Does anyone who doesn't have a vested interest (i.e. academics) actually believe Shakespeare from Stratford wrote the canonical plays?

>William had, at best, a few years of schooling. He is otherwise fully employed working for his father and later as an actor and business man in the theatre
>Somehow Will also finds the time to write masterpiece after masterpiece, with dozens of plots and characters from foreign language sources. And he achieves all this in around 20 years.
>All of the Shakespeare canon is filled with complex legal terminology, as if the language of the law is habitual to him There is no evidence William had any legal training or experience whatsoever.
>The playwright was obsessed with Italy and shows detailed knowledge of Italy. William had no connection to Italy.
>It has improved impossible to link the plays with William’s life. This is bizarre and in complete contrast to how easy it is to link Dante, or Goethe or Dickens or Joyce etc etc with their works.
>The only play that has clear autobiographical elements that can be related to William is Merry Wives of Windsor, which is extremely different from the rest of the canon, most importantly it is of much lower literary quality.
>Contemporary sources such as Groatsworth of Wit and Ben Jonson portray William as a “Jack of all Trades” theatre man and impresario, with little learning. This is not a description of someone who wrote these highly elaborate, learned plays.
>The epitaph on William Shakespeare’s grave is embarrassingly bad doggerel. Everyone accepts this doggerel was written by William.
>During William’s lifetime there were many plays published under his name that are now considered Apocrypha. Shakespeare is the only writer in the English canon to have two sets of writings attributed to him in his lifetime.


TL;DR: Thomas North wrote essentially everything in the First Folio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GpY1WUYGOA

>>24501061 (OP)
Oh fuck off.
This is the same cope that would say Napoleon couldn’t have done what he did because he came from an upper middle class Corsican family with hardly an education.
Sometimes some men are just extraordinary.

>It has improved impossible to link the plays with William’s life.

no it hasn't. if you can't link tempest or lear to shakespeare's own life you just lack basic reading comprehension

>detailed knowledge of italy

shakespeare doesn't have a detailed knowledge of fucking anything. he's clearly treating most foreign countries he mentions as basically fictional with no particular devotion to the facts because it doesn't matter.

>William had, at best, a few years of schooling.

you don't have to be upper class to be smart and capable. you can learn from places other than formal school.

>Somehow Will also finds the time to write masterpiece after masterpiece, with dozens of plots and characters from foreign language sources

you explained how he did it in this sentence -- shakespeare is borrowing really heavily from other plots and plays.

a huge part of the "did shakespeare write his plays" controversy stems from idiots elevating the man from a talented writer with some obvious flaws to a living god of letters, then claiming it's unrealistic to be a living god.

obviously it's unrealistic. that isn't what he was.

>>24501109

>Extraordinary
>Writes embarrassing doggerel for his epitaph


>>24501118

>no it hasn't. if you can't link tempest or lear to shakespeare's own life you just lack basic reading comprehension

Lear and Tempest are about disinherited, poor old failures, betrayed by their family. This has nothing to do with William who died extremely wealthy and successful.

>shakespeare doesn't have a detailed knowledge of fucking anything.
>you explained how he did it in this sentence -- shakespeare is borrowing really heavily from other plots and plays.

Contradictory assertions above. The author clearly has knowledge of Greek, Italian and French, because, as you say, they are all in plays. Plus the endless legal terminology. There is a literally a textbook of Shakespeare’s legal terminology. This is not a grammar school education or a Jack of all Trades theatre man.

>a huge part of the "did shakespeare write his plays" controversy stems from idiots elevating the man from a talented writer with some obvious flaws to a living god of letters, then claiming it's unrealistic to be a living god.

Idiotic. The writer of these plays is on a different level from any other writer in the language. No one in history has created this many extraordinary characters or been able to express such a wide range of thought and emotion in language this endlessly evocative.
What is interesting is that no one questions Dante - the reason is it easy to fit Dante's life to the works.

>>24501109
>doesn't know his connections to secret societies.
Anon..

The reason why angloids make up all these retarded schizo theories is because they have turned Shakespeare into a god and the altar is so high up that no one can measure up, except obscure and secretly giga genius characters that barely anyone knows. Strictly for the birds.

>>24501258

Not an argument

>>24501061 (OP)
>Does anyone who doesn't have a vested interest (i.e. academics)
Why is this such a common line of thought among anti-Stratfordians?
If an academic could prove that someone other than William Shakespeare, the glovemaker's son from Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote the plays that bear his name, then that academic would have unprecedented fame among Shakespeare scholars. It's like saying scientists have a vested interest in the Big Bang theory or something. If someone proved it wrong they'd be a household name like Einstein or Hawking.

>>24501061 (OP)
>>The playwright was obsessed with Italy and shows detailed knowledge of Italy. William had no connection to Italy.
He made pretty basic geography mistakes.

>>24501061 (OP)

>>24501619

Even science proceeds "one funeral at a time". When livelihoods or status or self-image are in question, people do not act rationally, regardless of evidence.

