The True Origin of Lady Macbeth and Her Eternally Blood-Stained Hands
Like many of the most renowned scenes in the Shakespeare canon, the Macbeths' murder of King Duncan actually derives from Thomas North's life: specifically a true-crime tragedy involving his family
As will be discussed at my upcoming author talk at East Hampton Library (2:00-3:30 pm, 6/29/2024), most — yes, MOST — of Shakespeare’s renowned set-piece scenes derive from Thomas North’s life. This includes one of the most iconic scenes in English literature: the Macbeths’ murder of King Duncan—and Lady Macbeth’s guilt-ridden lament that she cannot wash away all the blood: “Out, out, damned spot!” In fact, the historical Lady Macbeth had nothing whatever to do with the murder of Duncan, who died in battle. The following excerpt, taken from Chapter Four of THOMAS NORTH: The Original Author of Shakespeare’s Plays, provides more details:
[Begin excerpt:] One of the earliest events that captured Thomas North’s attention, disrupting the serenity of his childhood and almost certainly rattling his very sense of the world, occurred a few months before his sixteenth birthday on a snowy Saturday night on St. Valentine’s Day, 1551.
At that time, Thomas North was likely a student at the University of Cambridge, some 14 miles from the family estate of Kirtling Hall, but had he made the trip home for the weekend he would have likely spent the day enjoying the Tudor luxuries of his family’s estate. It was a few months before the balmier days of spring, and many of the estate’s recreations—the lawn bowling green and the archery gardens—may have lain beneath a blanket of snow. But other enjoyable pursuits would have still been available. Perhaps Thomas worked one of the horses that day, riding around the grounds or practicing some equestrian maneuvers. Or he may have enjoyed some falconry with the numerous falcons and goshawks kept at the estate. Kirtling is situated on the upper slope of a valley, and the Norths’ red brick castle-manor stood on the highest part of the county, on a “prettie hill” that afforded a commanding view of much of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.[i] The family resided with an entourage of servants: physician, cooks, tailors, grooms, porters, footmen, and various laborers.[ii] And, like young Hamlet’s household (and Duke Frederick’s in As You Like It), the North household included a fool—a live-in jester who would dance, joke, and banter with the family in order to keep them entertained.
The castle property was already centuries old by this time, and its rooms creaked and groaned with the ghosts of English history. In 1466, Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick and so-called “Kingmaker,” took up residence at the estate with his wife, Anne, and his two daughters, Isabel and Anne.[iii] The Neville sisters would eventually marry two brothers from the House of York: Isabel wed George, Duke of Clarence and Anne married Richard, Duke of Gloucester—the future Richard III—and all of these characters would later appear in Shakespeare’s history plays.
Although Kirtling Hall was the Norths’ primary residence and, with 60 hearths, the largest mansion in Cambridgeshire, it was not their most spectacular dwelling. The family also owned the Charterhouse—a former Benedictine Abbey in the north of London with courts, stables, gardens, walks, and orchards. It even had running water, an extraordinary luxury at the time. In 1558, Elizabeth would spend her first six nights as queen in London with the North family at the Charterhouse, and she would return again in 1561 for a fabulous feast the Norths presented in her honor. But the Norths’ grand manor at Harrow on the Hill, the former stately residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was supposed to have been even more spectacular—considered by some to have been the “flower” of the North estates.[iv]
These were the manors that mostly served as Thomas North’s residences for the first 45 years of his life—until a falling out with the powers-that-be would send Thomas on a downslope toward misery.
The St. Valentine’s Day event that upended young Thomas’s life in 1551 occurred in the town of Faversham in Kent, about 50 miles southeast of London. There, Thomas Arden sat at a parlor table across from Thomas Mosby, a backgammon board between them. Alice, Arden’s wife, prepared their supper and cleaned the room, but she still seemed agitated. She had at first tried to stop Mosby from entering the house. She argued that Mosby liked to hang with a rough crowd, and, worse, neighbors were gossiping that she and Mosby were having an affair. She furiously demanded that he leave their home and never return. Mosby agreed, but Arden pleaded for calm. “Alice, bid him welcome,” Arden said. “He and I are friends.”
