North of Shakespeare: The True Story of the Secret Genius Who Wrote the World's Greatest Body of Literature

No Conspiracies, no speculation, just the documented proof that Sir Thomas North wrote the plays and that Shakespeare merely adapted them for the public stage. Yes, Shakespeare wrote everything clearly attributed to him while he was alive; yes, all the Shakespeare-era title pages were correct; but as "North of Shakespeare" shows, most of the plays attributed to Shakespeare during his lifetime and even up until 1620 are not the same plays that everyone now believes he wrote."North of Shakespeare," written by the acclaimed scholar-author of "Here Be Dragons" (Oxford University Press -- 2009), exposes extraordinary, documented information that overturns everything we had once believed about Shakespeare. Specifically, a thorough analysis of seven rare documents has confirmed that the impoverished, war-weary scholar-knight, Sir Thomas North, was the one who actually penned the original "Shakespearean" masterpieces and that Shakespeare had merely adapted North's plays for the public stage. Moreover, a careful examination of the actual title pages of the dramas published while Shakespeare was alive and even up until 1620 -- combined with a study of all relevant comments from his contemporaries -- reconfirms this same fact.The true story of North and Shakespeare, unlike all other speculations over authorship, whether put forth by orthodox scholars or intelligent dissidents, is devoid of all conspiracies, hypothetical behind-the-scenes-intrigue, or outlandish and dastardly motives. What remains is one exceedingly simple explanation, confirmed repeatedly by numerous documents and multiple lines of evidence, that unknots confusion, settles the paradoxes, and, once and for all, solves the mystery of Shakespeare.With Dennis McCarthy's first book, "Here Be Dragons / How the Study of Animal and Plant Distributions Revolutionized Our Views of Life and Earth" (Oxford UP, 2009), many reviewers highlighted the book's power to transform the way we see the world: "The Huffington Post" described it as "a grand time-and-space voyage of the imagination," concluding that "at the end of the book you will be someone different." "Science News" referred to the work as "fascinating and revelatory." And "Science Magazine" declared, "[W]e will never look at the world in the same way again." McCarthy has also published revealing papers in the leading journals of English literature, geophysics, and biogeography. In a 2007 paper for "The Journal of Geophysical Research," McCarthy became the first researcher to provide the correct explanation for the global distribution of continents and oceans. This became the subject of a number of major news reports around the globe, and "Der Spiegel" noted that the "study surprises the professional world." More recently, McCarthy's 2009 paper for Oxford's "Notes and Queries" was the first to identify the long-sought source for Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy. McCarthy will now transform our view of Shakespeare in the same way that his past works have helped change our views on the history of life and Earth.