Also, Dennis McCarthy as above has already proved who was the original author (this is merely a small sample of the evidence): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GpY1WUYGOA

Anti-stratfordians have rightly been suspicious for centuries that William's life and education do not match the canonical plays. No other major writer since antiquity has this question mark over them.
It took Mccarthy's using modern digital means of showing all the linguistic fingerprints of Thomas North (including from unprinted diaries and manuscripts) all over the plays to give definitive prove as to who the true author is.

>the plays that bear his name

The so-called Apocryphal plays all bear the name Shakespeare. If you don't believe Shakespeare wrote everything attributed to him, why deny some plays over others?

>>24501665
>No other major writer since antiquity has this question mark over them.
Debatable

>>24501118
>elevating the man from a talented writer with some obvious flaws to a living god of letters
Shakespeare is a living god of letters

>>24501795
kek

>>24501061 (OP)
>It has improved impossible to link the plays with William’s life. This is bizarre
Utterly strange opinion.

>>24501061 (OP)
>TL;DR: Thomas North wrote essentially everything in the First Folio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GpY1WUYGOA
This is your smoking gun? Lol

>>24501061 (OP)
This is very similar to the arguments of Academic Bible studies. And to the theories that Homer didn't exist.

Woody Allen frames it correctly. He reasons Shakespeare was not in fact written by Shakespeare but instead by another guy who's also named Shakespeare. Either way Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Whoever wrote this work is Shakespeare.

>>24501061 (OP)
OP you are thinking like an AI algorithm and not like a sensuous human soul. Can a man have imagination and mercurial whims at all in 2025? Or is a man just the aftermath of some bill of pathology. Prescribed his fate. Rational excuses for everything he is and does. You are forgetting that we aren't automatons with precise gears driving one formulaic cause and effect determining outcome of our creature. Shakespeare is the outcome of a mind, not an education, please. At best you can conspire he is the product of a committee. But this is just a typical conspiracy you can't prove, you simply convince yourself of it through a couple of points, which is called confirmation-bias.

Shakespeare couldn't have written all those works because he didn't go to Oxford.
I'm aware of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who went to Oxford who never wrote anything even comparable, but I'm not talking about them, OK?!

I think the real mystery is how/why humans are so resistant to accepting evidence which goes contrary to their worldview. The Shakespeare authorship question is the perfect case study. None of this really matters. It's not political, it's not religious, it's not paradigm shattering. It's simply just individuals ego not being able to accept they were wrong.

I just find it funny that anti-stratfordians care so much and are so loud about it even though everyone not in their circle ignores them. They're the literary equivalent of Jehovah's Witnesses.

>>24501061 (OP)
Unfortunately I've been convinced by every Shakespeare authorship advocate. The evidence for De Vere, North and Bacon as the author behind Shakespeare is just too obvious and significant, but that leaves me confused about how this evidence exists for three, perhaps more, different individuals.

>>24501665
The Thomas North argument is interesting and compelling.
The other part of the argument is that plays by Sir Thomas North AND other playwrights, were reused by “whoever” was using the Shakespeare moniker,
and the reason some plays firmly attributed to Shakespeare centuries ago don’t natch the “writing style” of “Shakespeare” is that the “Shakespeare Writing Style” was based on the writing style of Sir Thomas North, or his brother, or a combination of the two.
The other question though, is who the later “Playwright” or “Playwrights” were, who used the “Shakespeare” moniker, and how much of the writing was by these later playwrights, and why the plays were changed, and how much.

Since the plays obviously have political connotations, were the plays changed to press certain political points, and if so, for who?
Once one accepts Sir Thomas North as the main playwright whose work was used and adapted into “Shakespeare’s” work, then all the arguments for and against the alternative “Shakespeare” “Authors” have to be reevaluated not just as the primary authors of the plays, but as later editors of the plays, and that editing would still be critically important for historical reasons.

>>24502406
>The Thomas North argument is interesting and compelling.
NTA but I've never seen anything compelling about it. Shakespeare borrowed liberally from and was influenced greatly by North's translations. But I don't understand what the fuss about the supposed source for Shakespeare's plays found in the possession of Thomas North's possible cousin George North is all about. How much of Shakespeare's words is found in this source? Besides, Shakespeare could have just had access to it the same way anyone could have. Maybe he was friends with George North.

>>24502443
>NTA but I've never seen anything compelling about it. Shakespeare borrowed liberally from and was influenced greatly by North's translations. But I don't understand what the fuss about the supposed source for Shakespeare's plays found in the possession of Thomas North's possible cousin George North is all about. How much of Shakespeare's words is found in this source? Besides, Shakespeare could have just had access to it the same way anyone could have. Maybe he was friends with George North.

