Selects: Did Shakespeare really write all that stuff?

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I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to superhuman on the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's me, Josh, and for this week's select, I've chosen our 2022 episode on Shakespeare,

and whether he actually wrote all that stuff. Where if there even was a Shakespeare? This episode is actually possibly my favorite episode of all time, because I knew nothing about this and I learned a bunch of stuff.

And I found it really interesting. You know, it was fun, really fun to kind of turn around and explain it to all of you.

So I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I always have

every time I hear it about Shakespeare. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's on the line.

Jerry's here too, and we're about to get jiggy with it. About $6. Shakespeare. Can I caveat this out of the gate? Yes.

So the more we dug into this, you know, I was an English major. We talked very briefly when I was in college about Shakespeare's authorship. Right.

And I thought, hey, this would be a fun little, semi-easy episode, and the more we dug into it, the more this onion unfolded. It's quite an onion. This blooming onion unfolded layer by crispy delicious layer.

For all of our Australian listeners,

“that's what we think you guys eat every night.”

Every night. To the point where I was almost like, you know, is this a two-part or is I mean, you could probably do a 10-part episode on this. Oh, yeah.

It's so dense. So I just want to caveat this for people that know a lot about Shakespeare authorship and saying, this is a pretty broad overview of the high points of his authorship being questioned.

Because it is dense, baby. It's the kind of thing that like, extremely intelligent people take on as they're like lifelong hobby. It's like that. We're like, we'll just bust it out in a few days.

It'll be fine. Yeah. You know, like, how some people are like, they research World War II submarine warfare and know everything about it. It's along the same lines. But it's even bigger.

There's so many people involved. And each side is like, you're so naive to the other. And yes, it's true. Like, we could turn this into a 10-part series.

“But I think we've got a handle on it enough to present it.”

I feel okay about it. And then the other thing that sticks out for me, Chuck, is this is one of the few things I've ever come across like this that I am like truly agnostic about. I do not have an opinion one way or the other.

I don't know if I do either, actually. Like, it's not like, I don't care. That's not what I'm saying. Like, I genuinely can see both sides. And the other thing about it is, the more you dig into it,

the more you realize, oh, neither side actually has really good evidence to support their claim. It's all just, they have to get so granular that it really quickly goes into the world of conspiracy theories. Pretty quickly.

Yeah, I saw this video of a guy. This wonderful gentleman who knows a lot about it that said like, "And here's the golden bullet which proves once and for all." And he made his case and I was like, "No, no, no, that didn't really prove it once and for all it might be."

Because both sides do things like they get into biographical readings

“where they're trying to find clues within the text,”

or, you know, parallels to his life or that kind of thing. And once that starts, it's like, okay. Because you've just completely left the world of objectivity. Yeah. So what we're talking about, if you haven't guessed by now,

is this idea that has been around since, at least the mid-1800s, maybe before, about the question of whether or not William Shakespeare was the sole author of all of his works. And this is Shakespeare from Stratford on the Avon,

like that gentleman that we know became an actor and, you know, brighter.

Whether or not he was the sole author, whether or not he was a front

for some other authors for some of the works. Some people say he didn't write any of them. Some people said it was various women who weren't allowed to write things at the time.

“They're, I saw a 66 candidates over the years have been put forward.”

I saw 80. Oh, really? So there you have it. Somewhere between 66 and 80 something. I know we haven't been accused of writing any of Shakespeare's work. I don't think so.

I didn't come across that in my research. But it's an interesting literary, I don't even know if I want to call it a mystery, because some people just say like, no, I mean, of course he wrote it.

And he was, these outsized personalities,

the most famous of the famous are conspiracies are drawn to them. Elvis is still alive. Marilyn Monroe was murdered like that happens when you are, you know, one of the biggest icons in your field quite often. So some people say this just, that's all that it is.

In addition to that, there's a lack of biographical documentation. That he actually did write those plays.

“And I think that that's also what allows for people to say, you know,”

"Well, do we really know?" Right. Or that he didn't write him. Like, there's just, it was a time, you know, in the 1500s, where there were, in 1600s, where there just wasn't a ton of great preserved information. And we're going to talk about a lot of that.

So we do know that William Shakespeare did live. He was from, like you said, Stratford on Avon. It was at the time about a two to three day journey from London about a hundred something miles, I think. And he definitely did live.

He definitely did exist. That's not a question because we do have documentary evidence that this person live from 1564 to 1616, about 52 years. And depending on when you place his birthday, maybe 52 years on the nose. So we know he existed again, what's a issue, what's being questioned,

whether that man William Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon, who went on to become an actor, who went on to become a producer, who worked in the globe theater, whether he was the author of the plays we consider written by Shakespeare. That's what's that question. Yeah. So like you said, he was a real dude.

