Hey, did you guys ever hear about this Willy shakes dude.
Kind of a big deal. They teach him in high school, so you know he's important.
Willy triple shake, that's what I remember of him, The old triple shaky because it's so big, you gotta shake it three times.
Old two hand Shakespeare.
You don't want to get anything on the pantaloons, right right.
The playwright William Shakespeare is sort of famous in English because he is considered to be one of the most influential authors in human history. He's also cartoonishly prolific. Between about fifteen ninety and sixteen thirteen, he wrote something like thirty seven different plays or was it Francis Bacon or was it a brand name?
Right?
The same way that you know, you go into an airport and you will see paperbacks written by purportedly the same author.
Oh wait, are we talking about Bill Shakespeare?
Oh? You know Bill, Billy, Billy Willy.
You know what is that from?
What's that from? He's a regular Bill Shakespeare. That's like a line that's in my head.
Sounds like some Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler comedy basically invented comedy too by the way well Billy shakes.
Yeah, I guess I always thought that the first human who invented comedy was the person in a survival situation who lived when someone.
Else died Seinfeld, Right.
So we are thrilled to introduce you to a group of what we will call renegade academics. Their street name is anti Stratfordians. Their idea is that the storyory of William Shakespeare himself is just.
That, a story, a narrative. What part of it is true?
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our friend Noel is on some adventures.
As we record today, they.
Call me Ben. We are joined with our guest super producer Ramsey Ramjams junt so say hello to him when you get the chance. Most importantly, let's.
Talk about you.
You are here.
You are you that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
I really thought he was talking about me that time, because he looked right at me when he.
Said the show, the show would be nothing without you met as numerous Apple Music or Apple Podcast reviews have assured.
Us, Oh really, well, I don't know if that's true, but I agree with it. Well, you know what, none of us would be who we are today if we didn't have a certain playwright, a man that we all call back to, that we all imagine as perhaps the father of.
Plays, the father of plays.
At least when I was growing up, I always imagine him as like the play, the one from which all other plays that I was reading kind of sprung from, or at least we're heavily influenced by.
He's the most well known. That's a fact.
We are talking, fellow conspiracy realist about Shakespeare. William Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon. Do you did you ever act in Shakespearean production?
I was never in a full on production. I have did many a scene. Yes, My favorite, I would have to say, came from the Tempest, and it included just a line that has really influenced my whole life. I think, what is it? I might paraphrase here, but it is Hell is empty and all the devils are here, or something to this effect, because all the devil's here. I don't remember exactly his language.
But I know the paraphrase. The paraphrase is enough to convince the least take us to that line.
Yeah.
I did some Shakespeare's stuff as well in high school and early college, I believe. But past is a watercolor in the rain, you know, things blur. I'm still pretty sure it happened today. Playwright William Shakespeare is widely acknowledged as one of, if not the most influential writers in the English language. His plays have been read or performed, whether in part or a whole, numerous points millions of times across the planet over centuries. Yeah, people are reading this,
they're performing parts of it, they're performing entire productions. Here in Atlanta, where this podcast is based, there's the Shakespeare Tavern, which we can mention a little bit later. I just want to drop that seed here. Shakespeare was also quite prolific. Between about fifteen ninety and sixteen thirteen. Uh, he wrote at least thirty seven plays, collaborated on several more.
But who was this man? Who was Willie Shakes? Really?
No, we're just gonna go ahead and push this little button. That's I don't know who left this button here, But let's just let's present and see what happens.
Hey, guys, I heard you were asking who Shakespeare was.
Whoa Jonathan Strickland.
Hi, that's what the button was.
Yeah, it's labeled Strickland.
Yeah. Yeah, you know, marked out Quister because this is the same show, the same show as that.
That's true.
Yeah, yeah, So.
I actually have the honor maybe honor is too strong a word to be playing William Shakespeare at the twenty nineteen Georgia Renaissance Festival. So, as you might imagine, I have done my fair share of research into this subject, and there's a lot of stuff I could tell you, but I feel like to really get a grasp on why William Shakespeare is this person we still talk about four hundred years after he last wrote anything. I want to recite to you one of the most famous speeches
from Shakespeare. And there's tons right, there's to be or not to be. There's two two solid flesh. Those are two speeches about suicide from the same play. He has a famous Shakespeare's But no, I'm going to recite to you one of my favorite speeches in all of Shakespeare's from the History of Henry the Fifth, and it's called the Crispins Day speech, and this is to set the scene. The English army is in France. They are outnumbered five
to one. They have been spending the entire previous day marching, so they're exhausted, whereas the French troops are fresh, And just as the lords of England are are looking out and they're feeling a sense of dread. They're talking with one another about what is to come. And one of them, Westmoreland, says that he wishes that just ten thousand more Englishmen, who are otherwise laying in bed back in England had joined them. And the king happens to overhear him. And
so is that's to set the scene. Here's the speech.
Oh Paul, could Paul Ramsey? Could we get maybe a nice sound design.
Some rousing music?
Yeah? What's he that wishes?
So, my cousin Westmoreland, No, my fair cousin, if we are mocked to die, we are enough to do our country loss.
And if to live the few of the men the greater share of our honor God's will, I pray THEE wish not one man more.
By Jove. I am not covetous for gold, nor care I who doth feed.
