Dennis McCarthy
@dennismccarthy.bsky.social
55 followers 24 following 35 posts
dennismccarthy.substack.com; Author of “Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare’s Plays” & “Here Be Dragons,” a book on biogeography
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
I do hope you join me and watch live as the 400-year-old mystery of the identity of the Dark Lady is finally solved. Next Sunday (9/21/2025) 5 PM EST: payhip.com/b/1uTnL
Shakespeare's Dark Lady Revealed Live (Zoom Presentation)
payhip.com
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
The Petrova case is a perfect microcosm of the Trump administration. It’s stupid, primitive, Draconian, anti-intellectual, anti-foreigner, anti-Harvard, anti-science, anti-J-1-Visa, & anti-Ukraine. It’s ignorant and despicable in every direction. dennismccarthy.substack.com/p/these-stup...
These Stupid, Vicious Cocksuckers
Harvard anti-aging scientist fighting deportation and imprisonment in Russia is now charged with smuggling
dennismccarthy.substack.com
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
8/ Why, in the 1st Folio, didn't Jonson just write plainly that Shakespeare shouldn't be praised & North should get the credit? Because this was a collection being sold to Shakespeare fans--& the publishers would have nixed it. Why don't we see the truth about Walt Disney in Disney collections?
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
7/ And as I have just shown, Jonson's ode at the front of the First Folio, actually outs North as original author--and mocks Shakespeare as just the reviser (which is why Digges and Dryden described the ode as an attack against Shakespeare) dennismccarthy.substack.com/p/the-stunni...
The Stunning 400-Year-Old Secret at the Front of Shakespeare's First Folio that Explains Everything [Unpaywalled]
How did everyone miss this?!
dennismccarthy.substack.com
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
5/ They also probably preferred longer, unpublished versions. So no conspiracies. Publishers couldn't get rights to Shakespeare's own adaptations (bad quartos & apocryphal plays)--so they published the plays as the Folio advertised on the title page: "According to the True Original Copies."
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
4/ Y didn't they include Shakespeare's apocryphal plays or bad quartos in the First Folio? Well, they did include the apocrypha in the 3rd & 4th Folios. But the reason they were left out of the 1st is, as I will show, they actually tried but couldn't get the rights. It's mostly that simple.
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
3/ So why did Jaggard, Blount, et al. publish Shakespeare's First Folio?
A. For the exact same reason publishers produced collections of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, etc., they wanted to make money.
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
2/ It is the First Folio that became popular and enduring and the text that scholars studied--so that then became the official record of Shakespeare's "real" plays. But as shown in the pic above, the plays produced while Shakespeare was alive provide a more accurate record of what Stratford wrote.
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
1/ Thread: I'll address Ben Jonson at end of thread but first: Great question, but as I show with the list of ALL pre-1621 title pages below, no one was trying to fool anyone. The title-pages confirm Shakespeare wrote/adapted the bad quartos and apocryphal plays. There is no mystery.
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
This is the most stunning fact about the Shakespeare authorship question, and almost no one knows about it: Most of the plays that were attributed to Shakespeare while he was alive (and up till 1620) are NOT the same plays that we think he wrote today! dennismccarthy.substack.com/p/travelling...
Travelling Back in Time To Determine Exactly What Shakespeare Really Wrote
A review of all title pages and documents of the era is actually quite shocking:
dennismccarthy.substack.com
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
I use this pic in my latest Substack post (and cite you, of course.)
Reposted by Dennis McCarthy
marclauritsen.bsky.social
Don't read this unless you're curious who wrote the original version of this play
dennismccarthy.bsky.social
[Free post:] Everyone believed "The Winter's Tale" was just a dazzling and gaudy fairy-tale filled with eye-popping impossibilities. In fact, it is, like "Animal Farm," an important, clear-eyed, politically oriented, symbolically precise fairytale-à-clef. dennismccarthy.substack.com/p/the-450-ye...
The 450-Year-Old Secret Behind Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" [Unpaywalled]
As discovered in Thomas North's travel diary, the play is not just a magical fairytale but based on real events
dennismccarthy.substack.com