Yes. Kind of. There is an original poem by North--and a pre-adapted version of a Shakespeare play by North, which I will soon discuss at dennismccarthy.substack.com (IN fact, I will be writing my first post on the sonnets soon.)

8/ Why, in the 1st Folio, didn't Jonson just write plainly that Shakespeare shouldn't be praised & North should get the credit? Because this was a collection being sold to Shakespeare fans--& the publishers would have nixed it. Why don't we see the truth about Walt Disney in Disney collections?

7/ And as I have just shown, Jonson's ode at the front of the First Folio, actually outs North as original author--and mocks Shakespeare as just the reviser (which is why Digges and Dryden described the ode as an attack against Shakespeare) dennismccarthy.substack.com/p/the-stunni...

6/ Finally, Ben Jonson didn't perpetuate any fraud. He repeatedly stressed that Shakespeare "would buy the reversion of old plays" and then "marks not whose twas first." dennismccarthy.substack.com/p/ben-jonson...

5/ They also probably preferred longer, unpublished versions. So no conspiracies. Publishers couldn't get rights to Shakespeare's own adaptations (bad quartos & apocryphal plays)--so they published the plays as the Folio advertised on the title page: "According to the True Original Copies."

4/ Y didn't they include Shakespeare's apocryphal plays or bad quartos in the First Folio? Well, they did include the apocrypha in the 3rd & 4th Folios. But the reason they were left out of the 1st is, as I will show, they actually tried but couldn't get the rights. It's mostly that simple.

3/ So why did Jaggard, Blount, et al. publish Shakespeare's First Folio?
A. For the exact same reason publishers produced collections of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, etc., they wanted to make money.

2/ It is the First Folio that became popular and enduring and the text that scholars studied--so that then became the official record of Shakespeare's "real" plays. But as shown in the pic above, the plays produced while Shakespeare was alive provide a more accurate record of what Stratford wrote.

1/ Thread: I'll address Ben Jonson at end of thread but first: Great question, but as I show with the list of ALL pre-1621 title pages below, no one was trying to fool anyone. The title-pages confirm Shakespeare wrote/adapted the bad quartos and apocryphal plays. There is no mystery.

I use this pic in my latest Substack post (and cite you, of course.)

@carlquintanilla.bsky.social