A lot of playwrights borrowed from the published translations of Sir Thomas North, which is the reason nobody bothered considering Thomas North as the possible actual Playwright who wrote the works of Shakespeare, or at least most of the main works.
The compelling proof isn't in Thomas North’s published works, it’s in Thomas North’s unpublished writings, and those of his cousin.
Certain sections of an unpublished diary, kept for centuries by the North Family, contain exact, or almost exact quotes from Shakespeare’s plays.
The percentage of phrases or direct quotes between Shakespeare, and the writings of Thomas North is extremely high.
Further, there were historic episodes in the life of Thomas North and his relatives, that seem to directly correspond to scenes in Shakespeare plays, down to small details.
One of the arguments against the Merchant Shakespeare as the actual Playwright, is that the Merchant would not have been witness to the events mentioned in the plays, or traveled to the areas either, whereas a number of the alternative candidates for the actual Shakespeare authorship, such as Edward de Vere, would have, and are known to have had.
As far as fiaries ho, most were used to record events, and were considered private.
A person might allow close friends to read certain sections, but generally a diary of this sort would likely not just be handed out for circulation.
Allowing a family member to read sections is way more likely than a random acquaintance.
The only other individuals who might be able to demand access to the diary would be political officials needing to keep track of diplomatic missions, which is what the diary records.
Thomas North also received payment as a playwright.
Another point to be made, is that the North family still has a fucking family library after 500 years, containing family documents and “random diaries, of family members”.
The North Family are unlikely to be “Bumblefuck Nobodies” if they managed to maintain a family library for 500 years.
Even the official Danish Records concerning the colonies in Greenland have been mostly lost.
I wouldn’t be surprised if certain parties secretly knew about Thomas North.

It was me, I wrote them

>>24502558

>Shakespeare was a solo project

>>24501827

Yes, one of many.
Thomas North's language from all his published works is all over the canon, in thousands of lines and passages. We already know that lines from North's other work are right there in the Roman plays.
Even more irrefutable, lines from North's unpublished 1555 Travel to Journal to Italy (which explains why Shakespeare knew about Giulano Romano, amongst other things); and the unpublished manuscript by his cousin George North at their family library; and marginalia in Thomas North's surviving books are clearly used in the plays and even contain an outline for Cymbeline.
There are now two options
1.) Shakespeare plagiarised everything North wrote, including somehow his unpublished writings
2.) North wrote the original plays

If the above isn't smoking gun evidence then what would you consider a smoking gun?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Shakespeare_authorship_question#Non-English_candidates
>Some suggestions do not necessarily imply a secret author, but an alternative life-history for Shakespeare himself. These overlap with or merge into alternative-author models. An example is the claim that he was an Arab whose real name was "Sheikh Zubayr". This was first proposed in the 19th century as a joke by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, but developed seriously by Iraqi writer Safa Khulusi in the 1960s.[79] It was later endorsed by Muammar Gaddafi.[80] Such claims for a non-English origin for Shakespeare were linked to the expansion of his influence and popularity globally. Claimants have been detected in other countries, and he has even figured as a "contested heirloom", appropriated to various competing national or ethnic identities.
>His Englishness was first disputed in the wake of the Romantic "Shakespeare mania" (Shakespearomanie) that swept Germany, and led to assertions of his Nordic character,[81] and to claims that he was essentially German.[82]
>As early as 1897, George Newcomen had suggested Shakespeare was an Irishman, a certain Patrick O'Toole of Ennis.[84]
>Sigmund Freud, before adopting the Edward de Vere identification, toyed with the notion that Shakespeare may not have been English, a doubt strengthened in 1908 after he believed he had detected Latin features in the Chandos portrait.
>The case for an Italian, either Michelangelo Florio or his son John Florio, as author of Shakespeare's works was initially associated with resurgent Italian nationalism of the Fascist era.[89] Michelangelo Florio was proposed by Santi Paladino in 1927, in the Fascist journal L'Impero. The theory is linked to the argument put forward by other anti-Stratfordians that Shakespeare's work shows an intimate knowledge of Italian culture and geography.
>Emilia Lanier's candidacy is also linked to her Italian family background, but involved the additional claim that she was Jewish. Lanier's authorship was proposed by John Hudson in 2007, who identified her as "a Jewish woman of Venetian ancestry", arguing that only a person with her distinctive ethnic background could have written the plays.[94]

This is wewuzzery of the highest order. Of course it's the bloody Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews, plus above all the Arabs. All the meme nationalisms.

>'By far the greatest number of contributions, on both sides of the question, come from Americans; in an 1884 bibliography containing 255 titles, almost two-thirds were written by Americans. In 1895 the Danish critic Georg Brandes fulminated against the "troop of half-educated people" who believed that Shakespeare did not write the plays, and bemoaned the fate of the profession. "Literary criticism," which "must be handled carefully and only by those who had a vocation for it," had clearly fallen into the hand of "raw Americans and fanatical women".'[52]
Best wiki article

>>24502785
A smoking gun would be someone at the time actually saying ‘oh yeah, Shakespeare is a pen name for this other guy’, not circumstantial conjecture. You’d just need a letter, a diary entry, a copyright entry with the stationers guild thing, or indeed a text of one of the plays, predating the first folio, with your candidates name on the title page.
The first folio says it’s written by William Shakespeare, not North. You have to provide positive proof that everyone involved in the production was lying. If there was a conspiracy, find a contemporary reference to the conspiracy

>>24502541
>and those of his cousin.
Isn't it only allegedly his cousin, as in modern people thinking so because of the same name, but there being no proof?

