There's another theory about who really wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Marlowe? No. DeVere? Uh-uh.
This theory is about Dennis McCarthy, a self-taught Shakespeare scholar who claims that Sir Thomas North, an Elizabethan courtier and translator, wrote three dozen plays which Shakespeare later inherited through his theater company, and which Shakespeare claimed as his own. Shakespeare scholars, however, scoff.
Michael Blanding lays out McCarthy's claims in the book North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar's Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard's Work. Blanding visits with an overview of this latest theory on Shakespeare and the (possibly) true source of his works.