It was not a surprise that Faversham locals were whispering. Alice had actually known the dark and handsome Mosby before she had met her husband. Mosby was a household servant—a live-in tailor—for Alice’s wealthy step-father, and the 14-pound pressing iron that was tied to his waistband indicated he still worked for her family in that occupation. When Alice was a teenager, she and Mosby resided at the same estates, and Alice would still see Mosby whenever she visited her family on holidays. Also, Mosby would occasionally travel to the Arden home in Faversham to visit his sister, Susan, another long-time servant of Alice’s family. Susan was also in the house, doing chores, as Arden and Mosby played backgammon.
“What shall we play for?” asked Arden.
“Three games for a French crown, sir, and please you,” Mosby responded.
“Content.” Arden started rolling.
This would become the crime of the century—the most notorious murder of a private citizen in the Tudor era
Despite Arden’s welcoming of Mosby, he was a jealous and controlling husband. He too had at times suspected that Mosby and his wife were having an affair or at least that they were romantically involved at some point in the past. But he often ignored or suppressed those feelings—perhaps because he didn’t want to believe it or perhaps because he wanted to avoid any difficulties with Alice’s powerful family. Also, Alice had repeatedly convinced Arden that she never had feelings for her family servant, and now it even seemed as if she hated him. Didn’t she just insult Mosby and demand that he leave? All this helped to put Arden’s mind at ease.
As the two men played, Alice quietly unlocked the closet door behind her husband, and a large man—an ex-soldier and criminal known only by the name Black Will—stepped from its shadows. He held a thick rope-like towel taut between his hands. Mosby could see the shadowy hulk behind Arden but remained expressionless, still feigning interest in the backgammon game. He then rolled the dice.
“Ah, Master Arden, now I can take you,” Mosby said, not taking his gaze from Arden. The comment was an obvious cue to Black Will, who lunged from the darkness and wrapped the rope around Arden’s neck. He violently yanked him backward, pulling Arden onto the floor on top of himself. Arden struggled but was helpless: “Mosby … Alice,” Arden said, terrified and pleading. “What will you do?” Black Will, still strangling his victim, said to him, “Nothing but take you up, sir, nothing else.”
Mosby took the flat iron from his waistband and smashed Arden’s head, causing his limp body to slide off Black Will. The men thought they had killed him, but Alice, holding a large kitchen knife, heard her husband make a guttural moan: “Groans thou?” Alice asked, straddling Arden. “Nay, then … take this for hindering Mosby’s love and mine.” She stabbed him again and again as blood pumped and splashed around the room.
This would become the crime of the century—the most notorious murder of a private citizen in the Tudor era. The slaying became so infamous that Holinshed’s Chronicles, the somber and definitive Elizabethan source of English history, devoted five full pages to the case, discussing its events in detail. This is far more than the tome allocated to most matters of state or any other domestic crime, which typically got a sentence or two. John Stowe, the historian writing for Holinshed, explained this focus by referring to the “horribleness” of the act in which Arden was “most cruelly murdered and slain by the procurement of his own wife.”[v] Richard Helgerson also contends that “the Arden story’s continuing hold on the imagination of successive generations, both in and out of Faversham” was due in part to the fascination with the villainess.[vi] Alice’s betrayal would eventually become the subject of a puppet show, a broadside ballad, a novel, an opera, a ballet, a nursery rhyme, and even an anonymous play—Arden of Faversham—first published in 1592. The dialogue and description of the murder above is largely taken from that play. Arden’s large Tudor house still stands in Faversham and has become a tourist attraction.
Yet the extraordinary interest garnered by the crime is not why it had such an effect on the young Thomas North. In fact, most of this attention, including Holinshed’s historical account, would not come till decades afterward. Nor did North find it so affecting simply because of the peculiarly “Shakespearean” elements of the tale, centered, as it was, on jealousy, treachery, lust, murder, and a fitting recompense for those who succumb to unbridled passions and darker impulses.
No, the reason we know that this crime comprised the most staggering moment of his young life is that Alice Arden—the best-known murderess of the sixteenth century—was Thomas North’s half-sister, Mosby was a North family servant, and the estates where they had both resided were North’s family manors of Kirtling Hall and the Charterhouse. Young Thomas personally knew everyone involved in the crime.
