The Full FAQ on North and Shakespeare
Everyone agrees Shakespeare adapted anonymous old plays; now we know who wrote them
This newest and latest FAQ serves as a companion piece for my latest book, North Meets Shakespeare: How a Scandalous 1592 Pamphlet Exposed the Most Important Literary Relationship in History, offers the most comprehensive and definitive analysis yet for Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592). Long familiar to Shakespeare scholars, Groatsworth is a notorious, gossipy tract that derides Shakespeare as a plagiarist, the “upstart crow, beautified” with the feathers of others. Yet there’s far more to the pamphlet than this oft-discussed insult. At its outset, Groatsworth presents a thinly veiled biography of the North family, especially focusing on Thomas’s life and explaining exactly how he came to sell his plays to Shakespeare. (To get the book, click here.)
The Full FAQ
Q. How on earth could this have happened?
A. Here’s a brief summary of the North/Shakespeare Story:
Thomas North (1535- ~1604?), 29 years older than Shakespeare, wrote plays for decades for Leicester’s Men (from late 1550s to 1588). These plays were performed in front of small, noble audiences and were never published. But sometimes these early Shakespearean plays (like a Romeo and Juliet in 1562, before Shakespeare was born) were recorded by the original spectators or in records of payments for plays at court—though the author remained unnamed. (Click here to see why we know North wrote Shakespeare.)
In the 1590s and 1600s, Shakespeare published his own adaptations of older plays in quarto form: These include briefer, swifter, inferior staged renditions of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V (all originally written by Thomas North for Leicester’s Men). Shakespeare also wrote the “good quartos” of The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1 and 2 Henry IV—plays he adapted but are deemed “good” only because North’s originals were never published and have now been lost (Click here to read more on the “good quartos”). Shakespeare also produced other mediocre, differently styled plays like A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, and Locrine that Shakespeare had written with (or adapted from) other playwrights. (For example, orthodox scholars have concluded that Thomas Middleton is a very likely coauthor or originator of A Yorkshire Tragedy, while they attach Robert Greene to Locrine.) The bad quartos, apocrypha, and makeshift “good quartos” compose the true Stratford canon. (Click here to see a table of all the documents, especially the title pages, printed while Shakespeare was alive that confirm he wrote inferior adaptations.)
When the publishing syndicate of Edward Blount, William Jaggard, William Aspley, and John Smethwick decided to produce a collection of Shakespeare plays now known as the First Folio (1623), they got into squabbles with the publishers who owned the rights to the Shakespeare plays that had already been published. So in many cases, they printed North’s original versions—as they did with Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, etc., which were still in the possession of Shakespeare’s theater troupe. Indeed, the First Folio even advertised that the plays had been “Truely set forth, according to their first ORIGINALL,” and the printers added special emphasis to the word “ORIGINALL,” putting it in all caps and a kind of italics. (Click here for a full explanation of the First Folio.) Still, many of the plays in the First Folio, especially the comedies, are indeed Shakespeare’s adaptations of North’s originals.
For centuries, scholars had studied and praised the plays of Shakespeare’s First Folio, leading them to associate him with the masterpieces therein. It was not until the 19th century that researchers began rediscovering the “bad quartos.” For example, Shakespeare’s rewritten, staged version of Hamlet, published in 1603, did not come to the attention of researchers until 1823, long after faith in Shakespeare’s genius had become traditional, universal, and unyielding. Researchers faced with such lesser renditions “by William Shakespeare” found it less onerous to try to explain them away one at a time—rather than abandon their view of Shakespeare. Editors and academics never stopped to assess all the evidence as a whole, looking at all the documents “by William Shakespeare” to determine what he had really written. (Again, here is a table of all those Shakespeare-era documents.)
Conventional scholars also shrugged off the clear statements from contemporaries that derided Shakespeare for getting too much credit for other people’s plays (as we find in comments about Shakespeare in Groatsworth of Wit, Jonson’s On Poet Ape, etc.)