Upon my cost It earns me. Not if men my garments wear such outward things, dwell not in my desires. But if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive. Now faith my cous wish not a man from England God's peace. I would not lose so great an honor as one man, more, methinks, would share for me. For the best hope I have, Oh, do not wish for one more. Rather proclaim it westmelit through my host, that he which hath no stomach to
this fight, Let him depart. His passport shall be made, and crowns for convoy put into his purse. We would not die in that man's company that fears his fellowship to die with us. This day is called the Feast of Chrispian. He that outlives this day and comes safe home, will stand a tiptoe when this day is named, and rouse him at the name of Chrispian. He that shall live this day and see old age, will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors and say tomorrow is Saint Chrispian.
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, and say, these wounds I had on Chrispian's day, old men forget, yet all shall be forgot, but he'll remember with advantages.
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, familiar in his mouth as household words, Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester be in their flowing cups freshly remembered this story shall the good man teach his son and Crispin Crispians shall ne'er go by from this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered.
We few, we happy, few, we.
Band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. Be he ne'er so vile this day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now a bed.
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap.
Whilst any speaks that.
Fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day, Now, now here's the thing, God, here's the thing that really really brings that back.
So this speech.
There's a little bit more, all right, thank you.
But that speech that I mean Shakespeare, not me, that that speech was all meant to try and rouse the troops to fight, and in fact wes Moreland himself says, he turns to Westmoreland says, do you want to have someone join us now? And west Moreland says, if it were just me and you, we could take them all. And sure enough, as the story unfolds, the French lose thousands and the English number they're dead at twenty five twenty five hundred twenty five.
And this is historically accurate more or less.
Yes, the Battle of Agincore was a phenomenal battle in which the English faced overwhelming odds against the French, but they used a lot of interesting tactics, including using the longbow and hiding essentially kind of guerrilla warfare in the woods to the sides of the battlefield to kind of shower the French with arrows.
Yeah, use it.
Yeah, it turns out that's a really useful tactic. But this speech, I think is one of those that to this day tends to be one of the ones that in England is referred to as a truly patriotic speech. This idea of that because there are so few of us, that actually makes this even more of an honorable action.
And for those of you who do live. Just imagine the stories you're going to be telling your children and their children, and how everyone from this point forward will remember that you were here, Like, that's an incredible thing.
Yeah, and at the time, let's see, So Henry Henriett fifth was written around fifteen ninety nine.
Yeah, correctly, Yeah, it was.
It was in the second second Henriad, actually the Henry Ad, which was the second four play series in his histories.
And the battle we're referring to occurred in fourteen fifty. Yes, so this is at the time the first time at stage this is an historical work, you know what I mean. People were regarding this in some ways similar to the way modern audiences regard things like a World War II film or maybe The Patriot with mel Gibson or Braveheart with Me you know something, but not necessarily with mel Gibson.
Well, and the English history plays from Shakespeare that spans eight plays, from Richard the Second to essentially h Richard the Third. Yeah, that's that's oddly enough, Richard the Second and Richard the Third, not back to back. There's a whole bunch of kings in between.
So the.
That story is actually the War of the Roses, that that entire sequence of plays. And the interesting thing to me is that Shakespeare wrote the four plays that represent the end of that Henry the Sixth, Parts one, two and three, and Richard the Third, he wrote those earlier in his career, and then he wrote the four plays that represent the beginning of the War of the Roses, Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth Part one and two, and Henry the Fifth.
Those he wrote later.
So you could think that kind of like Lucas, he went back and wrote the prequels, and like Lucas, we also.
Knew where this story had to end up.
I mean, this was history, although he takes great liberties in his history play, yes.
But it was this.
This eight series of plays tells you the full history of the Lancasters and the Yorks, from the point where Richard the Second abdicates his throne and gives Henry Bolingbrooke, who becomes Henry the Fourth, control of England, all the way up to when Richard the Third loses the crown and Henry Tudor, the father of Henry the Eighth, who in turn was the father of Queen Elizabeth, his monarch at the time. Like that was that full story. So this was a story that a lot of the Englis knew very.
Well, and this is an excellent summation, or I would say a slice of the pie.
Shakespeare wise.
Again, we have to thank you for that excellent recitation. We do once recommend if you happen to be in the area, that you check out the Georgia Renaissance Festival. Jonathan, I know that I give you a lot of guff off air because it makes my day to do.
So I'm not going to stop on weekends.
I put on tights, I run around in Georgia weather. It's all right.
I admire that part.
And just by way of a plug and very honest one, I took my son last year and he absolutely adored it.
Yeah, it's the sort of thing that I loved as a kid, and honestly, it's the interactions with kids that I still enjoy.
Yeah.
It runs mid April through the first weekend of June, and if you do go, there will be open auditions with William Shakespeare. I'll be auditioning parts. So if you if you've ever wanted to stand up on a stage and recite, I'll have lots of different speeches on hand. From all the different plays so that we can we can cast all the I mean, I'm going to be performing all the shows. I got to cast every single part.
Right, Yeah, I'll go. Yeah, well I'll go.
But I'm I can't wait to hear the rest of this. So I'm waiting for you to tell me that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, so I can lay the smack down that.
I'm glad you said that because the.