Arden of Faversham, the tragedy written about the murder, holds a special fascination for Shakespeare scholars because, along with Edward III, it is one of only two extra-canonical dramas that many have argued should be credited to Shakespeare on the grounds of quality and style alone. The first known claim of Shakespeare’s authorship dates back to 1770 when the Faversham historian Edward Jacob commented on its ingenious and distinctive features in a preface to a reprint of the tragedy.[vii] Since then, numerous scholars have discussed its “Shakespearean” qualities, including the skillful unraveling of plot, the depth of characterization, and many passages, phrases, and scenes that appear to be echoed in the Shakespeare canon. As the renowned literatus Algernon Swinburne remarked, “Either this play is the young Shakespeare’s first tragic masterpiece, or there was a writer unknown to us then alive and at work for the stage who excelled him as a tragic dramatist. …” He then referred to the play as “the possible work of no man’s youthful hand but Shakespeare’s.”[viii] Shakespeare biographer Sidney Lee agreed: while “there is no external evidence in favour of Shakespeare’s authorship,” its “dramatic energy is of a quality not to be discerned in the work of any contemporary whose writings are extant.”[ix] And Marion Bodwell Smith recorded numerous images and passages found in Arden that recall similar elements in the early plays of Shakespeare.[x]
Extending this argument, Bryan Aubrey focused on the Shakespearean qualities of Alice Arden herself, placing her on the same pedestal as Shakespeare’s most important heroines and, especially, Lady Macbeth.[xi] Similarly, Hardin Craig refers to the “moving tragedy” as “a masterpiece of psychological interpretation, which foreshadows Macbeth.”[xii] This comparison even dates back to the nineteenth century, when two German editors, Karl Warnke and Ludwig Proescholdt, were among the first to depict Alice as “a predecessor of Lady Macbeth.”[xiii]
In recent years, MacDonald P. Jackson and Arthur F. Kinney have independently used literary search engines to help aid in attribution, connecting many of the lines and passages in Arden of Faversham to similar lines and passages in the Shakespeare canon.[xiv] Numerous editors and scholars have found these various analyses so persuasive that Shakespeare’s authorship of the work has now become the mainstream view, and in 2016 The New Oxford Shakespeare included Arden of Faversham in its collection of Shakespeare plays.
But as now seems clear it was North who, in his early twenties, first wrote Arden of Faversham, likely when he was in charge of entertainments at Lincoln’s Inn. For like all the plays in the canon, the play brims with North’s passages, and the story comes directly from his life. The only reason that investigators have found so many parallels linking the anonymous tragedy to the Shakespeare canon is that they are finding North’s passages in both. This will be discussed in detail in later chapters and Appendix E includes more than 100 compelling linguistic parallels linking the tragedy to North’s writings, especially his Dial of Princes. But these few examples should help give an idea of the correspondences:
1. Dial: Wherein is expressed the great malice and little patience of an evil woman (755)
Arden: Wherein is shewed the great malice and dissimulation of a wicked woman (1)
2. Dial: he might freely and without any danger of law put her to death (255)
Arden: that murder would grow to an occupation that a man might follow without danger of law (2.103–4)
3. Dial: If the fear of the gods, the infamy of the person,
and the speech of men do not restrain the woman,
all the chastisements of the world will
not make her refrain from vice (232)
Arden: If fear of God or common speech of men …
And reprehension makes her vice to grow (4.2,12)
4. Dial: If she laugh a little, they count her light.
If she laugh not, they count her an hypocrite.
If she go to the Church, they note her for a gadder…
If she go ill appareled, they account her a niggard (483)
Arden: If I be merry, thou straightways thinks me light;
If sad, thou sayest the sullens trouble me;
If well attired, thou thinks I will be gadding;
If homely, I seem sluttish in thine eye. (13.108–11)
5. Dial: as a man being vexed, lifting up his eyes unto the heavens, fetching a grievous sigh from the bottom of his heart, said these words (232)
Arden: What pity-moving words, what deep-fetched sighs, /What grievous groans and overlading woes…/Now will he cast his eyes up towards the heavens … (4.40–6)
In each case here (and in the majority of the more than 100 verbal parallels linking Arden to North’s writings that we will examine in this book), the parallels are unique. No one else has ever used that shared language before or since.
