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Acclaimed author of The Map Thief, Michael Blanding presents the twinning narratives of renegade scholar Dennis McCarthy, called "the Steve Jobs of the Shakespeare community," and Sir Thomas North, an Elizabethan courtier whom McCarthy believes to be the undiscovered source for Shakespeare's plays. For the last fifteen years, McCarthy has obsessively pursued the true origins of Shakespeare's works. Using plagiarism software, he has found direct links between Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and other plays and North's published and unpublished writings - as well as Shakespearean plotlines seemingly lifted straight from North's colorful life.Unlike those who believe someone else secretly wrote Shakespeare, McCarthy's wholly original conclusion is this: Shakespeare wrote the plays, but he adapted them from source plays written by North decades before.