Q. Why wouldn’t North publish his plays when he first wrote them?
A. Because throughout North’s prime writing years—1550s to early 1590s, almost no one ever published plays. According to David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (in the introduction to their Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England), only 543 plays currently survive out of approximately 3,000 performed in the commercial theaters between 1567 and 1642.1 This is a survival rate of a little more than 18%. The lack of interest in publishing plays is why most plays are now lost. Moreover, these numbers include plays from the first half of the 17th-century, when plays became increasingly popular. The percentage of printed plays in the 16th-century is even lower. Philip Henslowe’s records confirm that nearly 90% of the plays he produced between 1592 and 1603 are now lost.2 And the percentage of published plays in the decades during which North mostly wrote was even lower.
Finally, these percentages are for plays of the public theaters. But the first truly successful commercial theater would not be built until 1576. Prior to that, plays were mostly a privileged diversion. Noblemen, like the Earl of Leicester, funded the theater troupes, and they produced their plays before the queen or at private manors, universities, or the Inns of Court. Naturally, if publishers often avoided the plays of the commercial stage, they would have had even less desire to produce scripts of plays about which the general public was largely ignorant. This also explains why the vast majority of plays from the era remain anonymous, for title pages are, by far, the most important evidence in determining authorship. For more on this subject, check this footnote.3
Q. Why wouldn’t North want money and credit for these plays?
A. He did get money and credit for them. But his first rewards came years earlier—when he wrote plays for the Earl of Leicester’s theater troupe, and/or they were first produced before Queen Elizabeth or at a nobleman’s house. That is when he first received his payments and heard the applause. But as newspapers and literary magazines did not exist, no one recorded these accolades. Moreover, the scant Revels account transactions only provided limited information about the plays performed for the queen—and almost never mentioned the playwright. Indeed, one of the few records we have of a playwright getting paid for a Leicester’s Men’s play was a payment to Thomas North in June 1580, for a play at court. North also almost certainly received payment for his plays from Shakespeare, but, unlike Philip Henslowe, neither Shakespeare nor anyone else with the Lord Chamberlain’s or King’s Men kept theatrical records that have survived.
Importantly, Shakespeare also did not publish the majority of his plays. And if it were not for the fortuitous publication of a collection of his works seven years after he died—the First Folio—we would have lost Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, As You Like It and many other plays. Indeed, in most cases, we would have never known these plays had existed. Does this mean Shakespeare did not want money or credit for these plays? Of course not. He did get money and credit for these plays when he produced them—but evidence for that was never recorded, or those documents have long since perished.
Q. Wouldn’t Shakespeare’s contemporaries have complained that he was getting too much credit for old plays?
A. They did! As is conventional, others did mention (even complain about) Shakespeare’s frequent use of old plays. The Absolutely True, Indisputable, and Definitive History of the Shakespeare-Authorship Controversy examines four comments from the 16th and 17th centuries, plus four more that appeared in the 18th and early 19th centuries, all referring to Shakespeare as an adapter of earlier plays. This includes the first description of him as a plagiarizing playwright in Groatsworth of Wit (1592) (check out, North Meets Shakespeare, for a full explanation of the pamphlet.) Ben Jonson also describes Shakespeare’s penchant for purchasing and reworking old plays: “On Poet Ape” and “Ode to Himself.”
Even in the decades after Shakespeare had died, writers would still make similar comments. In 1687, Edward Ravenscroft crafted an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, stating in a prefatory note that he had “been told by some anciently conversant with the stage, that it [Titus Andronicus] was not originally [Shakespeare’s] … and he only gave some master-touches to one or two of the principal parts or characters.”4 Likewise, in 1728, a Captain Goulding recorded an old rumor that had originally come from an “intimate acquaintance” of Shakespeare’s that he had kept a hired historian in his employ who had written all the plays that he then adapted.5 Even the first renowned Shakespeare scholars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries continued to refer to him as an adapter of old plays. As literary biographer Scott Astley Dunham wrote in 1837: “that extraordinary man was satisfied with reconstructing the pieces which others had composed; he was not the author, but the adapter of them to the stage.”6
Of course, we do not find similar comments regarding any other renowned author. We do not come across any fellow writers decrying Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, or Ben Jonson as play-recyclers who got too much credit for works of other authors. Indeed, we do not see any later playwright saying that he or she heard from an old theatrical insider that A Long Day’s Journey into Night was not originally Eugene O’Neill’s or A Doll’s House was not Henrik Ibsen’s. The reason this same claim is frequently repeated about Shakespeare is that it was true.
