The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work by Michael Blanding

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar's Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard's Work by Michael Blanding The true story of a self-taught Shakespeare sleuth’s quest to prove his eye-opening theory about the source of the world’s most famous plays, taking readers inside the vibrant era of Elizabethan England as well as the contemporary scene of Shakespeare scholars and obsessives. Acclaimed author of The Map Thief, Michael Blanding presents the twinning narratives of renegade 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, McCarthy has obsessively pursued the true origins of Shakespeare’s works. Using plagiarism software, he has found direct links between Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and other plays and North’s published and unpublished writings—as well as Shakespearean plotlines seemingly lifted straight from North’s colorful life. Unlike those who believe someone else secretly wrote Shakespeare, 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, he believes, were penned on behalf of North’s patron Robert Dudley, in his efforts to woo Queen Elizabeth. That bold theory addresses many lingering mysteries about the Bard with compelling new evidence, including a newly discovered 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 enigmatic life of Thomas North, the intrigues of the Tudor court, the rivalries of English Renaissance theater, 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 captivating drama, upending our understanding of the beloved playwright and his “singular genius.” Michael Blanding is a Boston-based investigative journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, Slate, The Boston Globe, and other publications. He is the author of North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work (2021), and 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. He has also been a journalism fellow at Brandeis University and Harvard University, and taught writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, and GrubStreet Writers.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

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It's that popular and important. So yeah, there you go. Also go to Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, some other place. I don't remember what it is. Facebook. Oh, I've heard of that place. You can go there and you can see all the different groups that we post in and all the different things we're doing.

You can also go to, let's see, goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss. And with all the plugs you can also go to let's see goodreads.com fortune s chris voss and with all the plugs out of the way let's get right to it today we have an amazing author on the show he's the author of the new book north by shakespeare we're going to get really intellectual here a rogue scholar's quest for the truth behind the bar's work oh that sounds pretty interesting and this episode is brought to you by a sponsor ifi-audio.com and their micro idst signature is a top of the range desktop transportable dac and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones it has two brown burr dac chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now.

I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion distortion and hiss from your listening experience check out their new incredible lineup of dax and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com michael blanding is on the show joining us today he is a boston-based investigative journalist whose work has appeared in the new york times wired slate the boston globe and other publications should i be saying that bossy mess anyway he is the author of north by shakespeare

a rogue scholar's quest for the truth behind the bard's work that just came out the map thief the gripping story of an esteemed rare map dealer who made millions stealing priceless maps which was a new york times bestseller and an npr book of the year he's also been a journalist fellow at bradis bradelius university i'll let him correct me for that and harvard university clearly i went to public school and he taught writing at tufts university emerson college and groves street writers how do you pronounce that name, Michael, and welcome the show? That would be- Brandeis University. Just outside of Boston. I can't even do the Boston accent. Boise, actually in Boise, Massachusetts. I'm not even doing it right, I'm sure.

So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's great to be here. I've been listening to some episodes of the show and you've got some great guests and I'm really thrilled to be among them. We are honored to have you. Give us your plugs so people can find out more about you on the interwebs. Yeah. So I am an investigative journalist and my website is michaelblanding.com. That's probably the best way to find me and all my links. And I'm on Twitter at Michael Blanding, Instagram at Michael underscore Blanding and Facebook at Michael Blanding writer. So you can find me all over the web. There you go. And what motivated you Blending, Instagram at Michael underscore Blending and Facebook at Michael Blending Writer. So you can find me all over the web. There you go. And what motivated you want to

write this book? Yeah. So I first found out about this book when I had given a talk for my last book, The Map Thief. And a guy came up to me afterwards, and he introduced himself as Dennis McCarthy. And he said that he was an independent scholar. And he had written this book about maps and biogeography himself. And we started talking, and he invited me out for drinks. And we had a couple of drinks with him and his adult daughter. And after a couple of martinis, he suddenly leans across the table, and he says, I've got the story for you. I have found this source for Shakespeare that no one has ever heard of before. It's this manuscript that's a source for a dozen of Shakespeare's plays.

