> There were just too many coincidences pointing to North’s authorship of the source plays—too many characters and ideas in North’s work and people and events i

> There were just too many coincidences pointing to North’s authorship of the source plays—too many characters and ideas in North’s work and people and events in his own life that seemed to make their way into the Shakespeare canon. Some variation of this claim has appeared in every anti-Stratfordian conversion story going back over a century to the original Baconians. The problem is that you can make similarly compelling biographical concordances with other figures of the time who definitely didn't write Shakespeare, and you can do the same with other playwrights' work. A deeper problem is that it assumes Shakespeare's work "should be" autobiographical, but there's no reason to assume that about a popular artist who we know based much of his work on existing stories.