Richard Hanania knows who really wrote Shakespeare's plays

Or so he says.

My favorite Shakespeare conspiracy theory has long been Malcolm X’s (and/or Alex Haley’s). When the cons were sitting around the pen one day, they got to arguing over who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays. From The Autobiography of Malcom X:

The King James translation of the Bible is considered the greatest piece of literature in English. Its language supposedly represents the ultimate in using the King's English. Well, Shakespeare's language and the Bible's language are one and the same. They say that from 1604 to 1611, King James got poets to translate, to write the Bible. Well, if Shakespeare existed, he was then the top poet around. But Shakespeare is nowhere reported connected with the Bible. If he existed, why didn't King James use him? And if he did use him why is it one of the world's best kept secrets?

I know that many say that Francis Bacon was Shakespeare. If that is true, why would Bacon have kept it secret? Bacon wasn't royalty, when royalty sometimes used the nom de plume because it was 'improper' for royalty to be artistic or theatrical. What would Bacon have had to lose? Bacon, in fact, would have had everything to gain.

In the prison debates I argued for the theory that King James himself was the real poet who used the nom de plume Shakespeare. King James was brilliant. He was the greatest king who ever sat on the British throne. Who else among royalty, in his time, would have had the giant talent to write Shakespeare's work? It was he who poetically 'fixed' the Bible - which in itself and its present King James version has enslaved the world.

Pundit Richard Hanania has many strong suits, but his ego tends to run away with him at times, most comically in regard to Shakespeare, about whom he knows strikingly little for a Ph.D., and yet holds extremely strong hostile opinions.

In contrast, I’m highly noncontrarian by nature. If really smart people like Ben Jonson, Voltaire, Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Hazlitt, Carlyle, and Harold Bloom all really like Shakespeare, well, I’m inclined to take Shakespeare seriously too.

I’m pleased to say that when my friend Alex asked me at my book tour dinner: what is my favorite Shakespeare play was, I replied, “I’ll go out on a limb and say: Hamlet.”

For example, last year, Richard declared in his post “Shakespeare Is Fake:”

… I could copy Shakespeare’s style and produce something just as appealing …

And yes, I’d be happy to test this theory myself. If someone wants to do this study with me, reach out.

While we await Hanania’s New, Improved Hamlet, Richard has now entered the anti-Stratfordian lists, championing one of the less popular rivals of Sir Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, and other pretenders to the throne: Hanania’s choice is suddenly Sir Thomas North, translator of one of Shakespeare’s favorite books, Plutarch’s Lives.

[Dennis] McCarthy’s second book is Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare's Plays.

Here’s McCarthy’s website.

Richard continues:

When someone tells you that he knows for certain who the real Shakespeare was, it certainly gets your attention. Most people who make claims like this tend to be cranks, but Dennis mentioned that, despite not being an academic, his discoveries have been published in journals and covered in The New York Times. I’m not a big Shakespeare guy,

Indeed.

but thought the book was worth taking a look at, and I can recommend it as a detective story and biography of Thomas North, whose exciting life in effect provided the source material for the most important literary canon in the history of the English language. …

Dennis’ book left no doubt in my mind that he has solved the Shakespeare question. He found countless phrases that appear in both North’s books, notebooks, or the marginalia of his books and Shakespeare’s plays, and never at any other time before or after in the history of written English.

There’s no doubt that North’s translation of Plutarch influenced Shakespeare (compare Shakespeare’s more historically realistic Roman plays written after he discovered North’s Plutarch in the 1590s, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, versus his early wild and woozy Titus Andronicus).

And it’s perfectly reasonable to think that Shakespeare (1564-1616) and North (1535-1604?) might have interacted in other ways as well. Despite the generation gap between them, they might possibly have become acquaintances, even friends.

I can well imagine Shakespeare wanting to sit down with the translator of his Plutarch.

I can recall reading Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting in my office at UCLA in 1981 when I should have been working. Upon finishing, I wanted to call up somebody and talk about it. I happened to see on the last page that Kundera’s translator was a UCLA professor named Michael Henry Heim, so I looked up his number in the UCLA phonebook.

He wasn’t in.

But I met Dr. Heim in 1982 when I went to an Amnesty International meeting, at which he was the chairman: a very impressive guy.

Still, that doesn’t prove that North wrote Shakespeare’s plays.