It's going to be huge news. And another thing, Shakespeare never even used this source, but it was used by this other writer named Thomas North. And Shakespeare used Thomas North's writings to write all of his plays. And by this point, I'm looking for the exits. And I'm thinking, how do I get back to my B&B? And this guy is a lunatic. But he started sending me this information later when I got back home. And it was just this really fascinating stuff that he'd been working on for years and years. And it just sucked me in. And I was like, oh, my God, I've got to write about this guy. And the result is this book. So, Michael, give us an overarching thing of the book. What is this

about? And what does it entail? Yeah, so North by Shakespeare is a book about this independent scholar named Dennis McCarthy, and his theories about Shakespeare and how he wrote the plays. And it's a bit different than some of the theories that are out there that somebody else wrote Shakespeare's work. He actually believes that Shakespeare wrote all the plays attributed to him. But he also believes that Shakespeare used these other source plays by this other writer named Sir Thomas North, and that he actually adapted those plays to create these great works of literature that we know today. So would that be plagiarism?

Yes and no. I mean, by our standards today, it probably would be. But back then, the whole idea of plagiarism didn't really exist. And in fact, the word plagiarism didn't even appear in the English language until much later. So back then, writers were taking other works and freely rewriting them, putting their name on it. It was all totally acceptable. Wow. Now, does this include his major works? That's the amazing thing about it is that you look at all of these works, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Richard III, all of the most seminal works of Shakespeare. And Dennis McCarthy, the scholar that I talked about, believes that they were all based on these earlier works, all by the same writer, Sir Thomas North, which seems outlandish and seems something you want to maybe roll your eyes at. But he has amassed

just an incredible amount of evidence that supports this from the life and works of Thomas North and how they're reflective in the plays. This is crazy. You took in, who is this Dennis McCarthy and how did you meet him? We'll put you down this road. Yeah. So Dennis McCarthy is a New Hampshire based scholar who is totally self-taught. In fact, he's a college dropout. He was never formally trained in Shakespeare and spent his twentiess going through a wild period where he was actually playing ultimate frisbee professionally and not your typical resume for a scholar. But he was just one of these people that was incredibly smart and was able to get into any subject that he really set his mind to. And the first subject was, as I said, biogeography

and looking how plants and animal species move around the world. And he wrote a book about that. And then he started looking into Shakespeare about 15 years ago. And that just sucked him in. And he's basically spent every waking moment researching Shakespeare and his plays ever since. So how controversial is this? Like, do you have people throwing things at you? Just about. Yeah, virtually, at least on the internet, I've gotten a couple of tomatoes thrown at me. It's funny because there's always been these questions about Shakespeare and about how he could have written these plays. You've got this Glover's son from Stratford with no real formal education. We're supposed to believe that he has written these plays that deal with courtly life and soldiers at war and travel in Italy and all of these experiences that, at least as far as we know, Shakespeare never had. And so this provides a really elegant explanation for how Shakespeare could be Shakespeare and be this genius that put these plays on the stage, but at the same time have gotten all the knowledge that actually goes into these works from this other writer who actually had these experiences and had this

education. This is definitely controversial because you're really disrupting like all these years of stuff. With this McCarthy theory, who is this Thomas North in? Yeah, so Thomas North is best known as a writer who translated this work called Plutarch's Lives, which is this biography, set of biographies of all these Greek and Roman generals and rulers. And we know, scholars totally agree that source was used for Shakespeare's Roman plays, like Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. That was Shakespeare's main source for those plays. But he also wrote a number of other works, this one called The Dial of Princes and this other one called The Moral Philosophy of Dhoni, which is this sort of strange collection of animal fables like Aesop's Fables. Shakespeare's plays. And he has just found literally thousands of phrases in common between all these works by Thomas North and these works by Shakespeare that leads him to believe that Thomas North wrote these earlier plays. Did Thomas North have a large body of work,

or was it a small body of work? He had these three major translations, and then there was one more minor one. But altogether, it amounts to about a million words. So it's not insubstantial. And that's about the same amount of words as Shakespeare's plays as well. So there's a roughly equal kind of corpus of writing between the two. This is pretty interesting. And they use plagiarism software. I didn't even know they had that, but 2021 and they use that to, to compare the syntaxes and stuff like that of the writings? Yeah, that's right. It's the same kind of software that professors use to see if college students

are plagiarizing writers on their term papers. And Dennis was able to use it on these works of literature. And like I say, these thousands of phrases came up. And then what was even more compelling to me than just the number of phrases was that they seem to be used in these kind of passages that are very similar to the passages in Shakespeare's plays. So there'll be like these phrases, but then they'll also be expressing these similar ideas. And he just finds that over and over. And I'm a journalist.

