Given the extent of influence the George North manuscript had on the Shakespeare canon, its size is relevant. At 13,000 words, “Discourse” is shorter than Shakespeare's shortest play, The Comedy of Errors (14,369 words), but it is densely packed with pre-Shakespearean passages, events, and themes, with numerous subjects that are represented in the canon. Indeed, the impact of “Discourse” exceeds that of most other known sources. Recall Kenneth Muir's focus on the use of the single word insculpt in the casket scene in The Merchant of Venice and his linking it to Robinson's translation of Gesta Romanorum (1577); compare this with the extensive correspondences between the Shakespeare canon and “Discourse,” which include dozens of parallel passages, offered in the same context and sharing multiple words, phrases, and word groupings that were not merely unusual for Shakespeare but unique in the EEBO database. In Poor Tom's reciting of a canine hierarchy (trundle-tail, mastie(ff), greyhound, spaniel, cur(rish), dog), words are not strewn about but appear, as in “Discourse,” in analogous tetrameter stanzas, making the same unusual point about hierarchies. Moreover, EEBO confirms that trundle tail was not only rare for Shakespeare but rare for everyone else as well, appearing in only one other work prior to the publication of the First Folio (1623). When we expand our focus to the rest of Jack Cade's poem in “Discourse,” we find traitors all, rebel like, pight, and flesh and fell – all phrases and terms that reappear in King Lear (5.3.274, 4.3.14, 2.1.64, 5.3.24). Indeed, Shakespeare is the only writer to use flesh and fell in the searchable EEBO texts of the seventeenth century. Other scholars have concluded that Jack Cade was the model for Poor Tom; hence the conclusion that North's description helped the playwright create Edgar's alter-ego is inescapable. Indeed, on the same page as the beginning of Cade's poem, we also find North's description of the suffering Glendower, who must “… feed on … / … mire and filthy mud: / And in the end to eat my dung / my flesh and eke my blood” (fol. 46). Again, we immediately think of the starving, filthy, dung-eating Poor Tom of the quagmire, whose flesh and blood …

A comparison of King Lear and George North's “Discourse,” especially fols 35v–37, once again suggests a relationship between North's writing and Shakespeare's. Indeed, North's conflating of a prophecy by Merlin with a description of role-reversals in a topsy-turvy world offers a primary example of King Lear's debt to the earlier text. “Discourse” may even have provided the basis for the character of the Fool, who quotes Merlin explicitly, emphasizing the sixth-century Prophet with whom he has much in common. Or, to be more precise, Lear's Fool resembles the peculiar version of Merlin described in “Discourse.” Moreover, North's poems on the hunted and famished rebels, Glendower and Cade, figured in the crafting of the hunted and famished Poor Tom. Many of Jack Cade's lines in “Discourse” also appear in King Lear, and they are frequently associated with Poor Tom.

The following excerpt is just one example of the myriad descriptions in King Lear of a world turned upside-down:

With Lear's imagining of a thief playing a justice and a dog commanding a beggar, we see allusions to Jack Cade and Edgar/Poor Tom. In the English history play, Cade, the commoner rebel and thief, switches places with Lord Say, a fair and noble justice: Cade, the play's force for chaos, sits in judgment of Say, and his verdict is beheading. Similarly, in King Lear, when the desperate, pursued, and starving Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom, he witnesses Lear's mad trial, playing the role of a “learnèd justicer” (3.6.21), though, of course, Edgar's noble impulses remain. William C. Carroll is one of many scholars who have emphasized the resemblances between Cade and Poor Tom, including in this scene:

The unpublished manuscript “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,” now housed in the British Library, is a little less than 450 years old. George North wrote the treatise in 1576, signing, dedicating, and presenting it to Roger, 2nd Lord North while living at the nobleman's Cambridgeshire manor, Kirtling Hall. It generated no known copies or contemporaneous allusions to it. Until now, no Shakespeare scholar has studied the manuscript, and it has probably remained little read. Yet, as our analysis has revealed, “Discourse” is not merely the only uniquely existent, evidently uncopied document to have had a substantial impact on the canon; it is one of the most influential Shakespearean source texts in any form. In one year's work on the manuscript, we have traced more than twenty Shakespearean monologues and passages back to North's essay. These include Gloucester's opening soliloquy about his deformed appearance and villainous determination (Richard III 1.1.14–30), Canterbury's discussion of aristocratic order in the societies of bees (Henry V 1.2.183–212), Macbeth's comparison of various breeds of dogs to different classes of men (Macbeth 3.1.93–102), the citizens’ uprising in Coriolanus (Act 2), and essentially all the events surrounding Jack Cade's fatal fight with Alexander Iden in his garden (2 Henry VI 4.10). While scholars had long believed that Shakespeare had invented the circumstances of Cade's final hours, a reading of Jack Cade's poetic soliloquy in “Discourse” confirms we have now found the source. Similarly, George North's discussion and quoting of a Merlin prophecy also clears up long-standing confusions over the origin and purpose of the Fool's Merlin prophecy in King Lear (3.2.79– 95). In terms of the number of plays, scenes, and passages affected, the scope of the manuscript's influence likely exceeds all other known Shakespearean sources, excepting only the Chronicles of Hall and Holinshed and Thomas North's Plutarch's Lives.

Considering the unusual nature of this discovery, we have taken painstaking steps to assure the uniqueness of the links between “Discourse” and various Shakespearean plays. This includes the use of plagiarism software and rigorous searches of the Early English Books Online–TCP Partnership database (EEBO) to exclude the possibility of other source texts for the shared content and parallel passages.

