
430 In Shakespeare's Shadow (with Michael Blanding)
The History of Literature
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The Origins of Shakespeare's Plays
Dennis McCarthy was a scholar of geography, but he never really went to graduate school or got an advanced degree. He published this book with Oxford University Press and published some peer reviewed articles. And then about 15 years ago, he just started kind of as a side project looking at Shakespeare saying, you know, wondering if he could sort of trace the origins of Shakespeare's play is the way you might trace like the origins of a species and how they evolved. When he ran a test with all of Shakespeare's plays and all of Thomas North's writings, he just got hit after hit after hit. All of these phrases that were used nowhere else in English seemed to be connected between Shakespeare
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