“Rich with sumptuous historical details and discoveries that ripple through the deepest fault lines of literature, In Shakespeare’s Shadow is a page-turner that will utterly upend what you think you know about the classics.”
In Shakespeare’s Shadow
A Rogue Scholar's Quest to Reveal the True Source Behind the World’s Greatest Plays
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, IN SHAKESPEARE’S SHADOW takes readers inside the vibrant era of Elizabethan England and the contemporary scene of Shakespeare scholars and obsessives. It 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 investigated the mysteries behind Shakespeare’s works, using plagiarism software to discover surprising links between Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet and other plays; and Thomas North's published and unpublished writings. Plotlines from dramas such as As You Like It and The Tempest, meanwhile, seem 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 that North penned on behalf of his patron Robert Dudley in his efforts to woo Queen Elizabeth. The bold theory answers many lingering questions about the Bard with compelling new evidence—including a manuscript discovered in the depths of the British Library that seems to have inspired a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays; and a newly unearthed journal of North's travels through France and Italy, filled with details from the plays and locations Shakespeare is never known to have visited.
IN SHAKESPEARE’S SHADOW alternates between the dramatic life of Thomas North, the intrigues of the Tudor court, the rivalries of English Renaissance theatre, and outsider scholar 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.”
(Previous published as North by Shakespeare)
HACHETTE BOOKS | March 2021
“Virtuoso job... the most elegant proposed solution to the authorship question to appear in many decades... scholars who simply ignore it do so at the peril of their reputations.”