Q. Why didn’t Shakespeare adapt anyone else’s plays and get credit for those?
A. He did. Although this is not well known, other plays such as Locrine, A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, and Sir John Oldcastle were all published with Shakespeare’s name or initials on the title pages while Shakespeare lived in London. These plays continued to be attributed to Shakespeare for more than a century, and they even appeared in the most official collection of Shakespeare’s plays published in the latter half of the seventeenth century: the Third (1663) and Fourth (1685) Folios. There is no record during this time of anyone questioning their authorship.
Today, editors and scholars judge these plays so stylistically alien—or simply too weak—to belong in the Shakespeare canon, and have accordingly stripped them from it. They often explain their presence in early publications by hypothesizing that printers or publishers conspired to pin inferior work on Shakespeare’s name. In truth, these plays are Shakespeare’s adaptations as well. And the reason they seem so un-Shakespearean today is that North did not write them. For example, stylistic analyses suggest Thomas Middleton was the original author of A Yorkshire Tragedy.
Q: Why did the First Folio publishers “not just write, Shakespeare bought these manuscripts from North, North wrote the original plays, or whatever?”
A: The First Folio (1623) was published long after both North (d. ~1604) and Shakespeare (d. 1616) had died. And its publishers were not scholars or journalists but book vendors trying to sell a collection of Shakespeare’s plays to Shakespeare fans. Even assuming the syndicate knew the true history of the plays, they still wouldn’t want to drive away prospective purchasers by stressing that the Folio is mostly a collection of dramas by some obscure playwright whose name they didn’t know.
And this is commonplace. Parker Brothers’ never noted that Monopoly was based on Lizzie Maggie’s The Landlord’s Game. The Kate Smith Show and Universal Studios did not clarify that Abbott and Costello’s Who’s On First? was based on an old vaudeville routine. Mickie Most did not stress on the record cover of The Animals’ The House of the Rising Sun that the song was really an old folk tune. People trying to sell stuff for profit typically don’t care about the authentic origins of their product.
Yes, as I have emphasized, there is no evidence that any known English publisher has ever purposefully and deceitfully misattributed one writer’s text to some other living author. (One obvious reason for this is that both authors would have complained—and the publisher might suffer penalties from the stationers or harm their reputation.) However, it has always been a standard practice in publishing (and then movie producing) to emphasize a work’s connections with big names, sometimes in a misleading way (even though the connection was always real). And this, of course, was typically done with the blessing of the big name (or their estate).
Notice that in every case, the big name is placed at the top and is often in possessive case: Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful; Britton’s Bowre of Delights; Walt Disney’s Cinderella; Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, Tragedies. In most instances, the possessive case shows that the Big Name had, in some way, owned, produced, collected, and/or presented these works. And recall that Ben Jonson’s ode at the front of the First Folio was dedicated to “Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.” That’s not “what he hath written,” but “what he hath left us.” (For a full explanation of the entire ode, click here.)
However, when publishers declare that a work is “written by” some author or producers confirm that a film is “directed by” some director, they really mean what they say. (In England, the word “adapt” in a literary sense would not come into usage until the 19th century, so, before then, “written by” could also mean “adapted by.”) And as noted above, it is clear that publishers really meant Shakespeare was involved in the writing of The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy. And, no, there were no conspiracies to foist mediocre works upon him.