I'm paid to be skeptical and uphold my judgment. But it just became just so compelling to me after a while. I was like, I've got to write about this. I've got to let other people know about this. I guess a good question is if North's plays did exist, why hasn't someone uncovered one in an archive or a library somewhere? How come you're the first one who's discovering this or are you the first one discovering this from your research? Yeah, that's really the thousand dollar question here is if Thomas North supposedly wrote these plays,

then where are they? And it's a good question. But the way that Dennis answers it, at least, is that so many of the plays from that period are lost. We know that there were probably about 3,000 plays written in the Elizabethan period, and we have maybe 20% of them today. And only 10% do we even, you know, have the text of the other 10%. We just know their names, or we know a little bit about their plots. And in fact, none of Shakespeare's plays have survived in manuscript. The only reason we have Shakespeare's plays is because they were published. And so these plays wouldn't have been published. And so it'd actually be more surprising if they did survive than if they didn't. This is almost as controversial

as finding out like Led Zeppelin stole most of their early material. It is. In some ways it's controversial because it's changing our view of Shakespeare. But in another way, it's really not that far from what people already know,

which is that Shakespeare did adapt these stories. There's virtually no Shakespeare play that he created by himself. They all go back to these older stories that Italy or France or Greece. And in many cases, scholars even know that he adapted these earlier source plays

and they even know the names of them. They know the dates when they were performed. And so really all that Dennis is saying is that they were all written by the same guy. And now that is a big leap for a traditional Shakespeare scholar. I'm not going to pretend that it's not, but it's not that big. It's not saying that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays and Shakespeare put his name on it. And there was this vast conspiracy of people trying to hide it. It's somewhere between the two. I would say it's an interesting middle ground between the two theories. This could have been an applaud by the Illuminati, I'm thinking.

That doesn't figure into it as far as I know, but I wouldn't rule anything out. On the cover of your book, there's a kind of a literary sort of picture drawing illustration of what looks like the face of Shakespeare. And there's a hole punched through it with an eye. What was the choice behind that or meaning? Yeah, that was a cool image that the publisher came up with. And I had nothing to do with it. I'm just in charge of the words.

I'm not in charge of the images. But once I saw it, I was like, yes, this really represents it. The story where you have this image of Shakespeare that we all like know just from the outline. We literally know that Shakespeare. And then you have this torn fabric and this, you know, other figure peeking through. And that's really, in a literary sense, what Dennis's theory is. So it really just captured it perfectly. So what does it mean to you? Is that Thomas behind, the eye behind the picture? Yeah, I actually asked the publisher, I was like, who is this guy? Because there are no pictures of

Thomas North that have survived. He was a sort of minor gentleman of the court. So there's no portraits. They were like, no, this is just a 16th century portrait of a man or something is the actual title of it and i don't know who the artist is so it's just a representative picture it's not actually thomas poking shakespeare's eye for being maybe a plagiarist possibly the i had a question there but how is mccarthy's ideas and of course your book been received by shakespearean scholars and these there's a whole industry of shakes the shakespearean works even here in utah i think down in whatchamacallit they have a they have a shakespearean annual festival so yeah you're really pissing off a lot of people's money yeah it will it will not surprise you to learn that this has not been accepted with open arms and in fact dennis I should say, Dennis has one scholar who believes 100%

in what he has come up with. And she's a pretty big name. She's the editor of a Shakespeare journal or a former editor of a Shakespeare journal. Her name's June Schluter. And she became his partner in crime and actually wrote about a lot of the stuff with him. So he's not completely ignored,

but he has spent 15 years trying any way possible to get mainstream Shakespeare scholars to listen to him. So he's not completely ignored. But he has spent 15 years trying any way possible to get mainstream Shakespeare scholars to listen to him. And he's written papers, and he's contacted them, and they almost treat him like a pariah, like just personally attacking him. And rather than looking and saying, okay, some of the stuff you say, maybe there's more of a connection between these two figures than we knew about, and let's explore that. Anytime you suggest that Shakespeare may not have written the plays by himself in exactly the way that we believe they just will not give him the time of day. And that's what really inspired me to write the book. I was like,