>Certain sections of an unpublished diary, kept for centuries by the North Family, contain exact, or almost exact quotes from Shakespeare’s plays.
Was it actually his diary, or just a play manuscript? Another matter is what type of quotations these are. Are they related to history, to the same type of things North translated and published? Because if so, where are all the poetry quotations, if North was a poet?

>>24502945
>A smoking gun would be someone at the time actually saying ‘oh yeah, Shakespeare is a pen name for this other guy’
Well, that kind of happened with pic related. Shakespeare's name appears for no other reason than to, rather obviously though still technically hidden, claim that Edward De Vere (see the very crude attempt at hiding his name) is Shakespeare.

>>24502945

>A smoking gun would be someone at the time actually saying ‘oh yeah, Shakespeare is a pen name for this other guy’, not circumstantial conjecture.

The McCarthy thesis is that Shakespeare is not a pen name. William was a jack of all trades in the theatre and was buying plays left right and centre for his company as ALL other companies did.
North was disinherited from his family and broke (i.e. like Lear and Prospero and Orlando) and sold his old courtly plays to William. We have records that North was paid for playwrighting for Leicester's men - it's on McCarthy's website and the North wiki page.

There is no conspiracy or pen name required. Groatsworth of Wit and Ben Jonson comment that Shakespeare is using old plays. Some of the comments on this are on McCarthy's website (although there's a lot more, particularly in Jonson's satirical protraits of North and Shakespeare in his plays): https://sirthomasnorth.com/2021/01/04/wouldnt-some-have-noticed-that-shakespeare-was-using-norths-old-plays

Forensic linguistics is not circumstantial evidence, it is direct evidence of a relationship between one text and another. North's linguistic DNA is all over the canon, including from his unpublished manuscripts.

>The first folio says it’s written by William Shakespeare, not North

Even the orthodoxy doesn't believe the First Folio. Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Henry VI, Titus Andronicus etc are all accepted as having more than one author in the texts we have.
Also, the orthodox does not accept the so-called Apocryphal plays even though Shakespeare's name is on them and they were published during his lifetime.

>>24503093
Nta, but when do you think North wrote these plays? In the same time period as is traditionally estimated for Shakespeare, or earlier in the 1580s or 70s even? Because North just seems wayyyy too old to begin writing plays so late.

>>24503103

McCarthy gives his timeline on his website: https://sirthomasnorth.com/chronologies

He documents in his book, and in his academic papers published alone and with June Schlueter, the links between North's life and the plays and why and when he wrote each play (mostly for Leceister's Men).

>>24503093
>>24502958
So you don’t have a single contemporary source naming someone other than Shakespeare as the author of the plays. That is all you have to find. Let us know when you find it.

>>24503161

On the contrary, we have several contemporary sources.
The plays themselves are full of language that comes from North's published writings and unpublished manuscripts. Literally thousands of lines and phrases. and ideas. This is direct evidence North is the original author. The only other alternative is that Shakespeare plagiarised everything North ever wrote, including North's unpublished manuscripts.

And Groatsworth of Wit and Ben Jonson as contemporaries comment on North and Shakespeare and their relationship. Groatsworth even gives a biography of North and his family background.
They are clear Shakespeare is adapting/using old plays. If the plays are not from North, who wrote the source plays that everyone agrees existed i.e. the original Hamlet, Romeo and Julet, Merchant of Venice etc?
Do you accept Shakespeare as author of the Apocrypha? If not, why not, his name is on them.

>>24503142
>https://sirthomasnorth.com/chronologies
I'm sorry anon but there's just so much desperate reasoning. Why would it be utterly ridiculous for Shakespeare to work on an Italian comedy, then a history play, then a Senecan tragedy in a single year? That's not abnormal for an artist or poet. And there's also surprise at a genius being able to create many masterpieces before the so young age of.. 36? Look at Mozart, look at Raphael. Now that I look at the chronology being claimed for the writing of Shakespeare's plays, instead of claiming old man North began writing very late, he's instead claiming that North was writing plays of a style utterly anachronistic for the date. I'm not sure which is more ridiculous. Why would North be the only man writing blank verse plays for decades, with no one else even attempting to catch up to him until the 1580s? It belies the entire development of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama that we can very clearly see. No matter how great a genius is, they can't emerge in a completely different environment, without even the rudiments of the artistic style they would work in. Whoever wrote Shakespeare's plays required Marlowe's plays before him. I also find it completely groundless to describe Henry VIII as 'forgettable', and I would probably say that for The Two Noble Kinsmen as well, if I'd read it.