Q. Okay, while North was alive, why didn’t anyone mention that he originally wrote Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet?
A: They did. Repeatedly. As North Meets Shakespeare (for a copy, click here) confirms, not only does the pamphlet Groatsworth of Wit clearly mark Shakespeare as a plagiarizing playwright, it also identifies North as the original author of 1, 2, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, Hamlet, and Measure for Measure. In a few weeks, Medieval and Rennaissance Drama in England will publish an article by June Schlueter and myself confirming that Thomas Nashe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Lodge all wrote extensively on North’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays in their satires, marking him as the original playwright behind such works as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens, and Much Ado About Nothing. In fact, these satires on Thomas North are what first pushed us to gather more proofs of his authorship. We knew that these claims that North was Shakespeare’s main source-dramatist made testable predictions. And that is why we found:
a North-family manuscript used for 11 of Shakespeare’s plays and covered in news reports around the world;
North’s journal—which documents experiences that were then reproduced in Henry VIII and The Winter’s Tale;
North’s marginal notes (Michael Blanding located most of these), which were used to write the Shakespeare plays—including North’s handwritten notes that comprise an historical outline for Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (covered in The Guardian;)
thousands of lines and hundreds of passages of North’s writing recycled throughout the Shakespeare canon;
all the striking moments of North’s life that inspired the most iconic scenes of Shakespeare’s plays.
We would have never known North was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays had not satirists repeatedly marked him as such, encouraging a deep dive into his life and writings.
Q. Okay, but why didn’t Thomas North or anyone else EXPLICITLY write that he wrote Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, etc.?
A. Before we answer this question, let us turn the question around to orthodox scholars. Why didn’t anyone explicitly write, “Thomas Middleton wrote A Yorkshire Tragedy”? Or “Robert Greene wrote Locrine”? Or “So-and-So wrote The London Prodigal”? Or “Blah DeBlah wrote The Troublesome Raigne of King John”? Orthodox scholars understand that the dearth of 16th and 17th-century theatrical records has obscured the original authorship of these plays (as well as thousands of others). And, of course, the same explanation holds for Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, etc. But let us add specifics:
In most cases, the only reason we know someone wrote some play or other is that the play was published with the playwright’s name on the title page. And since plays were mostly an exclusive diversion of the aristocracy in the early/middle Elizabethan era, few plays were ever printed and few other works ever discussed them. There were no newspapers or literary magazines in Tudor England.
In fact, from the 1550s-80s, when North was writing plays for Leicester’s Men, only a few works ever mentioned plays at all, far fewer discussed playwrights, and essentially no publication explicitly linked playwrights to their plays. In fact, it is unclear whether anyone, during those decades, mentioned that so-and-so wrote such-and-such—even in an offhand manner.7 The famous account book of the theater manager Philip Henslowe did record his payments to playwrights for writing or adapting specific plays, but he did not start keeping these records until the early 1590s—and then mostly for the Admiral’s Men and the Rose Theater.
The playwrights themselves also left no such records. William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Middleton, etc., left behind no personal manuscripts or published comments claiming the authorship of a play.8 After all, where would they have written this? Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, etc., have left no known letters or diaries. And Thomas North’s other surviving writings consist of four translations, a journal at the age of 19-20 before he started writing plays, a legal comment on a patent, a letter to Essex on a landholding he should acquire, marginal notes in texts, and one poem (which I will introduce to the world soon). This is why more than 90% of the plays of the era (more than 2000 plays in total) remain anonymous.
Finally and most significantly, the point behind this question is moot. No matter who wrote the original Romeo and Juliet mentioned in 1562 or the original Hamlet mentioned in 1589—no one explicitly named that author. So we have to use other common, uncontroversial methods to determine authorship (e.g., forensic linguistics, personal papers used as source material, comments of satirists, life-history, etc.) We have done that, and the identity of the author is clear: It’s Thomas North.