this guy's onto something here. I don't know if it's completely true, but this could really change the way we read Shakespeare's plays and these works that we've known and loved for years. And this guy needs a hearing and we need to pay attention to this, whether he's right or not. And so as a journalist, I was like, if the scholars won't listen to him, I'm going to write about it. There you go. You piss everybody off. Right. And now I'm pissing people off and they're writing horrible things on my Facebook page. Oh, God, I can see that. But I can take it.

I've been a journalist for a long time and I've seen a lot of that over the years. I have that sometimes on our review videos we do on the Chris Voss Show because we review a lot of products too. And every now and then we fail a product or we don't give it the high marks that it claims on its marketing. We try and be honest with our audience and true to ourselves and be unbiased as much as we can. But if we don't feel, think something has good value, but man, I tell you, your YouTube video can get a million thumbs down and hateful comments all day long. If you

piss off the wrong people. In fact, I, sometimes we've had all offices of whoever product we fail. I swear to God, they send every employee after us on YouTube. So it's always fun. So he spent 15 years of his life researching the origin of these plays. And this is pretty interesting. He goes into this. Is there anything redeemable about Shakespeare's things? Tom Peters used to have this thing in his book, one of his books that I read years ago about business stuff. And he said, you're not really stealing ideas most times unless you violate a copyright but you're creative swiping he used to call it and you're taking an idea and improving it almost in a sense of copyright i forget what it's called where you can if you build on it you add on to it parody so is there anything redeemable left based on the research that you get where you can go at least he took it made something something better? Yeah. The analogy that Dennis uses is that it's Peter Jackson adapting Lord of the Rings. J.R.

Tolkien's a brilliant writer and the Lord of the Rings are these amazing books, but you're not going to put those on the screen as is. It takes a real hand to convert those into something that somebody's going to sit and watch for two and a half hours. And so it may be something very similar here that this other writer, Thomas North, wrote these more literary, more sort of courtly plays that would be performed before the queen. And Shakespeare's brilliance may have been taking and putting them in these rowdy public theaters where people have very limited attention spans and we're ready with the tomatoes, speaking of which, and put them on in a way that people would fall in love with and watch for literally the next 400 years. So in my mind, it doesn't take away from Shakespeare

and Shakespeare's genius, but it presents it as more of a collaboration like a lot of great books of art are today. And the writers working together rather than this sort of one person who is this kind of all-encompassing figure yeah maybe north can get some of those some of those residual checks exactly the north family estate or something yeah kind of like you know kind of like led zeppelin

had to reissue a bunch of greatest hits things to pay back all the lawsuits and stuff for all the stuff they did and technically led zeppelin did that i've heard the original songs that they scraped off of yeah and yeah it's at first i was like come on man seriously lawsuits over everything but then you listen to the songs and you're like holy shit like even stairway to heaven i can't remember the name of the band they ripped that from but they took the music too and you're just like they did make it better but right right you know they had to settle those lines. It just makes sense, Chris, because so many of the movies we watch and the shows we watch on Netflix, they're the process of a lot of hands all working together and taking things

from all kinds of other sources and adapting it and rewriting it and editing it. And my writing, as much as I want to think it's brilliant without a good editor, it's terrible. It makes sense to me as a writer that there would be this kind of more collaborative process. But man, people take their Shakespeare very seriously. And this image of William from Stratford is just so solid in people's mind that they really can't get over it sometimes. So was that the real difference between North and Shakespeare? Was his plays ever put on in theaters?

Or was that why Shakespeare really became more memorable? He put the plays on in theaters. Yeah. So at least in Dennis's theory, so Thomas North lived several decades before Shakespeare. And he was a gentleman of the court. And he was a foreign diplomat. And he was involved in all of the kind of courtly intrigues at the time. And he was particularly involved with this one Lord named Robert Dudley, who was the Earl

of Leicester. And it was so fun to research this and find all these great characters from Elizabethan times. They're all these larger than life figures. And this Lord, Lord Leicester spent most of his time trying to marry Queen Elizabeth. And he had this group of players that he employed to write plays on his behalf. And most of the plays were either about trying to get Elizabeth to marry him or trashing anybody else who wanted to marry Queen Elizabeth. That was a rough Tinder scene back then. Yeah, really. It was a very public dating scene where everybody is putting their hearts out on the stage, literally.