Originally we examined this, this group of thoughts as a video in our YouTube video series and it was fascinating because off air we've all worked together for years, folks. Oh yeah, off air, there have been times where more than once, actually where you, Jonathan, I don't want to say quite out of the blue, but you have come up to me. We weren't talking about me, think in particular to tell me how much this idea has bothered you and it bothers a lot of people.
The concept the anti Stratfordians. Anyone who thinks that that someone other than William Shakespeare must have written the plays. I find it infuriating and perplexing at the same time.
But was there even a real William Shakespeare?
Yes?
So well, there are legal documents that have his name on them.
I've seen six specific Yeah, I was gonna say I've seen a few.
So with that excellent introduction, let's dive into the life of William Shakespeare. Let's also just Jonathan, let's go ahead and kidnap you. Sure, you work on several other shows. You work on tech stuff, you work on the brink, You have a malt You're a man of many hats.
Yeah, I'm wearing one of them right now.
You are wearing.
You are wearing. It must have been tough to choose the one.
So they give me a porter.
Yep.
So we're going to there's a story there, So we're going to We're going to kidnap you absolutely all right, we've conscripted you to be a guest along with Ramsey on the show today. Let's explore William Shakespeare. He is born in as I believe you had established earlier, fifteen sixty four ish, right.
Yeah, sometime around there. We don't have the actual record of his birth. We have the record of his baptism.
Right, and that's a relatively common thing at this point in the historical record. He was brought up in Stratford upon Avon and eventually he was buried there. Of course, he made a couple stops in London. Yeah, and he maintained his household in Stratford for the duration of his career in London. But other than that, the things we know for sure about the individual, the human William Shakespeare, they seemed relatively scant by today's terms.
Especially for someone who was so influential and did so many things in his life.
And we don't have as many details as we would want. We do know that someone of pretty much the same name, the same guy. Again, the person married and had children in Stratford, because there is, as you mentioned, that baptismal register.
Right.
One of the problems that we should establish from the jump here is that you can find contemporary written records with Shakespeare's name mentioning him, even a few with what is confirmed to be his own signature, but the spelling varies, and so for people who have an issue with something about Shakespeare, they'll say, well, why does the marriage bond have shagspear?
And yeah, who's the shagspear Karen?
Are they the same as Shak's pair? Oh?
Yeah, that was another one, isn't it. Shax p ere E Shakespeare.
Yeah, I actually actually have answers to these, but I don't know if you want me to give.
Them not yet, but there are answers.
So we do know that William Shakespeare gave evidence in a court case. He signed some documents, he went home to Stratford. Eventually he made a will and around sixteen sixteen he.
Died apparently possibly on the same date that he was born on April twenty third. That's a guess. It's still based on the baptism.
Yeah, still a guesstimate, but well written, just structurally.
Yeah, yeah, No, if you're if you're going to have a mysterious life, being born and dying on the same date, not the same day, but the same date, is it does add to that era of mystery, doesn't.
Kind of like Samuel Clemens came or Twain.
That'll bring me back out again.
Yeah.
Shakespeare's Shakespeare's work in his career, well, a lot of it starts obviously in London. He becomes an actor and then a shareholder in what was called the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the known later as the Kingsmen. Matt were what were the Kingsmen? They were the playing company that owned the Globe, right.
Yeah, this is the part where the Globe Theater, the world renowned Globe Theater comes in. Also the Blackfriars Theater.
That would be later, but yeah, that was one of the first indoor theaters in London.
Yeah, Jonathan tell us a little bit about the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
Sure.
Yeah, So you had theater companies that typically had a patron that supported their work so that they could get the upfront costs they would need to put on a performance, and they would recapture those costs through whatever means like ticket sales once you got to the theaters. Theaters in London were brand new when Shakespeare got there. They had
only been around for maybe fifteen years. Before that, you would typically see a play performed in the courtyard of an in house or maybe in some real fancy person's like waiting room that just happened to be as large as a theater would be, that kind of thing. But this was a time where theaters as purpose built structures were brand new in England. So Shakespeare is a part owner with this theatrical group, which means he gets a percentage of the box office. That's actually how Shakespeare made
all his money. You didn't make very much money publishing a play because you didn't publish plays, you performed them. Shakespeare in his lifetime never published any of his plays. Some of them got published, but it wasn't his decision. And so he was making money by helping produce work that could be performed in this theater and then getting proceeds from the ticket sales.
And he was making money off of his own work because I think the Kingsman had the exclusive rights to produce his plays ye for a period of times fifteen ninety four.
Yeah, he was essentially Essentially he would write material for the theater that he had ownership in, and he would also we think, perform in those shows. He was often listed as one of the actors that we don't know what parts he played, Like you.
Think he ever did a one man.
Juliet, I'm going to do a production of Hamlet except all the characters. We do actually think that he may have played Hamlet's father's ghost in Hamlet, but there's there's not a lot of there's not really any hard evidence to back that up. So so you've got essentially a guy who owns part of the theater and he's a gifted writer. Assuming that we're going with the story that Shakespeare wrote. Shakespeare he's a gifted writer who is supplying
his own theater with material to attract people. You also have to remember that at the time, let me set the scene here in London, you have Puritans who are very powerful in the They do not allow theaters to operate within the city limits of London, so.
All the theaters are either north of the city or.