He came from a family that was, I mean, I kind of read it as a little bit middle class. They certainly were not like upper class nobility types. His father was a, was a glove or he wore, or he, well, I guess he wore gloves too, but he made gloves. Allow me to demonstrate if he'd be weird if he didn't.

Okay, I won't even wear his own gloves. But he produced these very, very fine gloves for well-to-do people. But he did achieve some, I guess, worked his way up to the social chain a little bit, because eventually he would serve with sort of like a mayor in Stratford. And again, while not nobility, like they were fairly well regarded as people.

Right. So we don't know for certain, but there's a pretty good, there's a much better chance than not that because of his father's position in town, because they had some money, like you said, their middle class. He almost certainly would have been educated at the grammar school at Stratford. So what most people think is that William Shakespeare was educated and tell about the age of 13.

And he would have learned things like Latin, he would have learned history, he would have learned some classic literature. He definitely would have been exposed to stuff that whoever wrote Shakespeare's plays would go on to expound on. So he definitely was, I can't say that, that's the thing. You really have to be careful what you say about this thing now.

I was about to say, so he definitely was educated. We don't know that he was. This is all just a supposition, but it's a pretty good bet. It's a good supposition that he actually was educated. Yeah, and all this, you know, the reason that's important is all of this kind of comes back later

because like how could one of the main arguments used many times is how could a kid who came from here

have known about these military exploits and the Elizabethan court and all these different languages and all this highfalutin stuff that he wrote about. So it's important to, you know, talk about his education and it seems like he was likely educated pretty well until 13, which, you know, I'm not even sure if that's earlier late, as far as the time period goes. You know, it was like kind of generally it for kids.

It was, it was in the middle because he could have just as easily not been educated at all. Right, of course. But he also didn't go on to Cambridge or Oxford to extend his studies. So he was in there in the middle.

They think he was probably educated, not highly educated, but also not, you know, uneducated.

That's the key and that if there was an evidence he had not gone to school,

“I think that the anti-shakes beer people would have a real, like marketing or favor.”

But he has just enough education that you can make the case like, no, like this guy, this guy learned about this stuff already and he could have known about it. And you know, when you add imagination in natural talent, you come up with Shakespeare conceivably. Yeah, he got married to Anne Hathaway, you know, go ahead and insert Anne Hathaway joke there. You know, she's a real actor, right?

Sure, yes. She has a whole wears Prada and Princess Diaries. Yeah, but they did. I think he was in inception. No.

Now, what's she? Interstellar. Yes. She did a stellar job in Interstellar. Come on.

They got married when he was quite a bit younger. She was 26. He was 18. She was pregnant, which is probably a little unusual for the time. They had a daughter named Susanna and then had twins.

Boy and a girl twin and the boy named HamNet, not Hamlet, but HamNet.

Yeah, what's apparently they've never turned up another use of that name in the, at the time, proof.

He was 11 years old when he died. And that kind of comes into play later on as well. And then there's about a, you know, from 1585 to about 1592, there's about a seven year gap where we don't know a lot about what was going on with Shakespeare. And then he pops up, which a lot can happen in seven years. Yeah.

Again, not trying to sway people one way or the other, but you can certainly learn a lot in seven years if you have some big life experiences. But he pops up in London in 1592 again, as far as the record goes and, you know, keep in mind a lot of this record before he was known in his lifetime as an author was, you know, just kind of not flimsy, but just not a lot of stuff like various little lawsuits and mortgages and sort of banking records and stuff like that, right? Yeah. And, and also, I mean, like, that's, that's about as much documentation as you would be able to come up with on most people.

And you can make a case that there's more documentation on Shakespeare than most other people who weren't nobility, right, of his era. Oh, and that's because there's been so much scholarship and study and research into his life that they've turned up, you know, as much as they can.

“But what they've turned up only amounts to about 500 different pieces of documentation of one form or another, right?”

So one of those pieces of documentation in early on in London is a pamphlet written by generally believed to be written by this guy named Robert Green. And there were some other people that could have possibly written it, but it's called Greens, Grotesworth of Whitt. And there's a line where he references Shakespeare in it in a contemporaneous fashion. Is that right? Yeah. It's a pretty matter.

[laughs] Where he kind of takes a shot out of me says, talks about Shakespeare says there's an upstart crow in his own concede to the only Shakespeare scene in a country, which kind of translates into, he kind of thinks he's the only Shakespeare. Right. Like he thinks he's all that.

And it should be noted also as far as the theory that in Asop's Fables, Crows, I would steal the feathers of others. Yeah. So the people in the, I don't want to say anti Shakespeare, but the people say that he might not have written these things. Says this is a big clue in saying that he might have stolen some of these things.

“That's why he's referred to as a crow by this other guy.”

Yeah, but in that quote, he says the upstart crow is beautified with our feathers.

So the pro Shakespeare people, you call them the pro stratford group.

