North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for
the Truth Behind the Bard’s Works. By Michael Blanding. Hachette. $30.
If you do not take this book too
seriously, you will enjoy a wonderful combination of detective story with
roller-coaster ride, all within an overarching David vs. Goliath tale that is seasoned
with a soupçon of intellectual élan. The problem is that the entire book, all
460-odd pages of it (more if you count the cover, title, jacket, and heck, even
the flyleaves) insists that you must, must, must,
MUST take it very seriously indeed,
as a work of PROFOUND SIGNIFICANCE
and TREMENDOUS MEANING. The result
is 460-odd (some very odd) pages of
cognitive dissonance.
Just getting through the book’s title is a
bit of a chore. It’s about Shakespeare, right? Well, no, actually –
Shakespeare’s name certainly draws attention, but the title refers to someone
named North “by” Shakespeare, so it’s about North, right? And North is some
sort of “Rogue Scholar,” yes? Well, no – despite the way the title is
constructed, North (there are actually two Norths of significance in the book)
is not the “Rogue Scholar.” That description applies to the
unmentioned-in-the-title Dennis McCarthy, who did not graduate from college but
has earned the “Rogue Scholar” designation by a years-long search for the true
authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.
Wait. “Has earned” from whom? Why, from
Michael Blanding, an investigative reporter who is at pains, from the start of
the book, to disarm criticism by stating that this is not merely another of the innumerable “how many angels can dance on
the head of a pin?” studies of the “true” authorship of “Shakespeare’s” work. Not
at all! The book is Blanding’s look
at McCarthy’s exploration of North’s involvement in Shakespeare’s
work!
Having unraveled the title, you may now
turn to the first page. Proceed with caution. It bears repeating that in many
ways the book is wonderful. It is well and breezily written, it contains some
intriguing discussions of the value of using modern techniques (in particular,
software designed to root out plagiarism) to explore Elizabethan plays and
playwrights, and it tosses about the names of the usual suspects (Christopher
Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson) with aplomb – while also delving into the
lives (what is known of them) and literary pretensions (what is known of them) of numerous others.
McCarthy, an Ultimate Frisbee champion and
freelance writer who “was confident that with enough diligence he could crack
the code of Shakespeare studies,” is quite a character, and it is a peculiarity
of North by Shakespeare that he
always seems almost to be putting
everybody on (including Blanding), but then lurches into a level of commitment
and sincerity that is enough to make him, if not his theories, very believable
indeed. It helps that so many of those theories rely on plays that have disappeared
– written by one Sir Thomas North, who in turn put them together from work by
his relative, George North. McCarthy hastily tells Blanding (who duly reports
the matter) that Shakespeare really did write Shakespeare’s plays, but that he based them on now-lost works by North,
from which Shakespeare drew plots and (especially) language.
If this starts to sound like a journey
down the proverbial rabbit hole (19th century), or taking the red
pill in The Matrix (20th)
– well, yes, it is that. The movie reference fits better than the Alice one,
since part of Blanding’s story of McCarthy involves McCarthy rushing some of
his findings into self-published print out of concern that he might be beaten
to the punch in some way by a 2011 movie called Anonymous (21st century): “As the publicity for Anonymous mounted, so did McCarthy’s
panic.”
North
by Shakespeare (speaking of movies, perhaps an echo of North by Northwest because, well, why not?) is so full of specificity
like this, so packed with research and anecdotes, that simply as a work of
investigative prose (if not exactly “journalism”), it is worth some of a
reader’s time, although perhaps not as much as it demands. It is ultimately the
story of yet another outsider seeking to change paradigms that have been
accepted perhaps too readily by the academic establishment and its hangers-on –
amateur sleuths have been in this position with regard to Mozart, for example,
for many years. It is also a story that Blanding again and again tries to get
readers to take very seriously, by trying (again and again) to anticipate and
undermine objections to what McCarthy believes. For example, at one point
Blanding directly quotes McCarthy’s explanation of why, after many years of
trying, he has so much trouble getting people to pay serious attention to his
theories about Shakespeare. “Once [Shakespeare scholars have] formed an
emotional attachment to their ideas, and written books about it and articles
about it, their entire sense of self is wrapped up in their view of how
Shakespeare worked and what he wrote. And they’re just not going to surrender
that.” The reader will immediately wonder if McCarthy suffers from the myopia of which he accuses others – so,
to prove his own bona fides, Blanding
brings that up: “Of course, I think to myself, it could be McCarthy who has
developed the emotional attachment.” A few lines later, though, Blanding lets
that possibility evaporate by ending that section of that chapter with a rather
lame joke by McCarthy.
To recap: this is not a book about Shakespeare, although his name in the title is likely to be what will draw readers to it. It is not really a book about North (Thomas or George), either. It is a book about a man who believes Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, but based his work closely on similar but not identical work by others, whose role can now be ferreted out thanks to the wonders of modern technology and computer searches. The underlying idea is intriguing and the concept is certainly of the 21st century, but like so many technology-based approaches to creative endeavors, it has little interest in the material being analyzed. McCarthy wants to prove a point; Blanding wants to chronicle the ups and downs of an outsider in the “Shakespeare ethos” trying to make his voice and views heard; and readers are entitled to wonder, having slogged and joy-ridden their way through North by Shakespeare, whether either McCarthy or Blanding ultimately cares very much about Shakespeare at all.
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