South of the city on the across the Thames on the south part. So if you want to go see a show and you live in the city, you have to find you have to pay a ferryman to get across the river, or you have to travel all the way to the London Bridge, which is not close to where the theaters are, make your way to the theater, pay your penny if you're a groundling, to stand and watch the show, and then you have to hustle back because the city gates of London were meant to be locked at sunset.
Makes sense because of the vampires exactly right.
You know, you don't invite them in, right, so you have to rush back to London to get back inside in time so that you could go to bed right.
Yeah.
The theater district was in the same district as all the brothels, the bear baiting arenas, the gambling houses, and the ends of ill repute.
It was a sleezy It was considered a sleezy profession, Yeah, and a sleezy show to attend.
In fact, the sleazy profession is what lends some people to suggest others who may have written for Shakespeare, because they wouldn't want their own name attached to so lowly a profession.
Ah, there we go. Okay, so now we've hit upon it. The one other thing we know about Shakespeare is that eventually, in after fifteen ninety six he became a gentleman because his father was given a coat.
Of arms which Shakespeare paid for, yes, which.
Did have some money involved.
And we can talk for hours and hours and days and days about probably each place specifically because there's such a depth and wealth of connection and I don't know, ripple effect now in modern society sure.
Yeah, And just to put this out there talking about that ripple effect, my wife just the other day went to the Plaza Theater where they were showing a version of Romeo and Juliet bas Lherman exactly and still still today in twenty nineteen. The effects are seen like in those ripples as they you know, as they affected bas Luherman, as they affected even my wife when she watched it, and now all the other people who are watch it well.
And then you have all the adaptations like West Side Story, which is not it's essentially Romeo and Juliet, but it's a musical, and it's changed the location, it's changed the two warring families to two gangs. But we still see these ripples going just as strong. In fact, I wouldn't even say that they've weakened over time. We might see
them in cycles. It's also interesting to see which plays are are popular during different eras, because you'll find one era where Hamlet is considered the height of Shakespeare's genius, and then after say nineteen sixty or so, it started to shift toward King Lear. And what it really tells you is more about the society that is currently enamored of that specific play than the play itself.
Right, Like how that remake of our adaptation of Titus Andronicus, Police Academy four.
Police Academy four, What's eating you?
It's true? So this guy, this individual.
This playwright is so prolific, especially even even in a modern day setting. Writing thirty seven plays that aren't garbage is a phenomenal feat.
Right, yeah, and.
This guy did it without the access to the wealth of instantaneous near instantaneous information we have today, without a word processor, probably without probably without a lot of help, or did he have help. It is a huge body of work for one man, and it's not surprising that many, many people from various walks of life disagree with what we just gave you. We gave you the official narrative, but what about the people who don't agree with it?
We'll explore their side of the story after a word from our sponsors.
Here's where it gets crazy, So, Matt.
Earlier Jonathan mentioned the rise of a group of people called the anti Stratfordians.
Anti Stratfordians.
There are many flavors of them.
There are There are positively like skittle level, you know.
That six or seven.
Well, let's taste the rainbow find out.
So, so, Matt, what what are these people?
What's their what's their stick? What's their thing?
Well, yeah, it's it's groups of people who, over the centuries have come together and agreed that they do not agree that William Shakespeare wrote all of his plays. They are, at least some of them don't believe he wrote any of them. Some believe that William Shakespeare wasn't even actually William Shakespeare or a person necessarily. And it varies very it varies widely.
Yes, and some people disagree with their own disagreements, you know what I mean. The anti Stratfordians are not a monolithic group. The one thing they agree on is they don't think that William Shakespeare did everything. Yes, and they have some beef with each other within their community. But you're absolutely right. There's the idea that someone else wrote
the place. There's the idea that Shakespeare's maybe an umbrella term, similar to the theory about Banksy the Street Artist, probably one of the best in the world right now.
There's the theory that you know.
That's actually a collective rights operating under a singular identity exactly.
I tend to enjoy that idea.
Yes, yeah, for Banksy. But one thing's for sure, this particular genre of conspiracy theory has a massive staying power. This isn't like a jade helm thing where it comes up with an expiration date or a world will end in twenty twelve.
Think.
You know, this concept has persisted for some time, but it's not as old as most people assume. I would argue because, contrary to popular belief, the idea of a Shakespeare a Shakespearean conspiracy, or a question about the authorship is historically speaking, somewhat recent.
Yeah, there's some some nineteenth century thinkers who were proposing this. You mentioned Samuel Clemens earlier, Mark Twain. Mark Twain's one of the people who suggested that perhaps Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare.
But that guy's such a troll. Yeah as well.
No, well, I mean, you know, Mark Twain was pretty much convinced that no one was as clever as he was.
So you know, I used to love that author true story, and to a friend got me a copy of his woefully unedited autobiography.
It just goes on and on. I feel like I'm done with Mark Twain till about twenty thirty.
Well, let's let's lay out why don't you guys. I don't mean to take over your show.
No, no, wekid you.
I would love to hear you.
Guys sort of lay out some of the usual suspects, the ones who are often proposed as the possible people who actually wrote those Shakespearean for sure.
Well, the best way for us to get there is to explore some of the history. You mentioned nineteenth century thinkers who first proposed these.
Alternatives.
Alternatives. Yeah, that's a very safe word.