* * * * *
In the tragedy, right after Black Will and Mosby drag Arden’s body into a side office, there is a knock at the front of the house: “Harken, they knock,” Susan says. “What, shall I let them in?”
Alice, brazen as she was, had purposefully invited guests for dinner that night, two visiting grocers from London, and was hoping to use them as an alibi. She had concocted a plan with her neighbor Greene, a man cheated out of land by Arden and a willing accomplice to the murder, to come over during dinner and claim he just saw Arden walking nearby, on the former abbey grounds near the St. Valentine’s Day fair. This was now part of the Ardens’ property, but he had leased out many acres for the festivities. This is also where they intended to leave the body, suggesting some out-of-town ruffians attending the fair had committed the murder and done so while Alice and Mosby were having dinner with the two grocers and after Greene arrived. But the guests came to Arden’s house earlier than expected.
Alice immediately takes control: “Mosby, go thou and bear them company. And, Susan, fetch water and wash away this blood.”
Mosby does as told, ushering the guests into a reception room while the women try to wash away the evidence of the crime in the kitchen and parlor. But it is more difficult than expected:
“The blood cleaveth to the ground and will not out,” says Susan.
“But with my nails I’ll scrape away the blood,” says Alice. “The more I strive, the more the blood appears!”
When Mosby returns, he asks Alice if all is well. “Ay, well, if Arden were alive again,” she responds. “In vain we strive, for here his blood remains.” Alice’s inability to wash away all the blood would eventually lead to the uncovering of their crime.
The connection between this passage and the imagery and language in Macbeth is difficult to miss. Right after Macbeth stabs King Duncan in his sleep, Lady Macbeth and her husband find themselves in precisely the same situation as Alice and Mosby. Blood is everywhere, and there is a surprising knock at the door:
Lady Macbeth: Go get some water
And wash this filthy witness from your hand. …
[… Knock within.]
Macbeth: Whence is that knocking?
How is’t with me, when every noise appalls me?
What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? …
[Knock within.]
Lady Macbeth: I hear a knocking
At the south entry. Retire we to our chamber.
A little water clears us of this deed.
How easy is it, then! Your constancy
Hath left you unattended.
[Knock.] Hark! more knocking. …
Macbeth: Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!
(2.2.50–1, 61–5, 69–73)
This, in turn, anticipates one of the most famous scenes in the canon: the walking nightmare of Lady Macbeth as she dreams about the murder and finds it impossible to wash away the imagined blood off her hands:
Out, damned spot! Out, I say! … / Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? … / What, will these hands ne’er be clean? … / Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand (5.1.34, 38–9, 43–4, 50–2).
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The following table lists the plot correspondences between Arden’s murder of in Arden of Faversham and Duncan’s murder in Macbeth. (Importantly, the table here is not meant to show compelling verbal parallels—but just confirm that the one murder was based on the other. For verbal parallels, see above.)
The plot parallels are numerous. Both women, fierce of temperament and masters at manipulation, have pressed their lovers into the brutal murder of an inconvenient man. Lady Macbeth has urged her husband, and Alice Arden has pushed Mosby. In each play, a knocking at the door threatens the guilty couple with possible discovery and is underscored by a similar line: Harken, they knock / Hark! more knocking. At the end of each scene, the killer wishes that the murder never happened and the victim were still alive.
