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North by Shakespeare

A Rogue Scholar's Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard's Work

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By Michael Blanding

Read by Will Collyer

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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around March 30, 2021. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

From the acclaimed author of The Map Thief comes the true story of a self-taught Shakespeare sleuth's quest to prove his eye-opening theory about the source of the English language's most famous plays.

A work of gripping non-fiction, North by Shakespeare presents the twinning narratives of rogue scholar Dennis McCarthy, called "the Steve Jobs of the Shakespeare community," and Sir Thomas North, an Elizabethan courtier whom McCarthy believes to be the undiscovered source for Shakespeare's plays.

For the last fifteen years, Dennis McCarthy has obsessively pursued the true source of Shakespeare's works, with fascinating results. Using plagiarism software, he has found direct links between Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and other plays and Thomas North's published and unpublished writings-as well as Shakespearean plotlines seemingly lifted straight from North's colorful life.

McCarthy's wholly original conclusion is this: Shakespeare wrote the plays, but he adapted them from source plays written by North decades before-many of them penned on behalf of North's patron Robert Dudley, in his efforts to woo Queen Elizabeth. That bold theory answers many lingering questions about the Bard with compelling new evidence, including a newly unearthed journal of North's travels through France and Italy, filled with locations and details appearing in Shakespeare's plays.

North by Shakespeare alternates between the dramatic life of Thomas North, the intrigues of the Tudor court, the rivalries of English Renaissance theatre, and academic outsider Dennis McCarthy's attempts to air his provocative ideas in the clubby world of Shakespearean scholarship. Through it all, Blanding employs his keen journalistic eye to craft a highly readable drama, up-ending our understanding of the beloved playwright and his "singular genius."

On Sale
Mar 30, 2021
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781549123429

Michael Blanding

About the Author

Michael Blanding is a Boston-based investigative journalist, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, Slate, The Boston Globe Magazine, Boston magazine, and other publications. He is author of The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps (2014), which was a New York Times bestseller and an NPR Book of the Year; and The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink (2010). A former writing fellow at Brandeis University and The Harvard Kennedy School, he has taught feature writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, and GrubStreet Writers.

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