>>24501061 (OP)
I don’t know where you’re getting these points from, but they were obviously written by someone who knew nothing about the era Shakespeare lived in. The Renaissance was a time when the people who could read read constantly on every subject. It was still believed that one could learn virtually everything about everything. This was especially true for England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Also, the fixation on Italy wasn’t unique to Shakespeare. Italy was the fountainhead of the Renaissance, so everybody in Europe was a huge wopaboo. Just look at some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, like Edmund Spenser for example.

>>24502785
>>24501827
This is the stupidest shit I've ever seen. Some unpublished "passage" by his cousin doesn't prove diddly shit except that North was aware of the plays (some before they were published).
You guys do know that plays are written for the stage and not to be bound as books, right?

>>24503297

The chronology is not in itself that informative, his book goes into detail as to his reasoning for why and when each play was written. You may reject a lot of the chronology - the thousands of phrases and lines in North in Shakespeare still require an explanation.
The oldest surviving blank verse play is Gorbudoc from 1561. McCarthy dates North's Titus Andronicus from the same time period when he was at Lincoln's Inn. From the wiki:
>In 1557, Thomas became Master of the Revels at Lincoln's Inn.[6] In 1560, North was praised by Jasper Heywood in his translation of Senaca's Thyestes for his "stately style" and "goodly grace". Heywood then listed him with other well-known writers at the Inns of Court, Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, and Christopher Yelverton.[7]

Marlowe did not invent English blank verse or English tragedy. Keep in mind essentially every play before the 1590s either is lost or is anonymous. Most of them being lost. Even from the 1590s to the early 17th century most plays were anonymously printed, including some in the Shakespeare canon.

>>24503425

>The Renaissance was a time when the people who could read read constantly on every subject.

The plays evidence an author who knows Greek, Latin, French, Italian and is an expert in the law and uses its language habitually. This does not fit the profile of William. He did not have the resources and therefore leisure time and education to do this. This is the reason why so many lawyers, actors and literati have been sceptical of the authorship - or have been puzzled as to how William acquired the requisite knowledge.

>Also, the fixation on Italy wasn’t unique to Shakespeare. Italy was the fountainhead of the Renaissance, so everybody in Europe was a huge wopaboo. Just look at some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, like Edmund Spenser for example.

Edmund Spenser was part of the Earl of Leicester's entourage who, yes, were obsessed with Italy.
Thomas North wrote plays for the Earl of Leicester's men. This partially explains why the plays are so Italianate. Thomas himself had been to Italy and discusses it in his journal. The journal itself was a source for several plays: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55900663-thomas-north-s-1555-travel-journal

>>24503511
Marlowe may not have been the first to use blank verse in English theatre, but he established the direction it would take in Shakespeare and other poets in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. Shakespeare's full perfection of blank verse, and of drama in general, was simply not possible with a starting point like Gorboduc, which is just written like rhymed verse without the rhyme. It's as impossible as Lisztian chromaticism appearing in the 1820s, and no one would take that as a slight against Beethoven's genius. The only possibility, if North was the author, is that he began writing Shakespeare's works at a rather old age, and I just cannot imagine an old man evolving that much at so late in his career. Although I agree with you that Shakespeare's quotations of North's unpublished writings, if indeed that is reality (I only say this because I haven't yet seen the evidence itself), do require an explanation.

>>24503472

The George North manuscript dates from 1576 when William was barely a teenager in Stratford you retard.

So why does Ben Jonson refer to Shakespeare as writing his own plays in his private notes published posthumously? His description of him seems like the description you would give of someone who is primarily an author and not just a taker-over of other's plays.

>>24501061 (OP)
t. the raped

>>24503607

William did most likely write Merry Wives of Windsor. There are no other good candidates for the Apocrypha, he probably did write these or have a major hand in them. His name is on the apocrypha and there is none of Thomas North's language or usual themes in them which you find in the canon.

>>24503654
But Jonson specifically refers to Shakespeare writing Julius Caesar to criticise one line of it.

>>24503663

No he doesn't. Jonson recalls William "in the person of Caesar" i.e. acting as Caesar.
He quotes William as clowning around, as Caesar, saying: "Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause". This is not a line from Julius Caesar.
He does not say William wrote Julius Caesar. Is it surprising William is acting in a play bought by his acting company from North?

>>24503699
It's in the context of Shakespeare's actors claiming that Shakespeare wrote his works without blotting a line. Jonson misremembered this line from the play:
>Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
>Will he be satisfied.
and built a critique on it. It makes sense that Shakespeare's poetry would sometimes be obnoxious to a poet with as clear a style as Jonson. But it leaves no doubt that Jonson believed Shakespeare was the author of the plays, and Shakespeare's actors believed Shakespeare was the author of the play.

>>24501109
fpbp

>>24503725

The context immediately before the quotation is Jonson chastising William for joking around too much, "His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said in the person of Cæsar..."
Jonson is remembering William messing around with the lines. Nowhere does Jonson say in the text that William wrote Julius Caesar.

Jonson in Poet Ape and Ode To Himself talks about William buying and using old plays. He satirises North and William in Epicene and Every Man out of His Humour and satirises their relationship in Cynthia's Revels.