They suggest that what Green is talking about is he's poking fun at a common actor who is dating to even attempt to write plays, which, you know, among playwrights, is far more important than acting. Anybody can act, but it really takes something to write a play, at least this what they thought at the time, and that he's taking a shot at him for that. Yeah, and we should point out that being an actor back then and being a part of the theater was not like it is today.

It wasn't some revered position. It was sort of, you know, body plays and common people were into this kind of thing. So it wasn't when he says he was just an actor that's a pretty big dis. Right. So the last thing that we have, I guess the last documentation, although there's other stuff that's been turned up,

they did archaeological expeditions on his house.

“I think his house has been under ownership of a public trust since like the 19th century.”

And they've carried out archaeological examinations of it, and they found that he went back and forth between London and Stratford. So they know stuff about him like that, but as far as like documentation goes, the last piece of documentation we have comes in 1616, which is his will that he wrote, and then a few months later he died. And the last, I guess the last piece of documentation is his tombstone, which in and of itself is curious,

because his tombstone contains a curse on it, but not his name. Yeah, is that the one that with the quote? Yeah, it's a curse. He's saying, like, don't dig me up or you're going to be cursed. Yeah, it's as good friend for Jesus' sake forbear to dig the dust and close here. Blessed be the man who spares these stones and cursed be he who moves my bones.

Some people point to that as poor writing and saying, well Shakespeare was a great writer,

would never written this kind of shabby curse.

Right.

“Another people say like, who said Shakespeare even wrote that necessarily?”

This is a good instructive example of kind of the back and forth between people. Right? This is terrible writing, who said Shakespeare wrote it? And then the anti Shakespeare crew says, well, of course he wrote it, because who else would just not think to put his name on his own tombstone? Right. And the other one's just put their head in their hands and just start crying.

And he just goes downhill from there. But that's a really good example of like the just kind of like, people will jump on any single thing that they possibly can and often interpret it one way or the other. So one thing, one single thing provides evidence for both sides. Is that kind of, yeah, totally.

Another thing that people point to is the fact that we don't have a lot of like letters and papers and things like that because his family line ended in 1670. I think he had a granddaughter Elizabeth Barnard that died without her bearing children. Right. So most of his stuff basically lost as far as family possessions and things like that. People do point to the will at times and say, well, in his will, you know, he leaves certain things.

But like there's never any mention of any manuscripts.

And again, this is all like, it's a little weird maybe, but none of this is proof. And you know, through the personal records that we do have in those 500 references, like none of them really reference him like manuscripts in him writing things. Right.

“That's what's most compelling to me is that when you put together the documentation about his life that we know, it's clear.”

He's involved in the theater. He's an actor. We get that. That comes through loud and clear. What doesn't come through, that isn't documented at all, is him as a writer.

And that, that thing about the will, the fact that if you look at the wills and of other writers of the time, you can find evidence that they were writers. They like leave books to other people that they leave unfinished manuscripts that stay in the family for generations. Yeah. And it is very curious his will is very curious.

But the fact that his personal stuff was just lost to history because his granddaughter was the end of the family line, that actually holds up. Because other great authors of, say, the same major of any age, a lot of the reason that their personal effects and papers are still around is because their family home was passed down from generation to generation to generation. Right. And there was a long enough period of time for the importance of that writer to become clear.

We want to put them in this museum.

There's enough time. There wasn't enough time. There's only 70 years between the death of Shakespeare and the end of his family line.

“And he didn't become widely popular until the, I think, middle of the 18th century.”

So he was kind of a victim of that. But both of those to me provide really good evidence for why there isn't documentation. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And by the way, the Atlantic has a great, great, pretty deep dive article as they do on this, which provided a lot of the supplementary information that we got. But by Elizabeth Winkler.

Yeah. In 2019. Great read.

One of the things that Winkler points out and other people who pointed out on the will as well is like Shakespeare wrote a lot about.

I think there were 300 musical terms and all of his plays mentioned of 26 musical instruments. And like in his will, he didn't, he didn't even have a loot to pass down to anybody. And like you said, didn't have books even like a library that he wanted to give. And, you know, again, this is not proof necessarily of anything, but it's all of this stuff has added up over the years. There's too enough for people to rise to like get suspicious about it, I think.

Exactly.

“You want to take a break? A breather, I guess you could call it?”

Yeah, let's take a, let's take a breather. Let's take five. Hey, it's us. The Jonas Brothers and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news news? We created our own podcast. Oh, hey, Jonas.

We invented a podcast. Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it.

First people to do podcasts.

Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts, right? But this one's extra special. So how do we, how do we actually come up with a name, hey, Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it.

And, oh, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers.

“Well, this is how you guys remember it going down.”

Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast. People could call in and say, hey, Jonas. And then I broke down on my little note pad.

Hey, Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title. I'll talk about that. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to hey, Jonas, on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. You get your podcast.

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Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. One thing that Ed, who helped us put this together, mentions that I wanted to get your take on it. I didn't really think it had a whole lot to do with it. One way or the other was all of the various misspellings of Shakespeare's name over the years. He would sign it in different ways.