One of the more exciting results to issue from our mining of George North's “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels” is that the manuscript reveals the origin of the much-debated circumstances surrounding the final hours of Jack Cade, the rebel who, in 1450, claimed Edmund Mortimer as ancestor and asserted his right to the crown. In Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, Cade leads a vigorous citizens’ revolt only to die at the hand of Alexander Iden. The Chronicles of Hall and Holinshed were clearly Shakespeare's primary source for the English histories, but there are details concerning Cade's death that do not appear in either – or, for that matter, in Caxton, Fabyan, Christopherson, Baldwin, Foxe, Stow, or Grafton. These include Cade's repentant monologue detailing his suffering as well as peculiar features describing his final hours: the weather is very hot, he is hiding fearfully until starvation compels him to trespass into Iden's garden, his limbs are emaciated, he eats grass to sustain himself, and he dies because he is too famished to fight effectively. Iden intends to drag Cade's body along the streets by the heels and leave his corpse to be eaten by crows. No other account of Cade's final hours includes any of these circumstances; indeed, scholars credit Shakespeare with having invented them. But the manuscript reveals that Shakespeare had a source.

Although nearly all of North's “Discourse” is in prose, the treatise contains poems on the three notorious rebels: Jack Cade, Owen Glendower, and the Black Smith. North fashioned each poem as a memoir-confession by the rebel's remorseful ghost, clearly drawing inspiration from William Baldwin's Mirror for Magistrates (1575), which contains similarly styled poetic monologues by these and other historical figures. North occasionally borrowed stanzas from Mirror for Magistrates, but, importantly, he did a fair amount of rewriting and added details that, some years later, ended up in Shakespeare's plays.

The regretful monologues in “Discourse” are best described as end-of-life laments, and, importantly, North intertwined them, introducing all three in the same paragraph. Baldwin's work, in contrast, deals with a variety of historical events involving the fall of princes and includes material on Richard II, Lord Clifford, Henry VI, and Edward IV. Thus, in Mirror for Magistrates, the poems on Glendower, Cade, and the Black Smith appear in three widely separated chapters, beginning on folios 19, 43v, and 144, respectively.

Personally, the 1980s were stable years for Arthur Miller. Sixty-five when the decade began, Miller had long since established himself as a, if not the, major figure in the American theatre. Having returned to playwriting in 1964 with After the Fall, a play that may well have helped him come to terms with his first two marriages and the suicide of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, the Miller of the 1980s shared a comfortable life in Roxbury, Connecticut, with his third wife, Inge Morath, a professional photographer who co-produced three handsome travel accounts with her husband: In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979).

Miller had purchased the Roxbury farm during his marriage to Monroe, but he seldom used the residence until he married Morath. By the 1980s, the couple had raised a daughter there and sent the young Rebecca to Yale. Miller, who, like Willy Loman, longed to work with his hands, found the eighteenth-century frame house a hospitable setting for his hobby, which, since the age of six, was carpentry. Relaxed in his Roxbury home (and only moderately disrupted by a 1983 fi re that claimed a portion of it, including his best books), Miller dedicated many hours to drafting and redrafting the copious manuscripts of the last thirty years. In the 1980s, colleagues and interviewers reported that the gentleman farmer/carpenter/writer/husband/ father was personally content.

Among the most familiar portraits of Shakespeare is the engraving that graces the title-page of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (see illustration). Unlike other portraits purporting to be the playwright, the engraving should present no question of authenticity, for the publication date establishes its terminus ab quo and Ben Jonson’s attendant verses lament the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’ and note the figure ‘was for gentle Shakespeare cut’. Nor is the engraver’s name in question, for below the portrait is his signature: ‘Martin Droeshout Sculpsit London’. Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare on the title-page of the 1623 First Folio, signed in London.

But there are two Martin Droeshouts in the records of early modern London, and the question of which of them engraved the famous title-page has not been settled. Was it the elder Martin, who was born in Brussels but spent much of his life in London? Or was it his nephew, who was born in London in 1601? The London records mention the elder several times, identifying him as the son of John Droeshout, a painter, and brother of Michael, an engraver; he himself is called a painter. The younger is mentioned only once, upon his baptism; but there are several references to his father, Michael, and his older brother, John, who were both engravers.

In 1991, following years of uncertainty and assumption, two articles provided new evidence on the Droeshouts. But the evidence was of two kinds, and the authors came to opposite conclusions: Mary Edmond contended that the elder Martin was the likely engraver of Shakespeare; Christiaan Schuckman believed it was the younger.

Personally, the 1980s were stable years for Arthur Miller. Sixty-five when the decade began, Miller had long since established himself as a, if not the, major figure in the American theatre. Having returned to playwriting in 1964 with After the Fall, a play that may well have helped him come to terms with his first two marriages and the suicide of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, the Miller of the 1980s shared a comfortable life in Roxbury, Connecticut, with his third wife, Inge Morath, a professional photographer who co-produced three handsome travel accounts with her husband: In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters Miller had purchased the Roxbury farm during his marriage to Monroe, but he seldom used the residence until he married Morath. By the 1980s, the couple had raised a daughter there and sent the young Rebecca to Yale. Miller, who, like Willy Loman, longed to work with his hands, found the eighteenth-century frame house a hospitable setting for his hobby, which, since the age of six, was carpentry.