LONDON — In Shakespeare’s “Henry VI, Part 2,” Jack Cade, the leader of an unsuccessful revolt against the monarch in 1420, ends up so emaciated and starving that he starts to eat grass from the garden of Alexander Iden, a wealthy gentleman. Iden finds and slays Cade and promises to drag the dead rebel’s body through the streets, behead it and leave it for crows to feast on.
Given that none of those gruesome details were in any of the histories that Shakespeare likely consulted before writing the play, it’s been widely assumed they came from the Bard’s fertile imagination. The particulars of the scene were certainly invented.
But, it turns out, it wasn’t Shakespeare who made them up.
A recently published book by two U.S. scholars — Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter, who made unique use of off-the-shelf plagiarism software for their research — makes the case that Shakespeare plucked his description of Cade’s death from a previously undiscovered 16th century, handwritten manuscript — a lengthy treatise that argued that all rebels and rebellions were an affront to God and therefore doomed — by George North, a barely known writer/soldier.
Indeed, the authors maintain in their awkwardly titled “‘A Brief Discourse of Rebellion & Rebels’ By George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays,” that North’s tome also provided Shakespeare with ideas for scenes, dialogue and character traits that he scattered among more than 20 passages in nearly a dozen of his works, including “King Lear, ” “Macbeth ” and “Coriolanus. ” McCarthy and Schlueter employed software used to ensure students haven’t cribbed from other sources without attribution to scan both “Discourse” and some of Shakespeare’s plays to find many of those links.
McCarthy says Shakespeare clearly took ideas from “Discourse.” “It’s irrefutable,” he says. “There’s no way to think he could have gotten them from anywhere else. These passages are a seminal influence.”
Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, agrees. “I think they ( McCarhy and Schlueter ) have done the world a great favor by finding this manuscript. I don’t think there’s any question that Shakespeare read it.”
McCarthy and Schlueter make for an unlikely team of literary sleuths. Though his background is in computer science, McCarthy ended up writing a book about biogeography, or how geology shapes animal and plant evolution. He then began examining how ideas and art spread and evolve beyond geographical and cultural boundaries, and initially focused on “Hamlet,” which the Bard based on Norse mythologies. That led McCarthy to the world of Shakespearean sourcing and, ultimately, to Schlueter, a professor emerita of English at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and a Shakespeare scholar.
McCarthy reached out to her about some ideas he had concerning Thomas North, a lawyer, soldier and writer whose translation of the ancient Greek writer Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives” was used by Shakespeare as a basis for his Roman plays.
McCarthy had a strong hunch that the library of the aristocratic North family contained several works that Shakespeare used as sources. (And their next book, he hints, will unveil more of them.) Thomas North’s brother Roger was the second Lord North. They’re not yet sure if or how George North is related to Thomas and Roger, but it was at Lord North’s estate, Kirtling Hall, in Cambridgeshire, that George North wrote “Discourse” in 1576.
The North family library was dissolved and sold off in 1820s, which hampered the academics’ search for texts it had included. Eventually, however, they came across a catalog for a 1927 sale of rare books that described North’s manuscript, and also pointed out the similarities between North’s and Shakespeare’s descriptions of Jack Cade. After a year of fruitless searching for “Discourse,” it was finally found in the British Library, hidden among papers of the Duke of Portland.
Some of its links to Shakespeare immediately jumped off the pages. To find others they may have missed, they had the manuscript copied so it could be scanned with a commercial plagiarism software program, WCopyfind. They also searched a digital database of 60,000 early English texts, including Shakespeare’s works, looking for key content words from “Discourse” positioned close to one another, to ensure there were no other sources that both North and Shakespeare might have used.
In one passage in “Discourse,” North suggests a link between physical deformities and villainy, and counsels those who look in a mirror and see ugliness to not surrender to evil. From that passage, they focused on eight words: proportion, glass, feature, deformed, world, shadow and nature. They found that they all appear in the Duke of Gloucester’s opening monologue in Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” In it, the duke, a hunchback, gazes at himself in a mirror and vows to play the villain. The eight words appear within a cluster of 77 words in “Discourse,” and within a group of 92 in “Richard III.”
“No other work contains these eight words in a similar-sized passage,” they write.
One scholar who is skeptical is Gabriel Egan, a professor of Shakespeare studies at De Montfort University in Leicester. Egan acknowledges he hasn’t yet read the book, “so I can’t refute what’s in it.” Nevertheless, “I have grave doubts” that the manuscript was a source for Shakespeare, Egan says. The odds are higher than most people realize, he says, to find several words and phrases in common in two large tracts. McCarthy and Schlueter, however, write that, just focusing on the first four words in the “Richard III” example, the likelihood of “Shakespeare juxtaposing these four shared terms by chance is less than one in a billion.”
Egan also dismisses their use of commercial plagiarism software, saying that unless they know the source code they can’t be sure of how works to find linguistic similarities, which is why most academics use specially designed programs. “It’s a simplistic approach to linguistic studies that I don’t find convincing.”
Dobson, however, disagrees: “These (commercial) programs are now sufficiently accurate to handle the job, so it was highly inventive of them.”
It’s well known that nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays borrowed their plots from other sources, and that the Bard was a magpie who also mined previous works for ideas, scenes and characters. But, scholars insist, this was common practice among playwrights at the time, and Shakespeare was no plagiarist. “I don’t think the word plagiarism had any currency in Shakespeare’s time,” Schlueter says. He mainly borrowed from prose works, she adds, “but after Shakespeare amended them, they were poetry.”
Nonetheless, knowing what sources Shakespeare used gives readers more insight to his works, McCarthy says. “It can transform our entire view of scenes. There is a very big difference between the idea that Shakespeare invented Jack Cade out of whole cloth and the fact that he actually got it from a manuscript that opposes all rebellion and rebels. It kind of shows, to a certain extent, that Shakespeare bought into that philosophy” and is a warning to commoners “if you think you are going to rebel, this is what happens to all rebels.”
So, how did Shakespeare happen to get his hands on “Discourse ” ? And don’t the years between the plays in which links to “Discourse” appear — “Henry VI, Part 2, ” was written in 1623; “Richard III ” 10 years later, for example — suggest Shakespeare had the manuscript, or a copy of it, for quite some time? McCarthy and Schlueter say they may know the answers to those questions but are keeping mum for the time being. “Our best guess is coming in a book to be published,” McCarthy explains. “I really can’t go into details now.”
So, until then, to quote Shakespeare: “Sir, it is a mystery.”
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Plagiarism Software Suggests New Sources for Shakespeare?s Works originally appeared on usnews.com