Yes, that's the eighteen hundreds, everybody, that's yes, that's.
When Samuel Clemens would be right.
So no one really seemed to doubt that Shakespeare wrote these plays until around the eighteen fifties. The first public anti strap forty and claim was written by an American, Deally A.
Bacon.
She had an article in Putnam's Magazine in eighteen fifty six called William Shakespeare and his Plays, an inquiry concerning them, which is, I know what a we need to talk kind of a kind of message. But what was in this What was the gist of this article?
Well, I mean it's it's an opinion that is kind of valid in a couple of ways and then just silly and others. So she thought the plays were were more than stories, like historical stories that are being retold. She thought they were written deliberately to spread ideas about enlightenment, about modernity, about progress of humanity, and she thought the plays were essentially, like I guess, a form of propaganda, and it was written by a secret committee essentially of people,
like an illuminati of sorts. I mean, it sounds kind of silly, but at the same time, it's an interesting thought experiment if we go into it. And she cryptically hinted that there was a different person that had actually written the plays, or at least had had a big hand in writing the plays, a certain Sir Francis Bacon.
No relation to Delia Bacon. Yeah.
She she said that there was a secret collective in the Bacon.
Obviously was the was the leader of the group. Uh.
Delia Bacon never found any any smoking gun evidence for her beliefs.
Or or anything beyond her belief vaguely circumstantial evidence.
All right, now, I know you've got some irons in the fire on this one.
Yeah, we want to know, we want to know, we want to know, we want to know, but we want to get you set up in the right place. As so, a lot of people will perhaps unfairly uh, cast dispersion on deal Bacon because she had a painful private life as well. She when she passed away, it wasn't an asylum, which was a brutal place to be in that time and era. But just like Shakespeare, Just like Shakespeare, she
had ripple ripples throughout history. As this single article it lit the fuse, It lit the fire for what would become an explosively controversial line of thinking, and one that very much, even in the modern day, aims to be considered a serious academic discipline, much to the massive irritation of people who are Stratfordians. Yeah, right, exactly, And I love academic beef. I think it's I think it's so fascinating. But to your question, a little bit of a circuitoust
way to get there. But to your question, Jonathan, if it was not William Shakespeare, if Shakespeare was not the author, or if it were a brand name for a bunch of people working in secret, who would the actual author be. Candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe.
That would have been a tricky one.
That would have been a tricky one, just time wise.
Yeah, because he died in a bar fight while several plays were still being written, although there have been theories that stated that the plays were already written, either the place had already been written and then were published regularly, or performed rather because again they weren't published, I performed regularly after Marlow's death, or the even crazier idea that Marlow faked his death in a bar fight and secretly was still writing the place because he just couldn't give it up.
Oh my gosh, did he move to like Cuba, kind of like Tupac.
No, he just sort of moved to Southampton and.
Put you know, you got some different clothes. Yeah, kept on a.
Silly wig and a fake nose.
Well, let's talk about who Christopher Marlowe is. Sure.
Yeah, marlow was another writer and playwright of the sixteenth century England.
Also was a spy.
He actually did work on behalf of Queen Elizabeth, which was not the safest of professions.
I don't think working for a royal family at that time is ever going to be an inherently safe profession.
Honestly, Elizabeth in England, any profession was an unsafe profession because if you were a Catholic you were all that was that was dangerous by itself, and Shakespeare's family, by the way, Catholic, so that was But that's another.
Segary for the time.
Yeah, so so you've got You've got Marlowe, who's uh he wrote Faust, so famous play's he wrote a couple of others. He is really well known for writing drama, was not known for writing comedy, which is possibly why some people say maybe he contributed some of the plays, but maybe not all of them, because there just wasn't any evidence to suggest that he could write comedy. I would argue that based upon some of Shakespeare's comedies, there's not a whole lot of evidence that he could do
it either. But no, there's actually some very funny shakespeare comedies, but there a lot of the humors lost on us, the modern audience, because we no longer have those puns, so they don't really make sense to us anymore. But anyway, so marlow is this very dangerous kind of individual who's also prolific writer. Also comes from a fairly humble background, which will be important later exactly so we'll get into
that later. But he ends up trying to come to the defense of a friend in a tavern, and as a result of the fracas that breaks out, he sustains a critical injury and dies. And this is in the middle of Shakespeare's productivity.
Right.
So that again, assuming that the death is legit and it wasn't Marlowe trying to fake his death so that he could live out his golden years, which would have been many. He was not that old when it happened, and he was of an age similar to Shakespeare, they were about the same age. Assuming that that didn't happen, that he didn't fake his death, it would have made it very tricky to continue writing.
Side note, unrelated, this is just a fact I've found, and I think you guys would enjoy it if you hadn't heard it before. I'm just reminded because of the idea of literary buddies or peers, creative peers, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, solid writers, Yeah, I'm being very fair, solid writers.
Notorious drunks. Yes, do you know this story?
Now? Apparently they were known for getting into bar fights, wasn't sur Joyce ed? I mean, you just have to read fitting its weight to know that the guy runs at the mouth bit. But apparently he was somewhat of a nebbish character, somewhat of a.
Yeah, what's what's another word for nebish?
Milk toast? That's really good, Actually, yeah, it was. It was a little bit more that.
It didn't come across as masculinity personified the way Hemingway.
