Selects: Did Shakespeare really write all that stuff?

Summary

Stuff You Should Know:

"Selects: Did Shakespeare Really Write All That Stuff?"

Date: May 30, 2026
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Podcast: Stuff You Should Know, iHeartPodcasts

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the long-debated Shakespeare authorship question: Did William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon actually write the plays and poems attributed to his name, or was he a front for other writers? Josh and Chuck traverse the history and perspectives of one of literature’s greatest mysteries, scrutinizing evidence, counterclaims, prominent “alternative authors,” and the swirling mythos around the Bard’s true identity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Nature of the Shakespeare Authorship Debate

• High Complexity of the Topic ([02:52-03:42])

  • The deeper you dig, the more complex and layered the question becomes—enough to inspire multi-part series and lifelong scholarly pursuits.
  • Chuck: “We could probably do a 10-part episode on this... it’s so dense.”

• Agnosticism & Uncertainty ([04:00-04:40])

  • Both Josh and Chuck describe themselves as agnostic regarding any definitive answer, recognizing that neither side has irrefutable evidence.
  • Josh: “...neither side actually has really good evidence to support their claim. It's all just... it really quickly goes into the world of conspiracy theories.”

2. What Is Actually Being Questioned? ([05:30-07:33])

• Not whether Shakespeare existed, but whether he authored the plays bearing his name, or if they were written by others—or even a collaborative effort. Dozens of alternate candidates have been posited: noblemen, women, and contemporaries like Christopher Marlowe.

3. William Shakespeare – The Historical Figure

• Biographical Facts ([07:33-13:38])

  • Born 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, likely reasonably educated (Latin, classics), married Anne Hathaway, had three children.
  • Evidence of existence: legal documents, business dealings, and about 500 pieces of documentation.
  • There’s limited direct biographical evidence tying him as a playwright specifically.

• Gaps and Mysteries ([12:25-13:38])

  • “Lost years” (~1585–1592): a seven-year period in Shakespeare’s life with scarce documentation.

4. Educational Arguments & Elitism ([10:08-11:34], [25:37-27:55])

• Key anti-Shakespearean argument: How could a middle-class man with a grammar school education have the knowledge and insight evidenced in the plays?
  • Josh: “Are people born that gifted?...That's ultimately...what their argument boils down to.”

5. Contemporaneous References & The Upstart Crow ([13:56-16:55])

• Early pamphlet (Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit) refers to “an upstart crow” (believed to be Shakespeare)—interpreted both as an accusation of plagiarism and as a snub from playwrights to an actor trying to write.

6. Shakespeare’s Will, Tombstone, and Legacy ([16:55-18:26], [32:29-34:23])

• Last documentation: his will—no explicit mention of manuscripts, books, instruments.

• Tombstone features a curse but not his name. Seen as both suspicious and simply “how things were done.”

  • Chuck: “Some people point to that as poor writing...others say, who said Shakespeare even wrote that?”

• The bust in Stratford’s church—debated as to authenticity and symbolism (sack of grain vs. writing pillow).

7. Why the Lack of Personal Papers? ([19:00-21:43])

• Shakespeare’s family lineage ended in 1670; possessions likely dispersed or lost—common for non-nobility without sustained legacy interest.

8. The Spelling Debate ([23:51-25:30])

• Dozens of spellings of Shakespeare’s name; generally believed to be era-typical, not coded evidence.
  • Josh’s favorite abbreviation: "Wilmshackpee" ([25:20-25:30])

9. The First Folio & Ben Jonson’s Testimony ([34:42-36:40])

• First Folio introduced 18 new plays; Ben Jonson’s foreword is both used to confirm Shakespeare’s authorship and dismissed by skeptics as deliberate misdirection.

10. Alternative Authorship Theories

• Francis Bacon & Delia Bacon ([36:40-41:43])

  • Delia Bacon (no relation) popularized theory that Bacon or a group of nobles wrote the plays, theorizing political motives or stigma of print.
  • She emphasized “hidden codes” in texts, prefiguring literary close reading.

• Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (Oxfordian Theory) ([45:16-46:19])

  • Poet, similar writing style, personal connections to figures in Shakespeare’s dedications.
  • Seen by some as a stronger candidate than Bacon for primary authorship.

• Christopher Marlowe ([47:09-48:48])

  • Theories suggest Marlowe faked his death, continued writing as Shakespeare. Josh: “You’ve now got a conspiracy theory wrapped in a conspiracy theory.”

