It's been called a truly significant new source for Shakespeare.

It's been called a once in a generation or several generations find.

It's been called a super cool story.

And it may be all of those things if it proves to be what they say it is.

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

I'm talking about one of the bigger stories in the world of Shakespeare in quite some time.

The claim, by independent scholar

Dennis McCarthy and Lafayette College English professor June Schluter, that they have

discovered a major new source for Shakespeare's Richard III, Henry V, Henry V, Henry

the Sixth, Part 2, and at least eight other plays. As you may have recently read,

on the front page of the New York Times and elsewhere,

they used W. Copyfine, a piece of software

that's usually used to detect plagiarism

on a nearly 450-year-old unpublished manuscript

called A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels

by a man named George North.

They say this is where Shakespeare got the details for the death of Jack Cade and Henry 6,

the idea for the description of dogs in Macbeth, the topsy-turvy world that the fool talks about in King Lear, and more.

The software works by looking for co-located words,

words that appear in two different sources and in identical order. When they used the software

to compare North's manuscript and Shakespeare's plays, they found multiple passages that matched

...