He would abbreviate it in different ways. There are documents with, I mean, it looks like 15 different ways of spelling Shakespeare. Everything from shacks with an X-peer to spears and something you would jab somebody with. It's misspelled all over the place. I just kind of took that as, you know, people misspelled things a lot back then.

There weren't necessarily records that you could go look at very easily. So you might just take a guess at how to spell a name and then it was on the record. And so I didn't really think that factored in much to do. I didn't. And the impression I have is that all the different spellings are easily explained away from just the era, like you just said,

Right.

“So I think like the different spellings of the names is, it's about it.”

Yeah, it's about as big a boondoggle as you're going to find in the Shakespeare authorship argument, I think.

All right, so we'll cast that aside. Well, hold on before we do. I want to point out my favorite abbreviation. It's one. I think I let me look at that.

I bet you I know which one. But go ahead. Put it back in the deck. Yeah, it's back in the deck. Okay.

It is Wylm Shaq P. Yeah. That's one. It stands out pretty blatantly. S.H.A.K.P.

I love it. Shack. Hello. Wylm Shaq. It's not a really good hotel check in name, but it's still worth mentioning anything.

That's pretty good. So like we mentioned, sort of what's at the root of a lot of these theories is what Ed, I think, that's a great, great, great cause of elitism, which is how could this guy even, you know, educated up to 13, how could he have known about all this stuff? How could he have known about military exploits?

And, you know, if you read Shakespeare's plays, which, if you're an English major, you have to read a lot of them, there's a lot going on in these plays about a lot of different stuff. He didn't write about just kind of one kind of thing. It implies like a really deep breadth of knowledge about a lot of things. And not just different things is it relates to England.

Different things is it relates to entirely different lands. Oh yeah. Like, think about where a lot of his stuff takes places in Italy. Yeah. And as far as anyone knows, Shakespeare didn't go to Italy.

Although, remember, there's that last year, eight year period, recall him the last years. It's entirely possible he went to Italy during that time. It's also just as possible that he didn't go to Italy during that time. We just don't know.

But that is something that really stands out. And yes, there is a tremendous amount of elitism and classicism among some of the anti-Shakes beer group. But I think that that is, I think that dismisses a lot of their points out of hand. And they do have some really good points.

They're not just cranks and crack pots. Like, they have some pretty good evidence. You can make a case as at least as good evidence as the pro Shakespeare people. But the upshot of it is really kind of a compliment. They're saying, these plays are so good.

Yeah. That Shakespeare is arguably the greatest writer who ever lived. He has such a crazy imagination. He's so funny. He has such an extensive vocabulary, such an amazing grasp of the human condition.

Really all have been written by this man from, at the time, the country who has educated up to 13, who came from the middle class, who may or may not have ever traveled out of England. How is that even possible? Are people born that gifted?

“That's ultimately, if you want to go beyond the classicism and the elite, totally.”

Totally. That's really what their argument boils down to you. Yeah. I agree.

And if you don't know a lot of Shakespeare, I've never really read a lot yourself.

And you think, like, you're sort of in that camp. I mean, this is kind of overrated, like this guy. No. These plays are brilliant. And there's a reason why they still make contemporary movies based on Shakespeare's plays or inspired

by Shakespeare's plays. It's because they were all genuinely brilliant. It was great stuff. And what you need is a really good teacher to kind of walk you through it. Yeah.

It's tough to read. And we had some good ones at Georgia University of Georgia. I had one. I can't remember his name. Kind of can picture him in my head.

He was so great. So lovely. So lovely. Yeah. So one.

No, it was well. So check. Check. Oh. We'll check it remember his name.

I bet you someone will write in in the mid 90s. Did he play a harpsichord? Oh. Oh. Oh, no.

I had a classics professor. Who played a harpsichord? Yeah. This was, you know, you had to take Shakespeare 1 and 2. Those were the only required English classes as an English major.

So that kind of shows the importance. But what he did was he satist down. And we read the plays out loud in class.

And after every, you know, short bit, he would say, well, here's what's going on.

And here's what he's saying. Yeah. And you're very lucky. Yeah. And once you hear that, you're like, oh, these are very contemporary stories.

“And that's why they still carry such weight today.”

It's because they were brilliant stories. But stories that were very relatable even now. It's not, it's not high for loot and stuff. It's just, it was written at a time where it seems that way. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Because we don't really speak in, you know, Renaissance English anymore. Right. So it seems, it might as well be Greek to us.

Yeah. But yeah. It was intended for common audiences. Like the average person would laugh or cry at those, at those plays.

plays can still make people today laugh and cry.

Yeah. Like they still hold up, I guess what you're saying. And to have you ever heard of Sister Wendy, no. She is, she's a nun. I don't believe she's still with us.

