Lots of jokes at the expense of people who think Shakespeare’s works were written by someone else. Funniest joke of all: Dennis McCarthy, the guy who uncovered this supposedly important source, is one of those people (or used to be). His earlier book “North of Shakespeare: The True Story of the Secret Genius Who Wrote the World’s Greatest Body of Literature,” claims that Thomas North (George North’s brother) actually wrote the plays collected in the First Folio.
McCarthy seems to have successfully hidden this book from the less-than-inquiring minds of the journalists covering his new opus. He never mentions its thesis and has withdrawn it from circulation, no doubt aware that it stands as a considerable obstacle to academic respectability. But the book is surely relevant. After all, he used the same “searchable database” methodology to buttress his now-discarded authorship theory as he more recently employed to establish a link between George North’s manuscript and Shakespeare. This fact might justify some questions as to the validity of his statistical methods, no?
