Dennis McCarthy has a post today in which he claims that Thomas North wrote Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale circa 1556 during the reign of Queen Mary. This sort of claim - that the plays were written much earlier than Shakespeare scholars believe, and that they were substantially the work of other writers - is a staple of theories assigning the authorship to Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford but have been advanced for known authors of Shakespeare source materials like North (his Plutarch’s lives is considered the primary source for Shakespeare’s Roman plays) or Florio (who compiled excerpts from Italian sources which inspired the plays set in Italy).

McCarthy’s argument is typical - he sees topical references and parallels to people and events from decades before Shakespeare was believed to be writing (or in this case alive) and claims that the work must be contemporary to those events. In this case he sees parallels between the characters and plot of Winter’s Tale and the events in the life of Katherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VII, and her daughter Mary. Presented in isolation, as McCarthy does, these parallels seem convincing; however his argument falls apart when the acknowledged sources of the Play are considered.

Winter’s Tale is believed to be one of Shakespeare’s last plays, possibly composed for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V of the Palatinate. Frederick was a German Prince who briefly reigned as King of Bohemia before he was defeated and deposed by Catholic powers at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. Elizabeth was known as the “Winter Queen.” It was first published in the Shakespeare first folio in 1623.

The story for the play is taken from and closely follows a prose romance by Robert Greene, Pandosto, published in 1588. It add elements from the popular play Mucedorus first performed about that time, which in turn borrowed from Philip Sidney’s Arcadia then circulating in manuscript but published soon after. Arden Shakespeare editor JHP Pafford found that "the language, style, and spirit of the play all point to a late date. The tangled speech, the packed sentences, speeches which begin and end in the middle of a line, and the high percentage of light and weak endings are all marks of Shakespeare's writing at the end of his career. But of more importance than a verse test is the similarity of the last plays in spirit and themes."

If in fact the play is substantially as North wrote it more than 50 years earlier, we would have to credit him with anticipating and inspiring the work of Greene and Sidney as well as the (debated) author of Musidorus and doing so in a style and language which would not be seen again on stage until Shakespeare late plays (sometimes termed Romances or Problem plays, these include the Tempest, Pericles, and Cymbeline). This despite no evidence for such an early play by North or anyone else and no surviving plays credited to North. McCarthy cites evidence that North contributed to scripts for the Earl of Leicester’s Men in the 1570’s and 80’s but there is nothing remaining to characterize his contributions or the nature of the plays from this early period. Other early plays and the criticism of Philip Sidney suggest they were a long way from the theater of the 1590s.

Perhaps a bigger problem for McCarthy’s revelation is that Pandosto itself is believed to be Greene’s adaptation of a much earlier work, Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale dating to the 14th century. Most of the parallels between Katherine and Hermione which McCarthy cites as proof positive that the story must be a thinly veiled roman-a-clef of Henry’s first marriage and divorce are also present in Chaucer’s tale of the patient Griselda, including the husband obtaining a Papal annulment.

Once again, there is no doubt that Thomas North was a key source of material for Shakespeare’s plays. McCarthy even has some compelling arguments that the author had access to North’s manuscripts including his travel journal (although he vastly overstates the case for patterns of words identified by plagiarism software to establish proof of borrowing). McCarthy’s success in publishing his research on North in mainstream academic journals reflects the unanimous acceptance that Shakespeare used North, and willingness to accept evidence that that reliance included previously unidentified borrowings from Dial of Princes and possibly even his travel diary. His contention that the evidence implies that North substantially wrote Shakespeare’s works decades earlier than currently understood is not accepted by the academy and relies on misrepresenting or simply ignoring the context in which these works were created.