The 450-Year-Old Secret Behind Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale"
As discovered in Thomas North's travel diary, the play is not just a magical fairytale but based on real events
Imagine that no one had ever realized what George Orwell's Animal Farm was really about—that no one knew it was an allegory on the Russian Revolution.
Picture, further, that, solely due to its thrilling power as an animal fable, it still was celebrated as a classic, that it was still read by high-school students, studied in college, and frequently discussed in literary journals. Yet despite its extraordinary popularity and the careful analyses that it generated, imagine that everyone still believed it was just a fairytale, with no relation whatsoever to any historical events.
Then consider how significant it would be if someone found a diary by George Orwell that instantly exposed the true meaning of Animal Farm. And it turned out that its plot and characters were meant to represent the tumultuous events and leaders of early 20th-century Russia. Wouldn’t that have been something?
Well, this is exactly what has happened with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. What had once been celebrated internationally as a dramatic and wondrous fairytale turns out to have been a compelling historical allegory that was laid bare with the discovery of Thomas North’s travel diary. Moreover, the true story that the fable represents describes an epochal time in English history.
As I wrote in Thomas North: The Original Author of the Shakespeare Canon:
One work in the canon that is entirely transformed by the North discovery is The Winter’s Tale (1555–7). On the surface, this romance seems little more than a fairytale, a mixture of magical and visually striking impossibilities adorning a fanciful narrative. It almost seems like Shakespeare was just playing with his imagination when he wrote the play, letting his fancy run free and then pouring the results onto the stage as Jackson Pollock might splash and drizzle paint across a canvas. But once we read about the exotic events of North’s journal of his trip to Rome and understand the context of his embassy, we come away with a new view of the play. Everything suddenly becomes coherent and understandable. And all the elements that had once seemed so whimsical and outlandish can now be seen for what they really are: part of a meticulously constructed and historically savvy allegory.
I later conclude:
“The Winter’s Tale is not simply a dazzling and gaudy fairytale; it is, like Animal Farm, an important, clear-eyed, politically oriented, symbolically precise fairytale-à-clef.”
So why hasn’t the world taken notice yet? And why are teachers and professors across the English-speaking world still teaching the old, incorrect, less powerful interpretation of The Winter’s Tale? Well, let us start at the beginning:
The Discovery of Thomas North’s Travel Diary
On Wednesday, August 24, 2016, at exactly 10 PM, my brilliant research partner June Schlueter emailed me about something that her husband Paul Schlueter had found. June and Paul are both sharp-eyed literary scholars and bibliophiles—as well as cherished fixtures at Lafayette College. Paul in the course of his own research had found a record of a travel diary attributed to Thomas North at the Huntington Library—and June immediately emailed the find to me.
The Huntington website provides the title and many other details of the manuscript, and, through a quick search of Google Books, I was quickly able to find some excerpts of North’s travel diary that had been published, without attribution, in Miscellaneous State Papers (1778).1 The journal, written by North in 1555, the year he turned 20, and recording the events of his travels with an embassy to Rome, was one of the few examples of his writing outside of his published translations.
At this time, June and I had already known that North was the original author of dozens of Shakespeare plays. And just two years earlier, we had published evidence in Cambridge’s Shakespeare Survey indicating that Thomas North wrote the original version of Shakespeare’s, Titus Andronicus. But two of the plays whose origins had entirely stumped us were Henry VIII and The Winter’s Tale. Now, with the discovery of his journal, the mysterious origins of these plays were immediately clear. North actually even based many scenes of both plays on his experiences in Italy. Moreover, the travel diary revealed what The Winter’s Tale was really about.
I still vividly remember the evening of June’s email. I had spent nearly 16 straight hours working on the George North manuscript—a handwritten work that had been kept at the North-family library—and served as an important source for Shakespeare’s plays. While June and I both knew the discovery of the George North manuscript was significant (though we were still very surprised at how much media attention it garnered), it quickly became clear the journal was a much greater find. And though I had been up since 6 AM, I just could not help but pour over North’s entries throughout the entire evening— my heart racing much of the time. Eventually, I fell asleep the next day at about 1 PM, my eyes bleary from having studied more than 30 straight hours.