Right, so they would be a barfight.
Allegedly, James Joyce was famous for running his mouth and then starting to fight, and then physically running to hide behind Ernest Hemingway while yelling like, take care of him, him away, Crimson his face.
That's perfect.
So that notice I just used that as cocktail trivia at your next James Joyce or Nest Hemingway themed soare and.
You know, there is a conspiracy that the bar fight that Chrisopher Marlow got into was actually or there's a theory that it was a conspiracy to assassinate Marlow.
That's yeah, yeah, well yeah, there are a lot of stories about that. I mean that was fifteen ninety three, which in Shakespeare's timeline would be right at the very beginning of his rise, and those would still be the plays produced in the early fifteen nineties were still considered the sort of the juvenile works of Shakespeare, the ones before he really found his voice.
Right, right, And that's like maybe just a year before the exclusivity agreement comes into effect. Other other candidates include the fifth Earl of Rutland, who that's all you need to know about them, actually, the sixth Earl of Derby, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Note that there are a lot of aristocrats being named.
Oxford is one of the.
Big ones Oxfordians are. It's one of the larger camps.
Of anti Stratfordians.
Yes, and then even Queen Elizabeth one has been proposed. That seems a little out there, right. It turns out there more than eighty potential real Shakespeare's and this is weird. Why do people believe this? In the case of Bacon Deally Bacon's original argument, you can say there's a little bit of classism involved because Shakespeare at the time in which Delia writes this article, Shakespeare is very much deified,
especially especially in his homeland. He's depicted as as a person being from a relatively uncultured.
Town, right, a rural old neighborhood.
Right.
And people say has no formal education, because they'll say there's not an exhaustive written record.
Well, he didn't attend university.
He didn't attend University Calebridge, right.
But he sure knew a whole lot about history.
He wrote, He.
Wrote a lot about history as if he were correct is the best way to say so.
At the time.
Though, this this anti Strap forteen argument, is that based on what what the plays have in terms of content, based on the various historical literary illusions and the extensive vocabulary, they say, well, there's not really a way a guy who didn't go to college could do.
This, I mean, if we're being honest.
Which yeah, that is a very common argument, the idea that how could someone from essentially the Sticks, right, And it's the effectively you're saying, some some hick from the sticks son of a glove maker and an amateur actor who then turns pro How could that guy end up creating what many people believe to be the pinnacle of poetic language, particularly in play format.
And that's another part.
You know, you know, you're you're thinking not just not just that these are cracking, good story but these are characters who seem to embody much deeper representations of human nature than what you would see in contemporary works. Now that's tricky to say, because there are not a lot of contemporary works that actually survived that era.
Sure, a lot of stuff in general.
There's a couple of Shakespeare plays that may have existed that we don't have anymore. Loves Labors one is one of them, and the Cardinio. Both of those are lost plays we don't know. We've got a an adaptation of the Cardinio that was done in the nineteenth century, but
that was a heavy rewrite, which was not uncommon. You often had theaters rewriting Shakespeare to perform it later on, especially as different values arose in society, where certain things were considered taboo, they would rewrite Shakespeare's plays to get rid of anything that would refer to that, And so Shakespeare's plays went through a lot of transformation, particularly in the nineteenth century, eighteenth and nineteenth century.
I love what you're pointing out, though, about the way you point out earlier, the way theater was perceived at the time. This plays into the views of anti Stratfordi and scholars or researchers or enthusiasts. Because at the time which Delia Bacon is writing this, and at the time in which Shakespeare was performing, popular thought of regarding what could be considered art and what could be considered a higher form of art or a lower form of entertainment.
Popular thought drew a sharp distinction between various forms of the written word. Poetry was a manifestation of high culture. The best book was and always will be, the Bible, and you will die if you don't like the version we have.
Now, especially once James came along and presented his version.
I know, which was so Kanye of him. But but theater, on the other hand, was seen as like vulgar entertainment. The groundlings that that phrase comes from the mosh pit.
Yeah, theater.
You would stand in this in this space that was right in front of the stage, and for a penny you could stand there and watch the show. And if you had sixpence, I think it was, you could sit in the galleries, so you would be in a seated position further back with a full view of the stage.
And but you know, it also spoke to the popularity of the theater, the fact that they could get commoners who you know, even when you sit there and say it was one penny for a show, for some people, that was that was the equivalent of two days pay, right, right, So they're paying they're paying two days worth of labor to watch a show. And these shows are changed the play.
They would perform would change every single day because you don't do one show for a run, because you have to constantly be filling up that theater.
Because people would say, why would I spend two days worth of pay to see the same thing again?
Right, And there's only two hundred and fifty thousand people in London and the theater fits twenty five hundred. So you start doing the math and you think, if you want to stay in business, you gotta change that. That's why you had so many plays being produced, not all of them being Shakespeare's. It was absolutely imperative from a business standpoint.
So let's get back to that idea of the theater industry because for anti Stratfordians, that tends to, paradoxically enough, be a piece of evidence that they use against the argument that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, because they would say, you know what, theater is relatively low brow. So one thing we do know about this William Shakespeare fellow was that he was a professional actor, and that means that he was associated with theater and.
Other actors, which, by the way, was right next to the.
