What Shakespeare Really Wrote

According to straightforward readings of all title pages and documents of the era, the answer is obvious.

Another huge post today. But first, a quick reminder: on Thursday, April 24, 6 PM, I’m going to give a brief and (hopefully) fun talk on “Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare’s Plays” at North Hampton Public Library in NH. I will also be selling /signing books, and answering any questions.

Also, I am grateful to all the new paid subscribers—especially those who were lured by my detailed article on the mystery behind Ben Jonson’s ode to Shakespeare in the First Folio. This is a 10,000+ word article with 38 footnotes and 9 pictures.

The Stunning 400-Year-Old Secret at the Front of Shakespeare's First Folio that Explains Everything

This article that you’re currently reading— “What Shakespeare Really Wrote”—is similarly extensive and, in my view, just as significant. In an upcoming post, I will also publish a brand new Shakespearean poem, the first one found since 1609.

What Shakespeare Really Wrote

So far, Michael Blanding, June Schlueter, and I have focused all of our attention on just half of the Shakespeare mystery. Specifically, we have only addressed the question of who originally wrote Shakespeare’s plays. And that answer, as we have repeatedly shown through various discoveries, is Thomas North.

Blanding is the investigative journalist who wrote In Shakespeare’s Shadow: A Rogue Scholar's Quest to Reveal the True Source Behind the World's Greatest Plays—as well as this article/excerpt that was the cover story for Boston Globe Magazine; a front-page story in The New York Times on one of our North/Shakespeare discoveries; an article for Literary Hub on how he evolved from a skeptic of the North theory to supporter and fellow-researcher; and umpteen other podcasts, articles, or presentations on the subject.

Meanwhile, June Schlueter, a professor emerita at Lafayette and former editor of The Shakespeare Bulletin, and I have also been publishing numerous peer-reviewed articles and academic books confirming North’s authorship. In 2014, we published evidence in Cambridge’s Shakespeare Survey indicating that North wrote the original version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In 2021, Schlueter and I published our discovery of North’s travel-diary (and its use in the plays) in Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. The diary described a 20-year-old Thomas’s exotic experiences in Italy—a journey of wondrous events that the playwright would use as a well-spring for the most spectacular and memorable scenes of Henry VIII (see video) and The Winter’s Tale (see, as an example, here). Most recently, we published evidence for North’s authorship of the first Hamlet in The Times Literary Supplement—with a special focus on Hamlet’s Murder-Play:

For a more detailed summary of the evidence for North’s authorship of plays later written by Shakespeare, check here. These proofs include thousands of North’s and passages that have been recycled in the Shakespeare canon (see video), and various smoking guns, like his use of marginal notes in texts to mark the passages he would use in the plays. North’s life in the plays, as demonstrated extensively in my book on Thomas North and as discussed in the following Substack articles:

• Arden of Faversham, Henry VIII, The Winter’s Tale, and Titus Andronicus (here)

• More on The Winter’s Tale (here)

• Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Love’s Labour’s Lost (here)

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (here)

• Hamlet (here)

• Macbeth (here)

• 1 Henry VI (here)

Eventually, this list will include all the plays in the canon.

Finally, later this year, Schlueter and I will be publishing an academic paper confirming that Ben Jonson, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Lodge all identified North as the original author of Shakespeare’s source-plays—not just Hamlet, but the first Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Timon of Athens, and Julius Caesar. This paper will serve as an important complement to my recent Substack post that explained Ben Jonson’s Ode to Shakespeare in the First Folio.

Still, all of this focuses exclusively on the question of who originally wrote the plays. But another question I keep getting asked is: What exactly was Shakespeare’s role in the matter? What did Shakespeare really write? Was Shakespeare the literary genius or just a producer-reviser? As we will show below, this question is the easiest of all to answer …