Shakespeare most likely authored what we have as the "Bad Quartos" i.e. the stage adapations of North's texts. He also likely wrote Merry Wives of Windor and probably the apocrypha. These trivial but successful works fit well with Jonson's criticism of Shakespeare as unlearned and something of a clown and his actors stating "he never blotted a line". The latter comment makes sense if you are writing slapdash banal plays for money, not if you are writing what we have in the canon.

>>24503778
The Merry Wives of Windsor is one of his worst plays because it was specially commissioned by Elizabeth I after seeing Falstaff in Henry IV, so he wrote it quickly, mainly in prose. It’s ridiculous that your evidence for Shakespeare writing Merry Wives and the Apocrypha boils down to “he sucks and they are bad plays so he probably wrote them”. Jonson never describes Shakespeare as clownish and unlearned. If you’re talking about Sogliardo that was obviously in jest if it was indeed a burlesque of him.

>>24503778
>The context immediately before the quotation is Jonson chastising William for joking around too much, "His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too.
Also, that isn’t what wit means here. It means intelligence. i. e. he gets too carried away when writing, it is not measured or refined, which matches with the “never blotted out a line” and contrasts with Jonson’s own staid style

>>24503862

>The Merry Wives of Windsor is one of his worst plays because it was specially commissioned by Elizabeth I after seeing Falstaff in Henry IV, so he wrote it quickly,

This is claimed in the 18th century, there is no contemporary evidence whatsoever for this.

>It’s ridiculous that your evidence for Shakespeare writing Merry Wives and the Apocrypha boils down to “he sucks and they are bad plays so he probably wrote them”.

Lets break it down:
-The Canon (except for Merry Wives of Windsor and Two Noble Kinsmen) contains thousands of phrases, lines and ideas from Thomas North's published and unpublished writings.
-Shakespeare either obsessively plagiarised all this or these are North's plays as they contain North's language and ideas AND closely mirror North's life experiences (his training and practice in the law, his travel in Italy and France, his military service, his experience as a playwright for Leicester's Men and Inns of Court, his disinheritance from his family and poverty, his knowledge of ancient and contemporary languages, etc etc etc).
-The so-called Apocrypha has no North in it and it is ascribed to Shakespeare in his lifetime. There is no other obvious author for this writing so it was probably written by William and it matches his level of education and profile.
-Similarly Merry Wives of Windsor clearly has an autobiographical William in the play and is banal much like the Apocrypha and has no North in it. Therefore William likely wrote it.

Even in his eulogy for William in the First Folio, Jonson states he had little Latin and less Greek i.e. he was unlearned. The portraits of William in Jonson's plays are of a social climber and clownish wit. Furthermore we have Jonson discussing William buying and using old plays in Poet Ape and Ode to Himself

>>24503872

He's talking about the wit of William the person, Jonson is remembering "when he said". Its clear he is talking about William's conversation he is not talking about writing in the context of the passage:
>His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said in the person of Cæsar, one speaking to him...

>>24501061 (OP)
Can you post evidence that North wrote any plays?

>>24503974

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_North

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_North#/media/File:Leicester-Mens-Play-Corrected-2-.webp

>Roger pays both Thomas and Leicester’s Men for a play performed at court in 1580

Also the thousands of phrases and ideas from North throughout the plays that require us to conclude William was the greatest plagiarist in history if North wasn't the original author.

>>24504013
I’m not sure that’s sufficient evidence. You’re basically saying there’s thirty six source plays, right? Where are they?

>Dennis McCarthy himself pointed out in an interview with Barbara Bogaev on NPR when asked if George North could be Shakespeare, he responded: "No. That would be impossible and ridiculous [LAUGHS]. If I may jump in on that. It’s so clear that it’s only a few passages, and Shakespeare’s rewritten it in his own language. And it’s quite clear that George North is an okay writer, not great. Shakespeare liked the ideas that he collected and collected all into one manuscript, but he definitely isn’t any more than that, than an author of an important source."

>>24504033

>I’m not sure that’s sufficient evidence.

We don't even have a contemporary document showing Shakespeare was paid for one play, we have one for North as above.
And we have thousands of phrases and ideas from North in the canon. This requires explanation if you don't believe North is the original author.

>You’re basically saying there’s thirty six source plays, right? Where are they?

The bulk of them are in the canon we have as North's language is all over them.
Its mainstream knowledge that there are source plays for Shakespeare (the Ur Hamet, original Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet etc), the Mccarthy thesis gives you an answer for these source plays' author.

>>24504013
>thousands of phrases and ideas from North throughout the plays
If all the proof you have are phrases and ideas that were used for full plays written later, the very obvious conclusion is that Shakespeare pillaged the "phrases and ideas" for material. I find it hard to believe that this guy went through his own material to make the plays and then he put someone else's name on them.

>>24504065
Right, so no evidence. Thanks.