• Women as Authors ([48:48-51:48])

  • Some suggest women such as Mary Sidney Herbert or Emilia Bassano were suppressed authors. Social media has perpetuated claims, sometimes with incorrect information.
  • A 1593 critic praised an anonymous “gentlewoman” playwright—encouraging some to believe Shakespeare was a woman or a front for one.

11. Motive for Concealing Authorship ([52:04-52:31])

• Motives posited include political treason, social stigma, and lack of women’s rights—key to any alternative theory.

12. Supreme Court Shakespeare Trial ([52:36-53:43])

• In 1987, Justices Stevens, Brennan, and Blackmun presided over a mock trial on C-SPAN; verdict narrowly favored Shakespeare as author—but evidence was circumstantial.

13. Modern Scholarship: Little Proof, Lots of Clues ([53:49-57:58])

• Miscellaneous “pro-Shakespeare” clues: friends from Stratford involved in early printing, contemporary critics referencing his works, regional slang, use of educational texts from his hometown in “Taming of the Shrew.”
• No “smoking gun” exists; both sides rely on circumstantial evidence, inference, and belief.

14. The Takeaway: Enjoy the Plays ([57:55–end])

• Debate is fascinating, but ultimately, the genius of Shakespeare’s work stands on its own.
  • Chuck: “Can we just like, love these plays?”
  • Josh: “That’s the ultimate point. Let’s just love the plays.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The Denseness of the Debate
  • Chuck (03:31): “This is a pretty broad overview of the high points of his authorship being questioned. Because it is dense, baby.”
• Agnostic Position
  • Josh (04:35): "...It's not like I don't care. That's not what I'm saying. Like, I genuinely can see both sides."
• On the Lack of Documentation
  • Josh (19:00): “What doesn't come through that isn't documented at all is him as a writer.”
• The Spelling Boondoggle
  • Josh (24:43): “All the different spellings are easily explained away from just the era... it's about as big a boondoggle as you're going to find...”
• On the Elitism at the Core of Skepticism
  • Josh (27:52): "Could it really all have been written by this man from, at the time, the country, who was 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?"
• On Memes and Emilia Bassano
  • Chuck (50:26): “...there was a meme in 2015... none of this stuff was true...This kind of thing gets passed along the Internet and then, you know, half the people that see it just say, oh, well, look at that. Shakespeare was...written by this lady back then.”
• On the Enduring Mystery
  • Josh (56:39): “The anti-Stratfordians have caused the pro-Stratfordians to actually defend their position. And in doing so, it's kind of revealed that both of them are kind of on shaky ground. It's almost just a matter of belief.”

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Timestamps for Notable Segments

• [03:12] – Framing how dense and complex the authorship question is
• [04:33] – Hosts admit they are agnostic, see both sides
• [07:33] – Biographical overview of William Shakespeare’s life
• [13:56] – The “upstart crow” pamphlet and its interpretations
• [16:55] – Discussion of tombstone, will, and missing personal effects
• [19:00] – On the lack of evidence tying Shakespeare directly as a writer
• [25:23] – The “Wilmshackpee” spelling joke
• [32:29] – Controversy over the bust and symbols of Shakespeare
• [34:42] – First Folio and Ben Jonson’s foreword
• [36:40] – Delia Bacon and Francis Bacon alternative authorship theories
• [45:16] – The Oxfordian theory (Edward de Vere as author)
• [47:09] – Marlowe theory discussed
• [48:48] – The possibility of female authorship and the role of Internet mythology
• [52:36] – Supreme Court mock trial on Shakespeare authorship
• [57:55] – “Can we just love these plays?” – hosts wrap up their feelings

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Tone & Language

• Light-hearted, skeptical, and irreverent; the hosts maintain curiosity and respect for divergent views without dogmatism.
• Frequent use of humor, puns, and asides—“blooming onion” for complex topics, faux hotel check-ins, and pop culture references.

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Summary Takeaway

Josh and Chuck guide listeners through the maze of the Shakespeare authorship debate, ultimately emphasizing how nebulous the evidence is on all sides, how deeply the case has been over-interpreted by partisans, and how both belief and “elitist” skepticism play roles in sustaining the controversy. Their ultimate advice? Enjoy the wit and wisdom of Shakespeare's works, regardless of who wrote them.