Yes, in 1560, Jasper Heywood implores the top tragedians to turn their attention toward Seneca—referencing Thomas Sackville, Thomas Norton, and Christopher Yelverton. And at the top of that list of tragedians, he places young Thomas North, describing his stately style and goodly grace. But, alas, he doesn’t mention any of North’s tragedies.
Yes, in 1576, George North, a likely cousin, compliments Thomas for his writings, confirming that he excelled “both for invention and translation” and “for copy, eloquency, and good method, may claim palm and place with the best.” But George lists no titles of works as examples of Thomas’s remarkable invention.
Yes, in 1580, Roger, 2nd Lord North records a payment to Thomas for writing a play that was performed at court by Leicester’s Men. But he doesn’t identify the play.
Yes, Arthur Brooke refers to Romeo and Juliet in 1562; yes, Stephen Gosson describes the original The Merchant of Venice in 1579; yes, William Warner refers to Timon of Athens in 1584, but none of them mention the playwright. (This is not as odd as it may seem. When you discuss movies with friends, how often do you gratuitously identify the screenwriter?)
Yes, in 1589,5 Thomas Nashe refers to “English Seneca” as the author of Hamlet—and it is indisputable that Nashe is referring to North, but that’s not explicit.
Still, while it is unfortunate that Nashe didn’t refer to North by his name in his discussion of Hamlet—or that Brooke never identified the original playwright of Romeo and Juliet—or Gosson didn’t name the playwright of the original Merchant of Venice—or George North didn’t list examples of North’s invention, we must also remember that if any of them had done so, there never would have been any mystery about the original authorship of the Shakespeare canon.
Q: Why didn’t Thomas North complain his original masterpieces were being credited to Shakespeare?
ANSWER: They weren’t being credited to Shakespeare—not while he was alive. North is never heard from again after 1603—and the First Folio would not be published until two decades later. Still, while North and Shakespeare were both alive, Shakespeare was publishing his own adaptations of North’s older plays—after paying North for them. What is more, four of the first five plays published with Shakespeare’s name on the title page clarified that they were indeed corrected or augmented by Shakespeare.
A much more devastating question is, why didn’t Thomas Middleton complain his A Yorkshire Tragedy was published with Shakespeare’s name on the title page? He was, after all, intimately connected with publication and play-production—and his name appeared on the title pages of plays like The Roaring Girl and Anything for a Quiet Life.
Certainly, A Yorkshire Tragedy has certain passages consistent with Middleton’s hand, but, then again, so do Timon of Athens and Macbeth.9 The reason for this is obvious: Middleton helped write or adapt A Yorkshire Tragedy — just as he had helped adapt Timon of Athens and Macbeth (and orthodox scholars now agree about the latter examples). It is well known that Shakespeare often employed poets-for-hire,10 and the Stratford play-producer was likely the one to outline, organize, and assign the specific playwriting duties.
So with Yorkshire Tragedy, Middleton may have penned some or much of the dialogue, which Shakespeare then amended to his tastes. The reason Middleton never demanded recognition for Yorkshire Tragedy is the same reason he never demanded it for Timon of Athens or Macbeth: He was performing assigned poetic-duties-for-pay rather than writing a play entirely on his own. And, of course, the reason the fundamental style of A Yorkshire Tragedy is thought to be so “non-Shakespearean” is simply that the work was not based on an older Thomas North play. So the play lacked North’s signature phrases, passages, characters, and storylines. As always, the wide gap in the quality of the source plays resulted in a wide gap in the quality of Shakespeare’s adaptations.
Finally, remember that there are four other allegedly apocryphal plays—Locrine, Thomas Lord Cromwell, The Troublesome Raigne of King John, The London Prodigal— attributed to Shakespeare while he was alive. So that requires four more anonymous authors refusing to complain (with Shakespeare never mentioning this either). The question as to why no one mentioned any of this or never complained is devastating to the conventional view—but understandable with the North explanation.