“And I think in the 90s, she made the series of videos where she just went around”

and museums around the world and explained paintings to you in a way that I would love to find a sister Wendy of Shakespeare. I'm sure there's somebody out there. But you could do a lot worse to killing several hours watching Sister Wendy explain paintings because she was like a natural gift.

It just not only understanding what she was looking at, but explaining it really understandably. I love that.

And I think in Sister Wendy's case, and my professor, Shackby,

it comes from a place of, they have such great admiration. And they want us, they really want people to understand this stuff. You might ordinarily go, like, well, I don't get paintings like this. I don't get plays like this. I art.

So should we get in speaking of art? Great segue. Should we get into this mess of the bust of Shakespeare? Yeah. I mean, it's another, it's very much like it's tombstone where people are like,

it means this. No, I mean to that. You know? Yeah. There's a bust an effigy of Shakespeare inside the church there in Stratford.

And there's been a lot of controversy over this thing because part of it is not necessarily like, was he the author although it does play into that. But sort of like, what did he look like?

“And how do we know that's what he looked like?”

Like, we've all seen the picture. And there's like this one painting and this one bust. And that's kind of where everything comes from. And some people say, this was done after he was dead. Like, we really don't know that that's what he looked like.

I think just a couple of years ago, this professor and expert made a pretty good case that beyond most reasonable doubt that it was actually done. I think she said it was highly likely. Professor Orland said it's highly likely it was done while he was alive and that he commissioned it because she thinks she knows who did the bust

and that that person lived near him and was a regular at the globe and kind of put all these clues together. But other people, some people say it was his dad and not him because of this whole sack of grain argument. Yeah, so there, there was an etching that was made of the bust

within some period of time after the bust was erected. But before it was altered, so the bust has definitely been altered. And it looks like one way you can interpret this thing at the bottom, this puffy thing that's at the hands of the bust, the effigy. As a sack of grain, I don't know if it were a sack of grain,

like anyone would ever present it in that position. Right. It doesn't make any sense. It's a weird looking. Right.

So what the, the anti Shakespeare, anti-strat for people are saying is like, yeah, it's his dad, it's not him, or if it is Shakespeare, he was known for his grain carrying skills, not his right in skills. And the pro-strat for people are like, don't be ridiculous. This is obviously a pillow.

Right. And at some point, somebody did revise the bust so it is unequivocally a pillow. Like, there's just no way to mistake it. And it's not so much a pillow as it is like a hand rest for him to write on. He's got a piece of paper on it and a coil in his other hand.

Right. The anti Shakespeare people jump on that and say like, see, it was altered to fit this, to cover up this conspiracy later on. Yeah, exactly.

“And that coil has been stolen and replaced, I think, so many times over the years”

that now I don't know if it currently has the coil, or if it has the coil and it's now behind glass. Oh, that could, that's a good way to get around it, sure. But you know, that became, you know, obviously something you could just snatch of his hand. And you've got Shakespeare's coil on your door. Speaking of being snatched, apparently that curse on his tombstone and work because they did a scan of it

on the 400th anniversary of his death and found that at least his skull was missing if not all of his remains. Oh, really? Yeah. And then interesting, so somebody out there has Shakespeare's skull in their personal collection. It's probably Rosencrancer, Guildenstern.

I like Shakespeare joke. There's some people out there that were like, nailed it. Good. Another thing, as far as evidence goes, is the first folia, which is, I think it was the first collection

that they put in print of all of Shakespeare's plays, including 18 that had never been in print before.

He was kind of known as a jealous sort of argumentative guy. But he calls Shakespeare the swan of Avon and is sort of a very lot of story in this forward.

“But I think you found stuff later on where he was kind of like, "I had my fingers across the whole time."”

Kind of, yes, so the pro-stratford people who believe Shakespeare's Shakespeare say, "Look, man, this guy was known as a rival, a friendly rival,

but a real rival, really critical, like had biting criticism in sense of humor, and also was not one to just be like,

"To just bow to nobility or privilege or wealth or status." So if this guy is saying that Shakespeare, the swan of Avon, which places this man at Streford on Avon, because Ben Johnson is calling him that, that proves that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. The anti- Shakespeare camp says, like you said, Ben Johnson at his fingers across the whole time, and that really what he was doing was providing cover for this larger essentially conspiracy of people who actually wore Shakespeare.

He was lending his renown to it. Neither one really makes sense. I mean, unless Ben Johnson had like a complete change of heart. It just doesn't quite add up, but then also the idea that he would provide that cover for a group of noble people and seems unlikely as well, too.

Yeah, I agree.

One of the first public doubters in the 1800s was a woman named Delia Bacon,

a no relation to Francis Bacon, although you've made things so, because one person that Delia Bacon put forward as one of the authors was Francis Bacon. Delia Bacon was an American, was a writer, had a sort of a long life before she got into kind of hating Shakespeare. Yeah, hating him. Like really didn't like Shakespeare, and really wanted to prove that he was not the author.

