the very first article on literature I ever published was titled, “Sir Thomas North as Sir John Daw,”(2007)1 which showed that, in his satire Epicene or The Silent Woman, Jonson was characterizing North as the literary knight, Daw.)
Shakespeare’s plays recycle thousands of lines and passages from North’s writings. This borrowed material derives from everything North ever wrote (including unpublished manuscripts) and involves nearly every act of every play — not just the Roman tragedies. And many of the links between the passages cannot be disputed as they include identical lines that no one else in the history of English has used — not at the time and not since. Quite simply, no one has borrowed more from an earlier writer than Shakespeare has from North, and it is not even close.
Shakespeare’s Plays are Based on Thomas North’s Life. As shown in Thomas North: The Original Author of the Shakespeare Canon, the life and writings of North so persistently dovetail with the works later adapted by William Shakespeare that to follow North’s life in detail is to reconstruct the entire history of the Shakespeare canon, play by play and subplot by subplot.
In other words, since we had already known that North wrote dozens of plays that Shakespeare later adapted, we believed that by tracking down texts that were kept in the North family library, we might find some kind of interesting connection to Shakespeare. But even in our most frenzied of fantasies, we never expected that the North-family-library would actually yield a treasure-trove of Shakespearean texts that generated news reports around the world and praise from many top Shakespearean scholars.
The North-Family Library and Shakespeare’s Plays
Schlueter and I published a book on our first North-family library finding in 2018—our discovery of a 1576 manuscript on rebellions, written and signed by George North, a likely cousin of Thomas. In his dedication to Roger, 2nd Lord North, George made sure to compliment Thomas’s literary abilities:
Most writers in English (both for invention and translation) do excel in this age (among whom Master T.N. [Thomas North], your L[ordship’s] brother, for copy,* eloquency, and good method, may claim palm and place with the best, and wherein long since I knew your L[ordship] to take great delight … —George North2
*copy: richness of words
A number of these comments suggest, George was referring, at least in part, to North’s plays. First, he describes Thomas as best “both for invention and translation,” and invention is clearly distinguished from translation and can only refer to original work. Also, the implication that George witnessed Roger taking “great delight” at Thomas’s work seems more consistent if he is referring to Thomas’s plays—rather than either of Thomas’s two previous translations, whether the dark beast fables of The Moral Philosophy of Doni (1570) or the stoic counseling on manners, The Dial of Princes (1557).
Regardless, the most significant feature of George North’s handwritten document, which praises Thomas and has no known copies, is that it was used as a source for eleven Shakespeare plays. Schlueter and I wrote a book on the manuscript, published by the British Library, and news of the find made the front page of The New York Times, The (London) Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Mail, The Los Angeles Times, U.S. News, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Slate.com, and generated still other press in France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Austria, Germany, Romania, India, Israel, China and elsewhere around the globe.
The late David Bevington, Professor Emeritus of the University of Chicago, editor of the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama, and one of the most renowned Shakespeare scholars of the last century, studied the find and wrote:
“New sources for Shakespeare do not turn up every day in the week. This is a truly significant one, that has not heretofore been studied or published. The list of passages in Shakespeare now traced back to this source is an impressive one… This is all a revelation to me, all the more remarkable in that this manuscript has been hidden and unexamined until now.” —David Bevington
Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute, was also kind: “I think they (McCarthy and Schlueter) have done the world a great favor by finding this manuscript. I don’t think there’s any question that Shakespeare read it.” Schlueter and I were interviewed about the book many times, including for the “Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast,” hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Importantly, as there are no known copies of George North’s manuscript, even those motivated Bardoltrists who want to deny Thomas North’s authorship of the source-plays, have to admit this is a text the original playwright had to hold in his hands—the first such work ever found. They also have to contend we got ridiculously lucky in finding the manuscript. For if North did not write any of the source plays, we should have had no reason to expect to find Shakespeare-related texts in the North family library. Even worse, they would also have to argue that three years later we got incredibly lucky again:
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