>>24504067

You are committed to believing William Shakespeare obsessively plagiarised thousands of phrases and ideas (including somehow plagiarising private manuscripts of North)?
What is more believable is that North was the original author, we don't need to posit William Shakespeare as the greatest plagiarist in history.

>I find it hard to believe that this guy went through his own material to make the plays and then he put someone else's name on them.

North sold the plays, just as Groatsworth of Wit and Ben Jonson discuss. North was disinherited and broke.
Do you believe Shakespeare also wrote the Apocrypha as his name is on them?

so how did a country bumpkin get the specifics on law, medicine, and aristocratic beef

>>24504107
John Shakespeare (William's father) elevated his social standing through marriage to the Ardens, a family of local nobility, and built wealth as a successful glover with enough capital to own multiple properties and make significant loans of 100 and 80 pounds at interest. William surpassed his father's achievements, securing a coat of arms that granted him gentleman status and acquiring extensive land holdings throughout the Stratford area. Far from being a "country bumpkin ", William Shakespeare belonged firmly to the landed gentry class.

Is this just some guy shilling his book?

>>24504578
yeah he's been all over /lit/ the last few days pushing some youtube channel and his north theory. it seems to be entirely researched by wikipedia and he seems to have done next to zero research on william shakespeare's life to try and understand. most likely he's a butthurt jealous classist like almost all of the anti-stratfordians.

>>24504118

Not responsive to the question.

>>24505241

>done next to zero research on william shakespeare's life to try and understand

The records of William's life are pretty clear. He was a shrewd businessman and jack of all trades in the theatre. We have no contemporary records of his having great education and his will contains nothing that indicates a learned man. The epitaph on his tomb, written by him, is doggerel.

This has no resemblance to the author of the plays who was extremely widely read and knew ancient and contemporary languages and was intimately familiar with the law. This required education and leisure time William did not have.
Groatsworth of Wit and Ben Jonson satirise William as a social climber and unlearned and discuss his using/adapting old plays.

>>24505574
Why is his epitaph significant evidence for you? It’s only there to deter grave robbers and is like five lines. There is no indication in the plays that the author knew Greek. The plays do not show someone intimately familiar with law, or particularly well educated. Robert Green was a jealous high born man who resented the upstart Shakespeare’s success, and also lampooned other writers. Jonson and Shakespeare were extremely good friends. Read his poem in memory of Shakespeare which you ignore because the entire poem is about him being brilliant and one of the greatest writers of the English canon.

>>24505688

>Why is his epitaph significant evidence for you?

The epitaph is very interesting as it is the one piece of writing that all Stratfordians and non-Stradfordians agree William wrote.
The orthodox claim is that the author of Hamlet and King Lear wrote cheap doggerel for his own grave. That is so obviously incredible and bizarre that it doesn’t require further comment.

> There is no indication in the plays that the author knew Greek.

Comprehensive overview of this (belief in Earl of Oxford as the author not required):
https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/rediscovery-shakespeares-greater-greek/

>The plays do not show someone intimately familiar with law

500+ Dictionary of Shakespeare's legal language:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/shakespeares-legal-language-9780826477781/

This facility with the law was first noticed by Malone in the 18th century and is part of the reason why many trained lawyers such as Sir George Greenwood and Justice John Paul Steevens have doubted William is the author.

>or particularly well educated.

Standard source reference for Shakespeare, eight massive volumes:
https://rarebooksfinder.com/rarebooks/narrative-dramatic-sources-of-shakespeare-8-volume-set/

>Robert Green was a jealous high born man who resented the upstart Shakespeare’s success, and also lampooned other writers.

If this is reference to Groatsworth of Wit, the text is clear. Shakespeare is a social climber and uses old plays from North. It also gives a biography of North and why he is selling. Jonson in Poet Ape and Ode to Himself and in his plays says the same that Shakespeare was a user of old plays

>Jonson and Shakespeare were extremely good friends. Read his poem in memory of Shakespeare which you ignore because the entire poem is about him being brilliant and one of the greatest writers of the English canon.

By this logic all the commendatory prefaces to aristocrats in renaissance books requires us to believe that the aristocratic patrons of the time were all beautiful geniuses.
Jonson is a writing a eulogy for the First Folio, a business project by two former colleagues and business partners of William. What are you expecting to hear?

>>24502785
If your smoking gun is so strong, why is the evidence first presented merely lines with similar word choice and themes, and not direct quotes? Even more troublesome is presenting a work published years after Richard II as the "obvious" source material. This is the sort of evidence one might use as corroboration after already presenting a strong case. In no way do they stand on their own as smoking guns.

The side-by-side comparisons presented look far more like Shakespeare copying the plot and ideas in his own writing style than North actually rewriting them in the beauty of Shakespeare. It makes a fair case for North being another reference for material, but a very poor case for North actually having written Shakespeare's works.

>>24501061 (OP)
Is there any conjecture against Stratfordian authorship that doesn't rely on pure classism?

>>24505551
Your question is poorly formulated.

Muhammad was 40 years old and couldn't read when he began to recite the Quaran. Who was the Arabian Bacon who secretly authored it for him?