And so Dennis believes that Thomas North was one of these writers who was writing for Lester's Men, this group of playwrights. And in fact, a lot of the plays have these sort of like allusions to these other suitors and crashing these other suitors that Elizabeth was interested in or had these kind of allusions to Lester's ancestors and trying to beef them up and make the case for why she should marry him instead. So it would have been these kind of more courtly plays that were presented by these players and then later adapted to the public stage and kind of the rowdy theaters of London when that scene really got going a few decades later. That's crazy, man. That's a lot of work just to plan to check, man. That's a lot of work just to

plant a chick, man. Oh, it's amazing. Hardy, I describe in the book is he threw this party called the Kenilworth Festival that lasted for 19 days and people drank like 40 barrels of beer a day. And he would have these entertainments that even today they'd be hard to pull off. He had this lake and this mechanical dolphin with like musicians inside and the person on the back singing a song and it was all just designed to try to get Elizabeth to marry him and in fact scholars today look at that as like the inspiration for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and that's one example of how it may have influenced the plays and of course Shakespeare never attended the festival so they don't know how Shakespeare could have written about it but

Thomas North and his brother were guests at the festival, would have seen this firsthand and could have adapted it into the plays. But yeah, it was unreal, kind of the lengths that they would go to for their entertainments back then. Sounds like I should read your book just for dating advice for me. Of course, Lester never succeeded in marrying Queen Elizabeth. She was the virgin queen until her death. Maybe it's not the model to follow, but it makes for entertaining reading anyway. Yeah. All right. I'm scratching that. I'll still read your book though, but I'm not going to follow his advice. It's entertaining.

The dating stuff. Why did McCarthy not write his own book and you did it? Yeah, that's a good question. The short answer is he's been trying to write his book and he's been trying to write this. He has written a couple of books that are more scholarly that have been actually published. So I'll put that out there. But he's been trying to write a book that would be more accepted to lay out his whole theory, and just been having so much trouble getting it published, because these scholars come out and attack it. And so I said to him, look, I've been writing about your work. I've been really enjoying talking to you.

Why don't I write the book and use my cred as a journalist and put some of your ideas out there? And of course, I thought it would be a really boring book to just sit across the table from him and talk about ideas all the time. So I was like, let's go travel together. Let's go to Italy and France and England and visit some of these locations where some of these plays are set and where Thomas North traveled and see if we can bring it alive for readers in an entertaining way. And so it's been this kind of strange collaboration, but you're right. It's like, why are you writing a book about a guy writing a book? But I assure you, it's more than that. Yeah, there you go. So what did you guys

find when you took those travels and stuff? Yeah, it was really amazing. One of the questions is, how can Shakespeare know about Italy? Because Shakespeare never traveled to Italy. And in fact, as far as we know, never traveled out of Stratford or London. But Thomas North went to Italy at least once and probably twice on these trips. And we were able to retrace the steps and go to, for example, this church in Mantua, which has these lifelike wax statues in the church. And then that same day, Thomas North went to this palace where there were these beautiful frescoes on the wall by this artist named Giulio Romano. And now Giulio Romano is famous because

he's the only artist that Shakespeare mentions in the plays. And in fact, he's mentioned in The Winter's Tale as the creator of one of, as this wax statue, which comes to life at the end of the play. And so you just see this, the life of Thomas North in these experiences that he was having, and he wrote about them in this journal he was keeping at the time, and then you see them in the play. And once you start knowing about that, and you start actually looking for them, you can start seeing them in literally every one of the plays. There's something from either Thomas Norris' life or the life of his patron, the Earl of Leicester. And just going there in person and being there with Dennis and talking about these things

on location was just so cool for me as a writer, because I could just imagine it was almost like, being like Scrooge and one of the ghosts from A Christmas Carol, looking at this history that took place back in time and then trying to bring it alive for readers and describe it. And so it was just a really fun way to write a book. That certainly is an interesting tell, isn't it? Because he didn't travel much Shakespeare. And wow, that also is a dead giveaway. What other dead giveaways did you guys pick up on? Or was that the perjury or not the perjury software and etc, etc? No, there's just so many of them. Like, for example, Thomas North wrote this other book,