Brothelm So there's no way someone from their argument is from a rural part of the world, in a very cd profession and one of the sleaziest neighborhoods of London. There's no way that guy could have written such amazing poetry poetic prose, is No.
It was obviously the sixth Earl of Derby. Yes, bestowed his brilliant work down upon the lowly actors.
But I could not possibly attach his name to the work. It would sully his otherwise spotless reputations.
Yeah, and we are talking about the sixth, not that, not that degenerate the seventh.
So yeah, it's it's true.
They also question, we mentioned this before, how Shakespeare, with no record of education or cultured background, how could he know all the things that the author of these plays knows. The vocabulary is calculated to be somewhere north of seventeen five hundred words, and the max would be twenty nine thousand different words. There aren't any signed manuscripts written by Shakespeare.
That are around today.
We don't have anything where, you know, you can't go to the Smithsonian and see underglass the handwritten draft of Hamlet.
Right, and to be fair, London has gone up and flames a couple of times since Shakespeare wrote so and again also to be fair, not a lot of material from that era survives.
Period in general.
Right, So singling out Shakespeare's work is a little is a little disingenuous, only because it's only in Heinz site that we see how valuable it was.
Right, right, that's a great point, you know. We see the classism involved again here with the anti Stratfordi in argument. So Shakespeare has six signatures that have been authenticated. People who don't believe Shakespeare wrote this stuff, who do believe he was a rube, They say that, look at these signatures. Sure this may have been some guy named William Shagg's pear or whatever. But shaggs but he writes like he
can't read. He writes, He writes in a scrawl. This means that he was either illiterate or functionally illiterate, someone who can just you know, write their name, maybe do some simple sums. But the spread of conspiracy theories about Shakespeare has an international dimension to it, right, Like both both Bacon and another anti Stratfordi and Heart were Americans, And these different candidates for authorship continue to find their supporters in the US. People in the US love this story.
The History Channel probably loves this story, right, PBS.
Loves this story. They produce documentaries about this usually every five to ten years.
Yeah, I did not realize that.
Oh yeah, because I've done quite a bit of research, I can tell. Yeah, which, to be fair, first of all, I studied this in college, but that was more than twenty years ago. Not that Shakespeare's written much since then, but it's been a long time since I was actively studying it. But now that I'm taking on the role, I want to be able to answer people when they ask me certain questions about Shakespeare as best I can. It is incredibly challenging because Ben, as you have pointed out,
we know so very little about the man. Very little information exists about Shakespeare's life.
We piece it.
Together from scant records and various things that were written about Shakespeare after he had already died. So it is hard to piece it together. But the same is true for everyone in the Elizabethan era, with the exception of.
Elizabeth Yeah and maybe some other members of the royal court. Yeah, but it's true this lack of this lack of knowledge allows alternative views or arguments to proliferate. There's nothing wrong with that, but we do have to look at the evidence. So we have presented the broad strokes of the anti Stratfordy and anti Shakespeare Shakespeare argument. What if any problems exist with these theories, we'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Guys, hold on a second here, I'm not fully convinced what I think. Perhaps William Shakespeare was in fact a group of some other people or one other person, just a whole bunch of that person who Okay, in some kind of multiverse. Let's let's really talk about the reasons why Shakespeare probably was Shakespeare.
Okay, Yeah, So it's first off, it's fascinating. Of course we want to be involved in such an intriguing historical Who done it?
You know?
Imagine how such revelation could change history. The problem is something isn't true just because it's interesting, and that's a fact we all run into at some point in our lives. The vast majority, by which we mean virtually all serious and accepted working Shakespeare scholars think these claims are malarchy. They think they're nonsense, and on their side, they have some pretty convincing arguments. One of the first hinges on
the timing. You see, if Shakespeare didn't write this stuff or if you who are somehow a secret gang of people, then why didn't anybody talk about it when this guy was alive?
Yeah?
Why did no one call him a plagiss Why did none of his contemporaries who who probably had some friendly rivalries.
Right, Why sure Johnson definitely did.
Oh yeah, why didn't they? Why didn't they say, let's expose this guy? And immediately after his death people who knew him while he was alive also didn't say that, And no one came forward after he died say oh, okay, so it was me.
Also, the plays stopped after he died. Yeah, no one wrote other awesome, amazing plays that are held in the same esteem as Shakespeare's after he died, even just by inventing another name, like you would think, like what, what would motivate someone to create this stuff in the first place? Because keep in mind, again, this wasn't meant for publication, It was meant for performance. You did not make money
selling your play to a theatrical company. Maybe made five pounds, which was a significant sum, but you couldn't live off of it perpetually. And considering the amount of labor it takes to write a play versus the amount of money you would get for selling the play. That that's a losing proposition. So you're not doing it to make money directly. That's why Shakespeare made his money by being a part
company owner, not through the selling of his plays. You're not making money through publication because nobody until Johnson came along bothered to publish their plays.
Another yeah, another point. We mentioned Johnson a couple of times here.
Yeah, who is this character?
Well, well, to that's a great question that because we know he wrote stuff, but we don't know when or where he was born. It is not especially unusual for us to have very very little biographical information for people existing at this time, from the bottom to the top
of the social sphere, not counting the royal family. Also, speaking of Shakespeare's peers, not only did they not say he was a plagiarist, not only did they not say he was a fraud, they at multiple times confirm that he wrote the stuff.