But the character parallels between the femme fatales—and particularly those regarding their interactions with blood—are what is most compelling. Directly after the murder, as the visitors knock, both women bark orders to clean up the blood: “Go … fetch water and wash away this blood,” says Alice. “Go get some water / And wash this filthy witness from your hand,” says Lady Macbeth. Both women, then, with blood on their hands, suffer an attack of conscience and fear of discovery, and both cry that they cannot wash away the blood. In each case, blood becomes a supernatural accuser, refusing to disappear no matter how much the women scrub. “Here his blood remains,” laments Alice. “Here’s the smell of the blood still,” says Lady Macbeth. And the complaint that the blood “will not out!” in Arden becomes Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”
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Here we have our first glimpse of how North’s personal experiences shaped the canon, providing him with the subject not only of one of his first plays but also of a famous Shakespearean scene. For it is a remarkable fact that the accusatory significance of blood is actually a genuine aspect of the Arden case. It was, indeed, the very life force of Arden—his blood that Alice could not wash away—that condemned her. And the young North made sure to stress the symbolic significance of this detail in his first tragedy. Later in Arden of Faversham, when the investigators bring Alice to Arden’s body and ask her to confess, it is his blood that moves her: “The more I sound his name,” says Alice, “the more he bleeds / This blood condemns me, and in gushing forth / Speaks as it falls and asks me why I did it.” She then confesses.
Here, then, is the evolutionary history of one of the most iconic images in literature—Lady Macbeth’s fearful cries over her eternally bloodstained hands. And we can trace its intellectual development from a forensic fact that condemned Thomas’s half-sister, to the young playwright’s first probing of the incriminating and conscience-staining nature of blood in his dramatization of the Arden murder, to its final, accomplished realization in Lady Macbeth’s guilt-ridden lament.
This is just the first example, chronologically, of how North put his life in the plays. Michael Blanding’s In Shakespeare’s Shadow: A Rogue Scholar's Quest to Reveal the True Source Behind the World’s Greatest Plays[xv] also does an excellent job of relating this and many other thrilling details of North’s life, identifying biographical connections between his experiences and Shakespeare’s plays. Moreover, true to its subtitle, it documents the story of how these discoveries were made.
What follows is a more extensive overview of the rest of this book, including new discoveries and smoking guns.
Part Two: North’s Writings in the Shakespeare Canon: Hundreds of Borrowed Lines and Passages
When North wrote his plays, he frequently recycled images, ideas, speeches, stories, and characters from both his published and unpublished writings. In most cases, North was not using his past writings for the source of a major plot and would have had little reason to have his book open in front of him. But he would often recall passages from his past writings (especially his most recent writings), and, upon restating these ideas in the plays, he would repeat his own language, echoing his distinctive words, phrases, and lines.
This section explores several hundred of the thousands of lines and passages shared by North and Shakespeare. Many of the links between the texts cannot be disputed as they include North’s verbal fingerprints, that is, identical lines or word-strings that occur in the parallel passages—and nowhere else in the history of the English language. Most of the borrowings discussed in this section have been found since 2011—often, but not always, through the use of plagiarism software.
All told, the hundreds of verbal parallels discussed in this section establish a unique relationship between the two authors, one that can be explained in only one of two ways. Either Shakespeare was the most obsessive plagiarist in history, stealing from everything North ever wrote, including his journal, and doing so, yearly, for every play in the canon—or he was adapting North’s plays.
Part Three: North’s Life in the Plays
Part Three includes a full chronology and summary, showing when and why North wrote each play—and how his plays continuously evolved with his studies and experiences. As will be shown both throughout this section and in the final chapters, North always remained faithful to the same modus operandi: he would take the most significant people, memorable moments, and striking visuals from his life and then craft plays around them. He also made sure his plays directly addressed the most pressing political concerns of the moment and did so to please those in charge. He began with plays flattering Queen Mary and supporting her counter-reformation policies. Then he wrote plays pushing the views of Leicester. After the earl died in 1588, he had more freedom, but he still wrote works in anticipation of the succession of King James and to help further the interests of the Earl of Essex, the man who would make North a knight. Meanwhile, North would also borrow the most insightful passages from his latest translations and transform them into unforgettable speeches. The entire canon is decidedly Northern, starting with plays based on his trip to Italy and an early tragedy about his half-sister and ending with his autobiographical farewell, The Tempest.