“And her idea was that it was Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, and I think maybe some other people too,”

who were these very well-regarded people of philosophy and politics and science, who would not have been allowed to put forth these plays, and what these plays, what they really were, were not even meant for entertainment or for the stage. They were meant to be sort of biting criticisms of all kinds of various things that these gentlemen could not put their name on.

Yeah, so they couldn't put their name on it, because they would be executed as basically treasonous to the crown.

Because they were, you know, putting forth the idea of social reform and, you know, women's rights and all sorts of stuff, taking potshots of the nobility, or there's another theory called the stigma of print that was introduced and I think the 1870s, and that was that they just, just out of noble nobility, noble ass, I guess. They wouldn't dain to have their stuff published. It would, it would erode their social reputation, even accepting the idea that they would be be beheaded for treason.

So there are a couple of reasons that somebody like Francis Bacon would have to cover up his identity if he were actually Shakespeare. And that same stigma of print and political cover argument gets extended to other people beyond bacon too. Yeah, and that, you know, it makes a little bit of sense. As far as Dealia Bacon, she was able to talk Ralph Waldo Emerson into basically kind of buying her story. And he arranged for her sponsorship basically to go to England to kind of research this.

Apparently in England, she, she was kind of on record saying that she didn't research history books or records and things like that. She believed that the proof was sort of in the plays themselves and in the text basically like with these clues. Apparently she used to go to Shakespeare's tomb a lot and kind of just, you know, hang out there and like try to convince the, I guess, the tomb keeper, whoever, you know, takes care of the cemetery. The crypt keeper? Yeah, the crypt keeper. I didn't want to say it.

“To be let in and like, almost got in at one point apparently, but I think she got sick and couldn't, but she thought that the, you know, the deep secret was within that tomb.”

Yeah, she kind of kicked off the nutty or camp of the questioning of Shakespeare.

Like, the idea that you could get your answers just from reading the plays, the clues were in there. The thing is, as Francis Bacon was known to, to amuse himself by including, you know, hidden codes and messages in his writings. So if it was Francis Bacon, that's not that much of a stretch.

And supposedly, Mark Twain and some friends did actually turn up if you read the first folio, there is, I guess, some series of lines that spell out Francisco Baycono.

“It's pretty good. I mean, here's the thing though, Francis Bacon wrote a lot about a lot of stuff, but not a lot of fiction and prose.”

Or didn't he, right? No evidence that he ever wrote any kind of plays, right, did he? Right. Then there was this other thing that kind of came along. So Dealia Bacon is widely regarded as the person who kicked off the, it was Shakespeare Shakespeare idea. But supposedly, there was a person who came before her, James Willman, who in 1781 sat down to write a biography of Shakespeare and did all the research in London and Stratford on Avon and was astonished by the lack of documentation that Shakespeare had written those plays and started to suspect it and that he kicked it off.

The thing is, the anti Shakespeare side has been accused of making those documents up, of forging those documents to support Dealia Bacon's Francis Bacon theory. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so they weren't discovered until 1931, which is pretty convenient, and it's entirely possible that they were just forged. All right, should we take another break here?

“Yeah, but, all right, we'll take another break, we'll talk a little bit more about whether Shakespeare wrote that stuff.”

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So one more thing about Dili, a bacon before we wrap it up. Like you said, she was a good writer. And her exhaustive examination of the texts of Shakespeare's plays resulted in a 620 page book. The philosophy of the plays of Shakespeare unfolded.

And she's often credited with basically prefiguring if not kicking off the idea of literary criticism of close readings of stuff to find other meanings.

And she was doing it to expose noble people as Shakespeare, but she was really good at it. And people said, well, hey, maybe we should do this for other stuff too. Yeah. And like ironically, because she kind of, I mean, you know, the various Todry accounts say she was driven to madness. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it did seem like it pretty much consumed her in the latter stages of her life and that her family is kind of embarrassed and stuff like that.

So Francis Bacon was not the only person put forth.

Somebody who at least rivals, if not it clips his him.

“And that would be the 17th Earl of Oxford Edward Devare, right?”

Yeah, I mean, there's a whole, there's a whole camp and a whole other, and you know, we can't get into this too, too much in detail. But there's a whole movement that says out of the 80 people, like we really think it was the 17th Earl of Oxford. Yeah, it's called the Oxfordian theory of the Shakespearean authorship. And there is, you know, some stuff to it, he was a poet, which I had points out that's so much for the stigma of print. And then also you can compare his poetry and like some specific works of poetry to some of Shakespeare's poetry.

And see some real comparisons.

But as far as I can tell, the questions or the similarities and their, if I'm not mistaken, like, and that to me it was the six Earl of Derby who has a little more, a little more to offer. Really? Oh, um, that was about Derby. There was one other thing.

“So Derby has his own group, The Derbyites.”