as I told you, The Moral Philosophy of Dhoni, which is this sort of book of animal fables. And it was published originally in Venice in the 1560s. And so Thomas North would have gone to Venice to get this book in about 1569, 1570. And so what was happening in Venice in 1570, the Turks were invading Cyprus, which is the setting for Shakespeare's play Othello, and forms the backdrop and the drama for all of that play that Shakespeare and Thomas North could have been in Venice at that time. And then you start looking at Othello, and there's all of these references in the plays that come from North's book, The Moral Philosophy of Doni. And in fact, it sounds really bizarre, but the character of Iago, who's this, you know, great villain, one of the greatest

villains in literature, is actually a dead ringer for this character in this book, The Moral Philosophy of Doni, which is this kind of insidious mule who tries to take over the kingdom from this lion. And if you read Norse book, and then you read the play, you realize that it's the same story. And Iago is just like this mule, and he uses the same words and same language. And he uses the same sort of techniques and strategies to take over the kingdom that Iago uses to try to take over from Othello and try to bring down Othello's downfall. And it's just one of like dozens of examples that McCarthy, Dennis has been able to find. And it's really just so fascinating, really causes you to read the play differently. That is crazy. Yeah, it's crazy.

It's almost, do you see in the future, maybe we have to put an asterisk on? I certainly, as a journalist, I try not to come down one way or the other. I lay out all the facts and I even question them throughout the book. And I try to be a stand-in for the reader. And I say, that sounds good. This one I'm a little bit less sure about, but I wouldn't have written the book if I don't think there's something there. I think that's the most important thing. And I think potentially there's a lot there and potentially Dennis may be right about a lot of this and it could really cause us to, I think there's this fear that, okay, you're going to take away from Shakespeare by proposing this theory. But for me anyway, it adds to Shakespeare and actually adds all these other layers

onto the plays that you can see them in a different way and in a richer and a deeper way that really brings them alive. For my money, I'm like, why wouldn't people want to look into this? Why wouldn't scholars want to investigate this and see what's true and what's not? And even if only 10% of it's true, it's pretty amazing. That is pretty cool. I always try and like my favorite artists, like Steely Dan, you try and figure out because they were so complex. You try and figure out what the influences were and what drugs they were on at the time, which could be anything with Steely Dan.

Where can I get them? Exactly, and where can I get them, yes. And Led Zeppelin, the same thing. It was really interesting to go back and hear the original music. One of them is a folk song that's really folksy. I can't remember which one it was that they stole, but it was really interesting to go hear them.

It was really interesting to hear the original version of Stairway to Heaven, and especially the original guitar line. You're just like, wow. And that did give more fabric to Led Zeppelin. Certainly, the Led Zeppelin version was better, but it was interesting. It gave more of a dynamic, more, like you said, a fabric, a more volume sort of history where you're like, wow, that's really interesting. Yeah, I'll give you another example. Henry V, we look at as this really patriotic play where Henry V is this great hero, and we all know the Band of Brothers speech and Kenneth Branagh,

the Kenneth Branagh movie. It's this kind of jingoistic play. And yet, according to Dennis, anyway, Thomas North wrote the original version of it while he was in Ireland. And he was involved in this really miserable war where everybody was fighting against everybody else. And it was a scorched earth campaign and everyone was bogged down in this muddy conflict. They didn't do anybody well. And in fact, the person they were fighting against in that war was this Irish rebel named McMorris. And in Shakespeare's Henry V, there is a rebel or there's a character in the play that Shakespeare's only Irish character and his name is McMorris, Captain McMorris. And so it's one of these things, again, where it wouldn't make any sense in Shakespeare's time. Why is he writing about this rebel from 20 or 30 years ago, but it ties it to that point in Thomas North's life and actually