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Transcript

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[Josh Clark]

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[Josh Clark]

Josh, and for this week's select, I've chosen our 2022 episode on Shakespeare and and whether he actually wrote all that stuff or 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 and 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.

[Podcast Producer/Intro Voice]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.

[Josh Clark]

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 Shakespeare.

[Chuck Bryant]

Can I caveat this out of the gate?

[Josh Clark]

I guess so.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

It's quite an onion.

[Chuck Bryant]

This bloomin onion unfolded. Layer by crispy, delicious layer for all

[Josh Clark]

of our Australian listeners. That's what we think you guys eat every night.

[Chuck Bryant]

Every night to the point where I was almost like, you know, is this a two parter? I mean, you could probably do a 10 part episode on this.

[Josh Clark]

Oh yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

It's the kind of thing that like extremely intelligent people take on as their, like, lifelong hobby.

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It's like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

We're like, we'll just bust it out in a few days. It'll be fine.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you know, like how some people are like, they research World War II submarine warfare and know everything about. 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, we could turn this into a ten part series, but I think we've got a handle on it enough to present it. I'm feeling 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know if I do either actually.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, no, that didn't really prove it once and for all, in my opinion.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. 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, you guys, you've just completely left the world of objectivity.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 writer. Whether or not he was the sole author, whether or not he was affront 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. I saw 66 candidates over the years have been put forward.

[Josh Clark]

I saw 80.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

I don't think so. I didn't come across that in my research.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. That happens when you are one of the biggest icons in your field quite often. So some people say that's all that it is.

[Josh Clark]

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?

[Chuck Bryant]

Or that he didn't write them. Like there's just, it was a time, you know, in the 1500s where there and 1600s where there just wasn't a ton of great preserved information. And we'll kind of talk about a lot of that.

[Josh Clark]

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 100 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 lived 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 an Issue. What's being questioned is 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 that question.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 glover. He wore. Well, I guess he wore gloves too, but he made gloves.

[Josh Clark]

Allow me to demonstrate.

[Chuck Bryant]

It'd be pretty weird if he didn't. That guy 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 the social chain a little bit because eventually he would serve as was sort of like a mayor in Stratford. And again, while not nobility, like, they were fairly well regarded as people.

[Josh Clark]

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, they were 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 until 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. Like, you really have to be careful what you say about this.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And all this, you know, the reason that's important is all of this kind of comes back later as some people say, proof that he may not have written this stuff. Cause like, how could a. 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 talk about his education. And it seems like he was likely educated pretty well until 13, which I'm not even sure if that's early or late as Far as the time period goes, do you know if that was generally it for kids?

[Josh Clark]

It was in the middle. Because he could have just as easily not been educated at all.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, of course.

[Josh Clark]

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 evidence he had not gone to school, I think that the anti Shakespeare people would have a real like mark in their 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 and natural talent, you come up with Shakespeare, conceivably.

[Chuck Bryant]

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?

[Josh Clark]

Sure, yeah. Devil Wears Prada and Princess Diaries.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I'm a big fan.

[Josh Clark]

I think she was in Inception. No. Was she Interstellar? Yes, she did a stellar job in Interstellar.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, a boy and a girl twin. And the boy named Hamnet. Not Hamlet, but Hamnet.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which apparently they've never turned up another use of that name in at the time.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. 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 keep in mind a lot of this record before he was known in his lifetime as an author was 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?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Of his era.

[Chuck Bryant]

And that's.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 Greene. There were some other people that could have possibly written it, but it's called Greene's Groatsworth of Wit. And there's a line where he references Shakespeare in it in a contemporaneous fashion. Is that right?

[Josh Clark]

It doesn't matter

[Chuck Bryant]

where he kind of takes a shot at him. He says, talks about shakes, says there's an upstart crowd in his own conceit. The only Shakescene in a country. Which kind of translates into he kind of thinks he's the only Shakespeare. Like, he thinks he's all that. And it should be noted also as far as the thievery, that in Aesop's fables, crows would steal the feathers of others. 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, but in that quote, he says the upstart crow is beautified with our feathers and he's a playwright. So the Pro Shakespeare people, you call them the Pro Stratford Group, they suggest that what Green is talking about is he's. He's poking fun at a common actor who is deigning 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 that's what they thought at the time. And that he's taking a shot at him for that.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 diss.