Q. Well, aren’t all the source plays lost? And if so, what actually can be said about lost plays?
A. First, many of the source plays are not lost. Controversially, I accept the title page declarations that confirm Shakespeare wrote the bad quartos. This implies that North’s source plays are the authentic, masterpiece versions of Hamlet, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, and 2, 3 Henry VI. This is also consistent with the fact that many of the most powerful and famous soliloquies in these plays derive from North’s translations.
Moreover, the extant True Tragedy of Richard III, though often garbled, is, in places, a fairly close rendition of North’s original ~1563 version of Richard III. Also, a German translation of North’s source play, Titus and Vesapasion—the source for Titus Andronicus—still exists. Arden of Faversham is another extant anonymous play by North, though it might include some revisions by other playwrights, including Shakespeare.
Also, no play that has been closely adapted is truly lost. Scholars agree that the extant Pericles is not Shakespeare’s original play but has been greatly modified by other writers. But that does not mean Shakespeare’s Pericles has vanished without a trace, or that we can say nothing about the original version, or that Shakespeare’s name should be kept off the title-page. Finally, these source plays have left behind a considerable amount of evidence. This includes fossil passages of North’s in the plays themselves and fossil references to now-missing scenes or lost characters that Shakespeare had eliminated from the extant version.
Q. Why is North’s identity only being discovered now?
A. The discovery required twenty-first-century digital technologies, massive and searchable literary databases, accessibility to North’s prior texts, accessibility to the catalogs of English libraries around the world, plagiarism software, and other modern digital tools—all of which helped expose important aspects of this story.
But perhaps, most importantly, these questions are not especially relevant. For the truly troublesome question that most people have is: “How can anyone have the audacity to claim that Shakespeare would adapt older plays!?” But as shocking as it may seem, that is not even a point in dispute. We know Shakespeare’s source plays existed. No source scholar denies this. We know that there were early versions of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, King Lear, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, etc. So the question is not whether these older plays existed but, merely, who wrote them? And we now have proof upon proof that the answer is Thomas North.
David McInnis and Matthew Steggle, “Introduction: Nothing Will Come of Nothing? Or, What Can we Learn from Plays that Don’t Exist?”, Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, ed. David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1. See also Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter, Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021), 167.
Neil Carson, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary, 82–4. See also Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter, Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal, 167.
For example, Leicester’s theater troupe performed plays steadily for nearly 30 years (1559–88)—in London, in the suburbs, in tours to country estates and universities, even in Europe. Yet, as Terence Schoone-Jongen writes, “little information about Leicester’s repertory survives.” [a]. Who was writing all the plays that they were performing for those decades? Scholars have only ventured a few educated guesses on who may have written a few of them. The vast majority are of unknown authorship—and, importantly, newly uncovered records now confirm that North was one of the dramatists for Leicester’s Men (see earlier Substack: “Thomas North: Playwright,” and June Schlueter’s and my comment on it in The Times Literary Supplement. )
Another confounding factor is that many of the plays printed during the Shakespeare era were published anonymously. Thus, our knowledge of Elizabethan playwrights often derives not from published title-pages but from the work of literary archaeologists who, through historical research and linguistic analyses, have uncovered their identity and reconstructed their oeuvres. Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy (~1588), for example, was mostly unknown to literary scholars for centuries after his death. Prior to that, few had ever come across his name or knew the authorship of his plays. As recounted in the classic 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica:
Kyd remained until the last decade of the 19th century in what appeared likely to be impenetrable obscurity. Even his name was forgotten until Thomas Hawkins about 1773 discovered it in connexion with The Spanish Tragedy in Thomas Heywood’s Apologie for Actors. But by the industry of English and German scholars a great deal of light has since been thrown on his life and writings.[b]
Thomas Middleton[c] and Anthony Munday [d] have similar stories. Both are early seventeenth-century playwrights whose dramatic contributions had to be identified by later scholars. North is no different in this regard. He is just the latest playwright to be discovered and saved from obscurity through a posthumous reconstruction of his canon.