causes you to look at the play differently. And if you read between the lines, and you look at some of these speeches of Henry V, as some scholars have pointed out, it's actually not quite as patriotic as you think it is. And it's actually an anti-war play in some ways. And Henry V does these things that are like really sketchy, where he's killing these French prisoners, and he's going to destroy this whole French town and women and children. And so once you look at it through that lens, it just completely turns the play upside down for you. And it's one of these things that you just say, man, I see this differently now. And the next time I read this play, I'm just going to think of it in a whole new light. And that's the kind of thing that really this kind of source study can do and really

change the way we read the plays. Really expands the context. Do you think that all of Shakespeare's stuff was taken from this North guy? And why did he choose them? And also, sorry, this is a three part question. Did he take from anyone else Shakespeare? Yeah. So if that's a good question, Dennis's theory is that basically all the plays that we know today, Shakespeare, with just a couple of exceptions, are these plays that were adapted from Thomas North. What's really interesting though, is that there's all these other plays that had Shakespeare's name on it at the time. And scholars now don't believe that those were by Shakespeare. And they say, oh, those were just plays by other people that they wrote, and they just put Shakespeare's name on it to try to make

a buck, which is possible. Or what Dennis thinks is that those were maybe plays that Shakespeare adapted from other writers, but they just weren't as popular as the ones that he adapted by North because they just weren't as good. And he sees Shakespeare as more of this like theater producer, like a director or an adapter who was basically buying plays from a whole bunch of other a whole bunch of people and putting them on stage and probably significantly rewriting them and then putting his name on it very legitimately at the time and publishing them and that's why we that's why we know Shakespeare today and we don't know Thomas North because he was this he was a gentleman you as a gentleman you didn't

really write plays you didn't really write plays. You didn't really take credit for plays at the time. So he wouldn't have really gotten, gotten this credit when Shakespeare put his name on it. It's crazy, man. This is wild. This is wild. So did you have to bone up on your Shakespeare in order to write the book?

Oh God, did I? Yes. I, I was an English major in college and I'd read a lot of the plays and I'd seen Shakespeare in the park and all that. But I knew that if I didn't know my Shakespeare, that I would just get eaten alive. And so I just, I reread, read or reread, I think 27 plays at this point and read multiple commentaries and all of them. And there were days and days I just spent in the library researching Much Ado About Nothing or As You Like It or whatever the play was, because as an investigative reporter, that's

the only skill I have is I can take a subject and just research it and just really deeply explore it and then write about it. And Shakespeare was no different than some other issues that I've written about in the past, but I felt like I really had to kind of spend some extra special time learning about it if I was going to write about it. And then the book, do you show the plagiarism software's comparison of texts and all that stuff? Yeah, I have some appendices in the books where I just show a few examples of that. And you can see them side by side and see the similarities. But I think to really get the full effect, you need to go to Dennis's website, which is sirthomasnorth.com. And he's got pages and pages of these. And when you see a few, you're like, all right, I can see it. Yeah, that seems similar. That seems similar. But some of them are just like, you look at them side by side, and they are just a dead ringer for one another. And then you see dozens of these after

another. And you're just like, all right, something's going on here. And we knew that Shakespeare borrowed from this one work by Thomas North, Plutarch's Lies. But this is all the plays, and this is all of Thomas North's' work and you just see countless examples. And it's, as a journalist, I try to keep an open mind. I try to be skeptical, but it's overwhelming just to see the amount of evidence that he's gotten. That's astounding, man. You're either going to have the worst Amazon things or you're going to have a best one. Everyone's going to have to put an asterisk on Shakespeare. They say good books get good reviews and great books get great and terrible reviews.

So thankfully, most of my reviews have been great. I've gotten really good reviews on Amazon, thankfully, knock on wood. But there have been a couple that there's either four or five star reviews or there's one star reviews. And those one star reviews, man, I do not recommend reading them because they will blow your hair back there. Heresy of Shakespeare. There's one that says, i beg you not to read this book i've never had anything i've written before i'm like okay you disagree with it tell me what you find wrong tell me what you think i should change but it's i've never had someone beg anyone not to read my writing before so that's been an education when you speak at like

shakespearean angled colleges and professor things you might want to have one of those shields up for them what's's your favorite Shakespeare play? Oh, that's a good question. But it's actually a play that I read really recently, which is As You Like It, which it's not really seen as one of Shakespeare's best plays. It's a mess. And it's like a really muddled narrative with a bunch of different characters coming in and out. But it is just hysterically funny. And the dialogue and back and forth between the two characters, and especially the heroine Rosalind, who is just this witty character who is like the model for every movie heroine that's just ever, you know, come after her. It's one of these things that as a reporter, I get to look more deeply into subjects.