Part Four: The Smoking Guns: Borrowings from North’s Unpublished Writings
Not only does it seem as if Shakespeare appropriated material from every book that North ever published; it also appears that he borrowed from North’s personal writings too. This section will discuss Thomas North’s travel journal—the 1555 diary that the 19-year-old North kept when he traveled with an embassy that Queen Mary had sent to Rome. Significantly, North then used the entries about his experiences in Italy to help him write early versions of Henry VIII and The Winter’s Tale. Indeed, it is through his journal that we discover that The Winter’s Tale is really an allegory on the life of Queen Mary—Perdita in the play—starting with the trial of Mary’s mother, Katherine of Aragon (Hermione), and continuing until Mary’s return to power and her marriage to Philip II, the Prince of Sicily (Florizel). The journal also reveals the true origins of the story behind Hamlet’s own murder-play, “The Murder of Gonzago.”
Part Four will also show that Richard II, which was first published in 1597, contains passages on grief taken from Nepos’ Lives, which North would not publish until 1602. In other words, whoever put those discussions of depression into Richard II had to have access to North’s personal, draft translations of Nepos’ Lives at least five years before North published them. The chapter will also introduce one of the most significant of the recent discoveries, involving North’s historic role in the Essex rebellion (1601). North’s relationship with the Earl of Essex had been complicated, and it began in earnest when the earl knighted Thomas before the siege of Rouen in late 1591.
Part Five: North’s Marginalia: His Workbook for Plays in Progress
In 1591–2, North started underscoring certain passages in his recently purchased personal copy of the 1582 edition of The Dial of Princes, now in Cambridge University’s library (Adv.d.14.4), writing notes in the margins.[xvi] He then reused and reworked many of those lines and passages into plays he was then revising—Arden of Faversham and The Taming of the Shrew—or that he was crafting for the first time—Macbeth. North also underscored passages and wrote marginalia relevant to Othello, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Richard II.
Also, we find that North has underlined a line that appears in The True Tragedy of Richard III, the extant, but garbled, original version of the Senecan tragedy North wrote in 1563 and that he would use decades later as the basis for his Richard III. Also, North’s commentary on the facing page marks a passage used in Titus Andronicus, another early 1560s Senecan tragedy by North.
North also wrote still other Shakespeare-related marginalia in other books. In Richard Harvey’s Astrological Discourse, he underscored and annotated the passage that he would spoof in 2 Henry IV. Also, likely sometime between 1600 and 1604, Thomas North used a North family copy of Fabyan’s Chronicle to craft an outline for the main plot of Cymbeline, underscoring and noting in the margins the various storylines, facts, and passages that he would then put into the play. Significantly, these Cymbeline-related passages are widely scattered across a 250-page span of Fabyan’s Chronicle. Yet North’s focus is clear. He has managed to write notes on nearly every one of the Cymbeline-related passages while ignoring essentially everything else.
Part Six: Final Arguments
Part Six begins with a chapter showing that all the set-piece visuals of Shakespeare plays also represent, in a very real sense, a pictorial history of the life of North, confirming that before North first wrote the plays, he lived them. The conclusion then provides a summary of all the evidence, marshaling the strongest arguments for North’s authorship of Shakespeare’s source plays.
[i] Dale B. J. Randall, Gentle Flame, The Life and Verse of Dudley, Fourth Lord North (1602–77) (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983), 5.
[ii] The account books of Thomas North’s brother, Roger—Lord North’s Household Book, 1576–1589, vols. 1 and 2—offer a fairly detailed listing of and payments to the household servants of Kirtling Hall. See also “The North Family” at The Kirtling and Upend Parish website: https://kirtlingandupend.org/wp/?page_id=127
[iii] “Kirtling: Manors and Estate,” A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Cheveley, Flendish, Staine and Staploe Hundreds (north-eastern Cambridgeshire), 2002, 10:63–9.
[iv] Dale B. J. Randall, Gentle Flame, 7.
[v] John Stowe, The First Volume of the Chronicles of England Scotland and Ireland … Faithfully Gathered and Set Forth by Raphael Holinshed (London: 1577), 1703. Holinshed’s Chronicles compiled the work from many different historians—including John Stowe. And we know Stowe was the primary author for Holinshed’s account of Arden because Stowe’s manuscript notes on the murder are extant, and Holinshed’s discussion often follows these notes word for word.
[vi] Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 18.