Footnotes for this endnote: [a] Terence Schoone-Jongen, Shakespeare’s Companies: William Shakespeare’s Early Career and the Acting Companies, 1577–1594 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 175. [b] “Kyd, Thomas (1558–1594),” The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (New York: The Encyclopædia Britannica Company, 1911), 15:958. [c] Gary Taylor, “The Orphan Playwright,” The Guardian Online, www.theguardian.com/books/2007/nov/17/classics.theatre [d] I. A. Shapiro, “Shakespeare and Mundy,” Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961): 25–33; 25.
Edward Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, or, The Rape of Lavinia acted at the Theatre Royall: A Tragedy, alter’d from Mr. Shakespears works (London: J. B. for Joseph Hindmarsh, 1687), sig. A2.
Much of this passage and other relevant quotations of Goulding’s work appear in Alden Brooks, Shakespeare and the Dyer’s Hand (New York: C. Scribner and Sons, 1943), 87-88.
Samuel Astley Dunham, The Cabinet Cyclopaedia, Conducted by the Rev. Dionysius Lardner, LL.D., etc.: Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2 (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Greene and Longmans; and John Taylor, 1837), 35.
In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham referred to two writers of tragedies—“Lord Buckhurst” (Thomas Sackville), who wrote for Inns of Court in early 1560s and, as shown above, was listed after North by Heywood for tragedies, and “Edward Ferrys” (George Ferrers), who wrote court plays for Edward VI in the early 1550s. He also mentions two writers of comedies—the Earl of Oxford and Master Edwardes (Richard Edwards), who wrote in the 1560s. But Puttenham doesn’t identify their plays. Then, in 1598, Francis Meres writes about plays being performed at the London theaters—and links playwrights to their plays—but, by that time, Shakespeare has adapted North’s plays, and Meres only references (and almost certainly only knows about) Shakespeare’s adaptations.
A few authors in tracts attacking plays or in prefaces have taken credit for some of their own plays. Stephen Gosson, for example, admits writing Catalines Conspiracies in his 1579 anti-theatrical tract, School of Abuse.
See Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, co-author: A historical study of five collaborative plays, (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 244-90, and Nicholas Brooke, ed., The Tragedy of Macbeth (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 57-59.
See Vickers, 244-90. Shakespeare appears to have hired George Peele to adapt certain scenes in Titus Andronicus (Vickers, 148-243), George Wilkins for Pericles, (Vickers, 291-332), and John Fletcher for Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (Vickers, 333-432). Many academics have also concluded that Henry VI, part 1 was the product of collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe. Again, the upstart player in Groatsworth, certainly a caricature of Shakespeare, had hired a Gentleman-Scholar to help him write. In another satire, The Return from Parnassus, Part 2, Studioso complains about Shakespeare-type actors “who prize Unhappy Scholars at a hireling rate.” See W.H.O. Smeaton, ed., The Return from Parnassus, (London: J.M. Dent and co., 1905), 84.
Ah, this article answers one of my questions about Macbeth.
It's long been known that the Hecate scene in Macbeth doesn't match the general style of the work (which we now know was North's). In fact, it's a verbatim copy of a scene in Middleton's The Witch. So scholars assumed it was a later addition to the text. But other scholars pointed out that, language aside, it fits well into the plot structure, leading to speculation that it replaced a scene in the original.
If Middleton helped Shakespeare adapt Macbeth, then the it's likely the scene replaced some part of North's original text. that plausibly explains all the difficulties with the scene.
Dennis, you say "the extant True Tragedy of Richard III, though often garbled, is, in places, a fairly close rendition of North’s original ~1563 version of Richard III."
Does this imply that "True Tragedy of Richard III" is closer to North's original than Shakespeare's First Folio version? If so, should Shakespeare be credited with speeches such as "Now is the winter of our discontent." etc? And more generally, how do we know whether the great speeches and other highlights in the canonical plays are due to Shakespeare or North? I.e. how much did Shakespeare add/change in his adaptations?