Yeah.
They were like, oh yeah, Hamling, I know that guy.
And sometimes they dissed him for it.
Yeah, And sometimes they were like, oh yeah, I have much ado about nothing.
That was a stinker.
Yeah, Well, you had Robert Green, who said, this upstart crow, you know, has beautified himself with our feathers saying, and he never specifically says Shakespeare, but he drops every single hint that it's got to be Shakespeare. So he's dissing on Shakespeare's largely because he's got the same sort of elitist view that this this bumpkin is suddenly getting a whole lot of attention, and he's like, why are you paying attention to this guy?
You shoulday attention to me.
How much more important? Of course, he also was dying at the time he wrote it. Johnson wrote after Shakespeare's death that he was not known to blot any lines, meaning he wasn't known for marking out a line and changing it or editing it in some way. And then he said would that he blotted a thousand So essentially saying he needed a better editor is what Johnson was saying. So you had his contemporaries not only giving Shakespeare the credit for writing them, but sometimes saying like he wasn't
that good of a writer. And it wasn't until after Shakespeare's death then a couple of his colleagues got together and decided they wanted to gather as many of the plays as they possibly could and publish them as a memorial to their friend. So these two guys get together and they put together was called the First Folio, which that's not even all of the plays, but it's most of the surviving ones that we know about. And you also had some plays in publication already, but not through
Shakespeare's permission, called quartos. Some of them were not great. They might have been written down by someone in the audience who was just trying that our best to remember the gist of a play. Those are what we call the bad quartos.
Something.
So he spilled long all over.
By, Hey, does that smell like plague to you?
So this this kind of stuff, this examination can continue for for quite a while. At this point we at this point we are going to have to close the curtain on today's episode. But we we thought, Matt and I that there was no better way to end than to point out a quotation from David Thomas of Britain's National Archives.
Yes, I'm gonna just do a quick quote here for you and try to kind of in a way I guess, audition for you right now, Shakespeare, and I'll give you notes the documentation for William Shakespeare is exactly what you would expect a person of his position of that time. It seems like an earth only because we are so intensely interested in him.
Someday as you exit pursued by the bar, some days the bar exits pursued by you.
So that's I mean, that's a great point though, because it's saying this whole time, does Shakespeare seem more mysterious than the average person just because we're looking Yes.
I think it's largely also because the amount of It's not so much the amount of work he produced, because there were playwrights who wrote more than he did, But
it's the quality of the work that was produced. Once you get past the early juvenile efforts of Shakespeare, the Titus Andronicus, you know, the comedy of Errors, that kind of stuff, and you start getting into when he was really coming into his own, just play after play, he was writing things that still resonate with us today and something that special, I think is what really drives our
desire to know more. And it is so unsatisfying to come up against just a darth of information about this person.
And at this point, with the information we have the understanding we have in twenty nineteen. It does seem that the answer to this question is similar to that old riddle about who's buried in Grant's tomb? So who really wrote the plays of William Shakespeare? As far as the evidence indicates, it was this guy named William Shakespeare. And he was from a town called Stratford upon Avon. He was born there. He went to London, he worked in London, and then he went back home and he died.
And he was a filthy actor associator.
Yes, he was a known actor sympathizer, unless that is there's still centuries later something they whoever they are, don't want you to know, and we want to hear from you. Are you still convinced that there was more to the story? Do you believe that there truly was someone behind the Shakespeare curtain? If so, why and if so, who is that person? You can tell us about this on Instagram. You can tell us about this on Facebook. You can
tell us about this on Twitter. You can swing by and talk to your fellow listers on our community page Here's where it gets crazy. Or you can call us directly if you are anti Stratfordian and you are super offended by this concept, then go ahead and leave us a voicemail.
Yeah, even make us soliloquy of it. If you want to do whatever you want to do at any point. Yeah, it would be great. Fourteen Yes we are one eight, three three std WYTK. That's stuff they don't want you to know in acronym form. It's also numbers you can dial in with your phone. Okay, So if you don't want to do any of that stuff, you you can always send us an email. But before you do that, consider hitting up old Jonathan Strickland. How do we find you? Jonathan?
I find you God?
Or are you?
Just go and check out my show Tech Stuff and my other show of the Brink, And we do lots of shows about technology and companies someone which tends to cross over into your territory. We did an episode of our Tech Stuff to an episode not long ago about some more stuff with the NSSA, which is always such a fun, fun organization to talk about.
Oh, we might need to update.
Yeah, we've also both appeared on your show at some point in the past. If you happen to be in the studio with us and you want to run into Jonathan, you can just hit this button. We discovered that says Strickland. Don it callback I made.
It so inconvenient. I was I was just getting the coffee machine's been pouring coffee this whole time.
What And and our guest super producer Ramsey Ram jams Young, thank you again for saving the show. My friend, we have we have pinged upon his time.
Yeah, too long.
Now I think he's ready to go. And he dude, he leveled up like four times while we were sitting here. I can see it. I can see it happening.
Leveled up.
Yes, Ping has he attained his final forb We've got to go to the We've got to get out of the studio to find out. Thank you so much for checking out the show. We do want to hear from you, and we hope that you tune in for our next episodes. No spoilers, but things are going to get curiouser and curiouser.
And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three std WYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
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