Right. No or say, too, man. This is what I mean, it's an onion, it's a blooming onion. So there was one other thing about Derby that is pretty suspicious. There were two narrative poems that Shakespeare dedicated to a man who was raised in the same household as Devere.

And from what anybody could tell, there's no reason Shakespeare would know this person. And why would Shakespeare dedicate two poems? So this noble, noble man he didn't know. But Devere certainly knew him.

He was basically raised alongside him like a brother.

So that, along with the biographical reading, the close reading, looking for parallels between Devere's life and Shakespeare's plays are what kind of backup docs for Deere's. Interesting. Because at Christopher Marlo was another one who was a contemporary in friend of Shakespeare's and they collaborated and they influenced one another. And the details around Marlo's death are hinky enough to where some people thought, or at least the, you know, the conspiracy is that, is that he faked his death because he was going to be executed by the crown and continue to write.

And then use his friend Billy Shakespeare as a front to continue to get those plays out. I'm not really sure about this because, I don't know, that's just a little far fetched if he asked me. Well, yeah, if you're, if you're supposing that Marlo faked his death in order to continue writing, you now got a conspiracy theory wrapped in a conspiracy theory.

“Yeah, maybe that's another thing. But it's interesting because, you know, Marlo is a pretty interesting dude in himself, supposedly he may have been a secret agent for the crown.”

Yeah. He was an atheist. He was his own playwright. People loved him as a playwright at the time, but he was no Shakespeare. Like, literally, he's probably the flimsyist person you could attribute Shakespeare's writings to because Marlo was gloomy and super atheist and he was his plays just didn't have that same kind of humanism and funnyness that Shakespeare's plays had. And also, why wouldn't Marlo just write these plays under his own name? He had no reason to write these plays under different names.

Yeah, agreed. There have been people that put forth the idea that there were several different women that might have been the real authors because women were not allowed to write plays at the time. 80% of the plays written during this time were anonymous and no author was listed and a lot of people said, hey, a lot of these were written by women and they just couldn't put their name on it. Many of Shakespeare's plays and ideas are very progressive. It's kind of a, I don't know about flimsy, but it kind of diminished Shakespeare a bit to say that like, well, it had to be a woman because they were so progressive about women like taking a stand.

When, in fact, Shakespeare seemingly very much thought that way himself. How could a man write women like this come on? Yeah, there's a woman named Mary Sidman Herbert who has a whole foundation that's trying to prove that she wrote, kind of the worst of the internet happened about seven years ago when you get these memes that are just full of false stuff and then everyone starts spreading them around. Oh, yeah. There was a meme in 2015 when all over social media that just had the picture of this black woman and said, this is Amelia Bassano.

None of this stuff was true. First of all, she was maybe Moroccan. She was definitely not of African descent.

“Oh, I thought she was some Venetian. Now I saw that she was Moroccan and had some Italian in her, so that makes a little sense, but she was definitely not of African descent.”

She was a published author, so the whole notion that she wasn't allowed to publish things wasn't right. She was kind of a well-known poet, I think, at the time. So this kind of thing gets passed along the internet and then you know, half the people that see it just say, oh, we'll look at that Shakespeare was was was all written by this lady back then. Yeah, problem solved and that's just not how it works. One of the other things I saw that, and I think that the people who are like Shakespeare was a woman are like, well, okay, if we're for starting a question Shakespeare's authorship, we can't ignore this whole group of people who had every reason to hide their identity as authors of these plays.

Because they were women and they were not for sure. So there was a critic who in 1593 wrote of a who praised a gentle woman who was writing some amazing plays and sonnets and this was the year after Shakespeare pops back up after his lost years and when he was starting to write. But that the critic said he didn't want to reveal who it was because he didn't want to basically get her in trouble. So that's when some other people kind of look at and say, see Shakespeare was a woman. Well, I mean, I think this theory makes a lot more sense on a lot of the others.

You know, just by the sheer fact that women would not have been allowed to, so maybe Shakespeare was progressive and decided to be a front for these great works.

“But it reveals a point about being a anti Shakespeare anti, I guess, stratford person is you have to part of is you have to explain why somebody would want to fake authorship,”

would want to hide behind Shakespeare's name. Yeah, what do you call that a motive? Yeah, you got means motive and opportunity. You put those three together, you got your Shakespeare. Well, that's what I mean about the maybe women wrote them.

I mean, it was definite motive there. Right, exactly. So there was one other thing that happened. I mean, a lot of stuff happened over the course of this 100, almost 200 years now of questioning Shakespeare's authorship. Back in 1987, a ox forety in Charlton Augburn got the at least three sitting Supreme Court justices.

John Paul Stevens William Brennan and Harry Blackman to hold a mock trial to determine if Shakespeare actually was the author of Shakespeare's plays. And they did on Seaspan, they had they held like a trial and heard the evidence and Shakespeare had his own attorney arguing for him.

