… Thomas looked at him as one looks at a stranger in the crowd. A stranger who reminds you of someone you have known from somewhere, from some-place in the past and when you see him you instinctively raise up your hand, open your mouth to call out person’s name – only to give up a second later in a realization that you might be mistaken, that he represents only an idea of someone you know. 

I turned excitedly to the reigns of the various Henrys and the Richards to see if North had noted anything included in Shakespeare’s history plays, but was disappointed to find that he had written little on any of those pages. In fact, he seems to have almost exclusively marked the early chapters of the book on Britain’s Roman-era history. I sent the images to McCarthy telling him that I didn’t think there was much here. He wrote me however to say: “It’s all Cymbeline.”

Now, I’d never read Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (and for good reason, as it’s not one of his better plays). The play is set in Britain during Roman times, as Rome is fighting with Britain over the question of paying tribute. Eventually Rome invades the island and is repulsed by a force led by King Cymbeline’s sons Arviragus and Guiderius. None of it is real history; rather, it’s a conflation of a number of historical events from the chronicles.

But Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, said that while the discovery of North’s annotations was “significant” in its own right, “I don’t think the evidence … comes anywhere near substantiating the claim that North was using Fabyan’s Chronicle as the basis for a play about Cymbeline.

“Nor does there seem to be any reason for thinking that Shakespeare would have needed to know about these annotations, or the otherwise completely undocumented and unknown play which North is here alleged to have composed out of them.”

The two passages are so strikingly similar that both McCarthy and Blanding believe the only explanation is that Shakespeare used North’s journal as his source material. They argue that countless other examples—so many, in fact, that they cannot be ignored—show the similarities between the two playwrights...

...One of the researchers’ most important clues comes from a private journal written by North in 1555. Detailing the writer’s tour of Rome the previous year, a 19th-century copy of the original was recently discovered by McCarthy and Schlueter in a library in California. In the diary, North describes statues by Renaissance artist Giulio Romano as “lifelike” and “extraordinary.” At the end of The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare, who is not known to have traveled to Italy or studied sculptures from that period, includes similar references to the artwork and artist.