[vii] Edward Jacob, preface to The Lamentable and True Tragedie of M. Arden, of Feversham, in Kent … (Feversham: Re-printed verbatim by J. & J. March, For Stephen Doorne …, 1770), iii–vi. See also Jacob’s History of the Town and Port of Faversham, in the County of Kent (London: J. March, 1774).
[viii] Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880), 136, 141.
[ix] Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (1898; New York: Macmillan, 1916), 140.
[x] Marion Bodwell Smith, Marlowe’s Imagery and the Marlowe Canon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 125–8.
[xi] Bryan Aubrey, “Critical Essay on Arden of Faversham,” Drama for Students (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007): 24:35–8; 38.
[xii] Hardin Craig, “The Literature of the English Renaissance: 1485–1660,” A History of English Literature (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 2:82.
[xiii] Arden of Feversham, rev. ed., Pseudo-Shakespearian Plays, ed. Karl Warnke and Ludwig Proescholdt (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1888), 5:xxiv.
[xiv] For a 2006 article in Shakespeare Quarterly, MacDonald P. Jackson used the Literature Online Database to uncover a number of Shakespearean phrases and certain literary devices, which, he believes, “overwhelmingly support” Shakespeare’s “authorship of the quarrel scene.” In 2010, he reinforced this analysis with a study of rare phrases, again concluding that Shakespeare was the author of various passages. MacDonald P. Jackson, “Shakespeare and the Quarrel Scene in Arden of Faversham,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57.3 (2006): 249–93; “Parallels and Poetry: Shakespeare, Kyd, and Arden of Faversham,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 23 (2010): 17–33. In 2014, Jackson published the most comprehensive collection and proof of Shakespeare’s authorship in a full-length book on the subject: MacDonald P. Jackson, Determining the Shakespeare Canon: “Arden of Faversham” and “A Lover’s Complaint” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Arthur F. Kinney also approached the play using “computational stylistics,” concluding that “Arden of Faversham is a collaboration; Shakespeare was one of the authors; and his part is concentrated in the middle section of the play.” See Arthur F. Kinney, “Authoring Arden of Faversham,” Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship, ed. Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 78–99; 99.
[xv] Michael Blanding, North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth behind the Bard’s Work (New York: Hachette, 2021).
[xvi] See Kelly A. Quinn, “Sir Thomas North’s Marginalia in his Dial of Princes,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94.2 (2000): 283-7.
Dennis, what’s your response? Mr. Hiatt raises issues they are at the very heart of good intellectual discourse. I hope you will engage.
"Like many of the most renowned scenes in the Shakespeare canon, the Macbeths' murder of King Duncan actually derives from Thomas North's life: specifically a true-crime tragedy involving his family."
The English teacher within me feels compelled to point out that "derives" implies North got the whole story from the Arden case. That's clearly true for Arden of Feversham, but somewhat less true for Macbeth.
You make a good case for some similarities of language (though the fact that a passage has both "out" and "blood" may be the result of coincidence). But as for Lady Macbeth, she's clearly a conspirator even in Holinshed, though she has a much less prominent role. It's possible that Mary Arden contributed to North's portrayal of her, but she is far from being the only literary woman with a murderous agenda. One thinks immediately of Medea, who conspired to kill her brother and did kill her own sons--recall how Lady Macbeth expresses a willingness to kill a child if she had one. Medea also engineering the murder of Pelias in an unsuccessful effort to get her husband, Jason, a throne. There's also Clytemnestra, who killed her own husband, just like Mary Arden. Clytemnestra's husband also happened to be a king just like Duncan. Sure, there are differences among these stories--but there are also differences between the Arden murder and Macbeth. As for the accusatory blood, the theme goes all the way back to the Genesis story of Cain and Abel and no doubt has spawned many parallels.
All of that said, an argument could certainly be made for North choosing to expand Lady Macbeth's role in the way he does could certainly have been influenced by Mary Arden. Perhaps it would be strange if she hadn't contributed in some way. But North may also have been influenced by his knowledge of Greco-Roman literature and by the Bible. The latter of which is often echoed in the texts.
In other words, I think your point has some validity but is perhaps presented in too absolute a way.