“And it was pretty interesting, but they went two to one, I think, in favor of Shakespeare from stratford as the author.”

But they did like real research and stuff. It wasn't just like a, you know, stunt. No, so the Supreme Court justices were kind of taking a tongue and cheek.

But I got the impression that Charlton Augburn was like, yes, it's finally going to prove it definitively.

One way or another, it didn't even fall in his favor. Interesting. Yeah, it is interesting. What people did in the 80s on Seaspan? I got a few more little things here from that Atlantic article.

That point to his authorship is being genuine. One is that he had a narrative poem called Venus and Adonis. There was a very popular poem at the time that was put in print. And it was printed by a gentleman named Richard Field, who apparently went to school with him at stratford. So that's a pretty good little hint.

Okay. He was written about at the time.

So it's not like he was never known until his death and then all of a sudden became super popular.

Like he died of rich man and was written about with by literary critics at the time and entertainment and play critics. So there were contemporaneous criticisms of his writing while he was still living, which is a pretty, you know, pretty big clue that he probably wrote this stuff. It is not proof. No, because those people could be, they went and saw a play by Shakespeare. It is a mean that they met Shakespeare and taught to Shakespeare about authorship of the place.

And leaned up for his shoulder while he wrote it. Right. Proof. The other last thing that I saw in that Atlantic article, this is the one, or actually this was in a, this was the golden bullet from that video. Oh, was it?

Well, Shakespeare was apparently concerned that his dad's reputation sort of in the family's reputation suffered later in life because of financial problems that his dad had.

And apparently it's a really long process.

They don't just hand them out to anybody. You got to, like, have a certain level of achievement to get a coat of arms. So he went through this big long process and had, he went all very linden on there. Oh, man, what a movie. He had a couple of different men in the Harold's office who defended Shakespeare's right to have a coat of arms because other people were saying, He was this guy even, like, he came from not much and they shouldn't have a coat of arms.

And one of the guys who defended him was a man named William Camden, who, this guy in the video referred to as one of the most learned men in all of England. Oh, wow. He was actually been Johnson Schoolmaster and apparently just knew everything on happening on the literary scene inside and out. And in one of his books, he is called the remains of a greater history. He talks about all the great writers at the time. And he lists William Shakespeare of Aivan in that book.

So he said, that's the golden bullet. Again, if it's just a front, it's still in a real proof of authorship. No, it's not. I mean, like, this guy could just be playing along, lending his or didn't know it. Or didn't know it.

Yeah, that's another one too.

Like, that's the thing. Like, the anti-strat-fortyens have caused the pro-strat-fortyens to actually defend their position. And in doing so, it's kind of revealed that both of them are kind of on shaky ground. Yeah. It's almost just a matter of belief.

“Do you want to believe that one man was that brilliant?”

And that talented and gifted? Or, can you just not believe that? It just doesn't make any sense to you. So it was a cabal of noble people who were trying to advance political reform and hiding behind William Shakespeare and paying him off with maybe family crests and money. And fame to let them use his name as the playwright.

Yeah. They also say like where he was from. There was some regional slang that was very specific to where he was from that was used. There was in Taming of the Shrew. He mentions these Latin phrases that are in specifically from a Latin book that apparently was known to have been used at his school at his grammar school in Stratford.

So again, there's all these little hints and clues. All of it kind of gave me a headache. And I was like can we just like love these plays? Exactly. That's exactly right.

It's the ultimate point. Let's just love the plays. You can get serious about this though. Yeah. They definitely do.

I mean, it's pretty interesting. I mean, I get it. Kind of fun to watch from the outside too. Yeah. Are you got anything else?

No, we could go on all day, but totally we'd never get anywhere.

There's like 10 things I'm leaving on the table. So we just got to keep moving on, right? All right. Let's keep on keeping on Chuck.

“If you want to know more about Shakespeare and authorship,”

there is a giant gaping rabbit hole you can jump down on the internet. And say, Saiyanara, that all of your other pursuits. And since I said Saiyanara, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this just came in over the wire. I was going to funny from our friends Steven.

And Kagoshima Japan, about eating squid. He says love the show fellas. Reason not to be so touchy, though. About eating squid. They are child murdering Seeverman.

He said the reason squid die after they made is a survival adaptation. Because if not, they would eat the eggs and newly hatch squid from themselves and other squid in the spawning areas. Squidley didly is in fantasidal maniac and should be cooked and eaten. I'll be at sustainably, of course.

So that's the argument. These squids deserve to be eaten because they would be eating themselves. If not for this adaptation. So he also says tell Josh not to eat uncooked squid. That's not great.

Alright. And Conregard from Steven. And Kagoshima Japan, a squid haven and a squid ink pasta destination. Steven, that was a really great eye-opening email. I may have seen the light. I'm not sure yet. I'll have to get back to you. Okay?

Okay. Thank you for responding to that Steven. Sure.

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