And it's one that I'd never read before. And it really jumped out at me. And I was like, this is now my favorite Shakespeare play and it was really a treat to find that. There you go. I haven't even read all the Shakespeare plays because I went to public school. Well, I will say there's some that are not read very often for good reason

and unfortunately, I read Time Out of Athens and some of these other plays that are really only about two-thirds of Shakespeare's plays are these brilliant works. We forget about Troilus and Cressida and a couple of the other ones that are not performed very often for very good reason. Yeah. Yeah.

So as we go out at the end of the day, does it really matter who wrote the plays, whether it was Shakespeare or Thomas North, or are they still the same plays we should appreciate? What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And it's one that that I get asked all the time. And they're like, the plays are the plays, why should it matter whether it was Thomas North or Shakespeare or someone else that wrote them. And I think outside of, you know, some of those examples I was talking about before with these kind of specific references that you can

now get Thomas North led this amazing life and experienced a lot of successes, but also a lot of heartaches. And towards the end of his life, he was impoverished and he had these real conflicts with his brother. And you see these conflicts expressed in the plays and in King Lear and Hamlet and The Tempest in this depth of emotion that you see in the plays. And I can only speak for myself, but knowing about Thomas Nort's life and reading these plays through that lens has just brought them alive to me in a way that was not there before

and really caused me to feel them even more deeply, if that's even possible with Shakespeare. But they have become just so much richer and so much more interesting to me. And so for that reason alone, I think it matters. And I hope that people take Dennis's ideas seriously and read my book and then read the plays and see what they think. There you go. Yeah. Do the analysis, people.

Research it and then make your own conclusions. But I think this is pretty brilliant. In fact, I'm looking forward to my YouTube video getting all sorts of hateful reviews. Let's hope most of them are positive, but I can't be responsible if you get a couple thumbs down you know the beautiful part about our youtube channels we get paid for it so people want to go up and make down votes or some sort of hateful comment they they skew the video so i get paid either way that's that's the way to do it i like that yeah hopefully they're buying my book either way too exactly there you go if you want to burn his book just buy it first that's all i ask you can do anything you want to it just buy it first first. I can see the Shakespeare's festival in, in what

is it? The Cedar city here in Utah and giant empire of, of like burning it at the stake. I don't know that you should ever go there. I'm just telling you, give me some advice, but I don't know. No, I think this is interesting. I think it's important to open your mind to it because, you know, like Thomas Peter used to say, Peters used to say, the creative swiping, everybody does it. Now if Thomas North can start getting those royalty checks, that'd be great too. He can get some writer credit. It's been wonderful to have you on, Michael. Thank you for coming on the show. Great.

Thank you for having me. It's been a great conversation. Thank you. I'm sure it'll be controversial and I'll be looking forward to coming on the show. Great. Thank you for having me. It's been a great conversation. Thank you. I'm sure it'll be controversial and I'll be looking forward to videos in the future. You'll be like George Bush when he's speaking and shoes are coming in. Thankfully, I've got a good dodging skill.

I'm a proud South Dexterity. Like I say, years of being an investigative reporter have opened me up to a number of shoes thrown at me. There you go. You're used to getting death threats. So give us your plugs so people can look you up on the interwebs, Michael. Yeah, so the book is called North by Shakespeare and it's available at Amazon and your indie bookstore

and everywhere books are sold, as they say. And you can also go to my website, michaelblanding.com and Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and you can find me in all those places. There you go. There you go. Thank you for being on the show. It was a wonderful honor, my friend. Terrific. Thanks for in all those places. There you go. There you go. Thank you for being on the show. It was a wonderful honor, my friend.

Terrific. Thanks for having me on again. You got it. To my audience, go to youtube.com, Forge says Chris Voss, hit the bell notification button. Go to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, all those different places. We have massive groups you can take and check out there as well. Go to goodreads.com, Forge says Chris Voss, see what we're reading and reviewing over there.

Thanks for tuning in. Wear your mask. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.