In this volume, Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter present a previously unpublished mid-Tudor manuscript discourse and make the claim that it was an important source for Shakespeare's history plays. The 13,000-word “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels” was located for the editors by manuscript scholar Anthony Edwards among the Portland Papers at the British Library, where it is now assigned the shelfmark Add. MS 70520. It is signed by George North, a known translator of the early Elizabethan period, whose other works include The Description of Swedland, Gotland, and Finland (1561), based heavily on Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia, The Philosopher of the Court (1575), translated from Philibert de Vienne's Le philosophe de court, and The Stage of Popish Toyes (1581), translated from Henri Estienne's “Apology on Herodotus.” North apparently penned this treatise in 1576 while staying at Kirtling Hall, the Cambridgeshire estate of its dedicatee, Sir Roger North. As the title suggests, it surveys the history of rebellion, moralistically detailing “the treasure that traitors in the execution of their treason by time attain to” (103), with special attention to scriptural, classical, and Italian rebels, before moving to recent events in the Low Countries, and contributions from homegrown rebels Owen Glendower, Jack Cade, and the Black Smith, each of whom voices a brief Mirror for Magistrates–like verse chronicling his downfall. The treatise is wrapped up with the predictable genuflection to Elizabeth, “our SERENISSIMA of England, our perfect Solomon” (143).

McCarthy and Schlueter provide a handsome facsimile of the manuscript, which comprises fifty-seven folios. Their transcription is modernized, and reasonably so, given the legibility of the manuscript's italic hand, although we do lose the resonant spellings of “sounderlie” for “sunderly,” “rediemar” for “redeemer,” and “lynggar” for “linger.” But their primary concern is to prove that Shakespeare used North's discourse, employing the plagiarism software WCopyfind on the Early English Books Online-TCP Partnership database to detect clusters of allusions shared by North's and Shakespeare's texts—a method they see as “akin to literary DNA analyses” (2). Thus (to give one example) they find the dedication to North's “Discourse” using (in quick succession) the terms proportion, glass, feature, fair-she (Nature), deformed, world, shadow, Nature-deceived; and the opening lines of Shakespeare's Richard III using glass, fair, proportion, feature-dissembling-Nature, deformed, world, shadow. They use this methodology to argue for borrowings in 2 Henry VI, King Lear, and Coriolanus, among others. The results are less than compelling: while it is easy to see direct uses of phrases from Plutarch's “Life of Anthony” (as translated by Thomas North, Sir Roger's brother) in Antony and Cleopatra, it is much more of a stretch to believe that these often commonplace discussions are absolute proof of a borrowing—when does a mirror not provoke thoughts of fair or deformed features?

Little is said here about the “Discourse” in its own right, but McCarthy and Schlueter do concede that in composing the treatise North borrowed from “a wide range of sources from the pre-classical to the Elizabethan” (7). In fact, the “Discourse” stands as an intriguing case study of how such a treatise might be compiled. As the editors note, North seems to draw on personal experience when he introduces the now-obscure figure of the insufficiently noble Quashnofsky, who acted as Sigismund of Poland's ambassador to Suleiman the Great; Suleiman, insulted by such an envoy, forced him to traverse a “lane … of lions, leopards, tigers, and other fearful beasts” (117) to deliver his embassy, before dismissing him unheard. But there are also lengthy passages dealing with biblical and classical precedents that are adapted wholesale from such works as Thomas Becon's The gouernaunce of vertue (1566) and Thomas Fortescue's translation of Pedro Méxia's The foreste or Collection of histories (1571); other observations on the dire situation provoked by “our Flemish faction” (122) may well be translated, while it is by no means clear that the prophecy by Merlin and the verses by the British rebels are the original work of George North. In positing this treatise as a “source” for Shakespeare, McCarthy and Schlueter have inadvertently drawn attention not to an origin, but instead to the endlessly recycled nature of textual materials in early modern English writing.