>>24506081

On the one hand you say the same language and ideas are a good case for a relationship between these texts, in the next you say it is "troublesome" for Nepos Lives to be a source for Richard II.
So which is it?

If you wish to claim William somehow had access to North's personal translation papers for Nepo's Lives and used it for his play, or that North plagiarised Shakespeare for his Nepo's Lives, you still have to explain the thousands of ideas and passages that indispituably are taken directly from North. William as the greatest plagiarist in history? And we are left still not knowing who wrote the original source plays for Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, etc in this William as plagiarist account.
We know already that whole lines and speeches taken from North's Plutarch's Lives are in the Roman plays. We now know, thanks to plagiarism software, that all of the canon is in North's language, including from North's unpublished manuscripts and marginalia.

We also know that Groatsworth of Wit and Ben Jonson discuss Shakespeare as buying and using old plays and they and other writers like Nashe discuss North as a disinheritated scholar knight.

On top of that, North's life matches the canon in his training and practice in the law, his travel in Italy and France, his military service, his experience as a playwright for Leicester's Men and Inns of Court, his disinheritance from his family and poverty, his knowledge of ancient and contemporary languages, etc etc etc.

>>24506211
I genuinely don’t know why you’re so obsessed with your theory other than to shill your book. We know for a fact that Shakespeare himself had direct access to many historical works and ran in certain circles. Your scholarship on this is very poor, and I would say embarrassing but I’m holding back because I haven’t actually read your book. You continue to insist that North is being cited here and North alone but this is just not correct and, again, though I haven’t read your book, I would assume that you’re counting as citations very brief fragments which could have easily been commonplace sayings or well known from elsewhere. Especially given your apparently smoking gun evidence is a fucking Google search in quotes is truly absurd. Spelling during that time was basically absent and to Google search an exact phrase and not have it come up is just silly. I mean, I appreciate your commitment to the bit, but there are other theories far better than your North theory with much better and more convincing research attached to them. I’ll give a starting point with a very basic, just fundamental question about Shakespeare himself and you can try and sort of start over with your ideas. Begin by researching the printer of his early poems and understand just how well they know each other.

>>24503181
>Literally thousands of lines and phrases. and ideas.
Quote ten

>>24506641

No problem, see more than 10 in the pic.

>>24506624

Google is your friend btw. This thesis has been around for more than a decade with several academic papers, high-profile news articles and five books on the topic across three different authors. If you're not interested in Shakespeare thats fine, why are you discussing it online?
Examination of just some of the North language in the canon: https://sirthomasnorth.com/another-day-another-borrowing

>>24505574
>shrewd businessman
Sounds like someone who would have a lot of incentive to study the law.

>>24506723
It would be more convincing if you could draw evidence from one work by North and show its parallels with one work by Shakespeare, but similar idioms spread across large bodies of work may just as well be coincidence. Find something by North that you think lines up with Shakespeare and do a direct, one-to-one comparison. If you can't, then allow your theory to be falsifiable. You can't just marry yourself to a theory and ignore all excluding evidence

>>24506810
Especially since we know Shakespeare was invilved in suits because some of the records survive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellott_v_Mountjoy

>>24506723
>30 something word paragraph
>7 words in common (including is, but, and a)

>>24501664
this is the funniest vid ive seen this year

>>24506723
Okay cool. I’m just going to ignore you now, because not only do you not know what you’re talking about. You do not care that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Listen, everyone knows Shakespeare “borrowed”/plagiarized/bought work from source material. This is common knowledge to anyone with even a passing, tangential interest in the subject. To anyone who’s interested to the answer to my question, Richard Field, who printed Shakespeare’s first poems, was Shakespeare’s childhood friend from Stratford. He eventually became one of the best/most respected printers in London at the time, though no one disputes that even though he was from the same corner as William Shakespeare of Stratford because classist academic and internet dipshits don’t care about Elizabethan era print quality, but I digress. Anyway, his shop was located in the Blackfriars area of London, where Shakespeare’s King’s Men would eventually take partial ownership of a theatre there. And yes, he had a copy of Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. This has literally been known for centuries.

>>24501109

>>24501061 (OP)
We've had this thread over 500 times old man

>>24507157

>similar idioms spread across large bodies of work may just as well be coincidence.

Given the extent of the parallels with North's idiom and the ideas and the idiom and ideas of the canon, the claim that this is a coincidence is simply not plausible. The mathematical odds against this are inconceivably huge.
This kind of forensic linguistic evidence holds up in court (see the Unabomber) and any competent expert witness would easily demonstrate in a trial that the same author wrote the North and Shakespeare texts.

>>24509144
What Browne got to do with it?

>>24507157

>It would be more convincing if you could draw evidence from one work by North and show its parallels with one work by Shakespeare

Also there is already a book length study of one work of North, his 1555 Italy journal, and its parallel passages with the Shakespeare canon: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55900663-thomas-north-s-1555-travel-journal

Video defending against a critique of the above book's analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gunid1Tiwc