[Josh Clark]

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, they've carried out archaeological examinations of it and they found that he, 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, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Is that the one with the quote?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's a curse. He's saying, like, don't dig me up or you're going to be cursed.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. It says, good friend, for Jesus sake, forbear to dig the dust enclosed 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, wouldn't have written this kind of shabby curse. And other people say, like, who said Shakespeare even wrote that necessarily?

[Josh Clark]

This is a good instructive example of like kind of the back and forth between the 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 ones just put their head in their hands and just start crying and it 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. It's that kind of.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, totally. Another thing that people point to is the fact that of, you know, 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 bearing children.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 and him writing things.

[Josh Clark]

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 thing about the will, the fact that if you look at the wills and bequeathments 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. 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 age or of any age, a lot of the reason that their personal effects and papers are still. Still around is because their family home was passed down from generation to generation to generation. And there was a long enough period of time for the importance of that writer to become clear. And so other people came in and said, can we have your great, great, great grandfather's personal effects? 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. And that both of those, to me, provide really good evidence for why there isn't documentation of his writing, you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, absolutely. And the will. 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 by Elizabeth Winkler.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, Elizabeth Winkler, 2019.

[Chuck Bryant]

Great read. One of the things that Winkler points out and other people have pointed out on the will as well is, like, Shakespeare wrote a lot about music, and I think there were 300 musical terms in all of his plays mention of 26 musical instruments. And like, in his will, he didn't. He didn't even have a lute 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 to enough for people to arise, to, like, get suspicious about it, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. You want to take a break? A breather. I Guess you could call it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Let's take a. Let's take a breather. Let's take five.

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[Chuck Bryant]

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 Shaxx with an X peer to spear, as in something you would jab somebody with. It's misspelled all over the place. And I just kind of took that as, you know, people misspelled things a lot back then. There weren't, you know, 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, did you?

[Josh Clark]

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, and that the people who clomp onto that are actually looking into them to see, to find like hidden meaning and codes to. So I think like the different spellings of the names is. It's about a. Yeah, it's about as big a boondoggle as you're going to find in the, in the Shakespeare authorship argument, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so we'll cast that aside.

[Josh Clark]

Well, hold on. Before we do, I want to point out my favorite abbreviation.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which one? I think I. Well, let me look. I bet you I know which one, but go ahead.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Put it, put it back in the deck.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's back in the deck.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. It is. Wilmshackpee.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Is that the one?

[Chuck Bryant]

It stands out pretty blatantly.

[Josh Clark]

S H A K P. I love it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Shekp. Hello. Wilm Sheck.

[Josh Clark]

It's not a really good hotel check in name, but it's still worth mentioning.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think 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 rightly calls 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. So it implies like a really deep breath, breadth of knowledge about a lot of things.

[Josh Clark]

And not just different things as it relates to England. Different things as it relates to entirely different lands. Oh yeah, like think about where a lot of his stuff takes place is in Italy. Yeah. And as far as anyone knows, Shakespeare didn't go to Italy. Although remember there's that lost year, eight year period. They call them the lost 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. But 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 Shakespeare 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 crackpots. Like, they. They have some pretty good evidence. You can make a case at least as good evidence that as the pro Shakespeare people. But the upshot of it is really kind of a compliment. They're saying these plays are so good 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. Could it really all have been written by this man from, at the time, the country, who was 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Totally.

[Josh Clark]

That's really what their argument boils down to.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I agree. And if you don't know a lot of Shakespeare or have never really read a lot yourself, and you think, like, you're sort of in that camp, like, 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 cause they were all genuinely brilliant. It was great, great stuff. And what you need is a really good teacher to kind of walk you through it because it's tough to read. And we had. We had some good ones at Georgia, at University of Georgia. I had one. I can't remember his name. God, I can picture him in my head. He was so great. Someone will probably.

[Josh Clark]

Someone.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, it was Wilm.

[Josh Clark]

Wilm Shack Shakpi.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I wish I could remember his name. I bet you someone will write in. In the mid-90s. Who. The greatest.

[Josh Clark]

Did he play a harpsichord? No. Oh, no, I had a classics professor.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really?

[Josh Clark]

Who played a harpsichord?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, this was, you know, you had to take Shakespeare I and ii. Those were the only required English classes as an English major. So that kind of shows the importance. But what he did was he sat us 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 here.

[Josh Clark]

Man, you were very lucky.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And once you. Once you hear that and you're like, oh, these are very contemporary stories. And that's why they still carry such weight today, is because they were brilliant stories, but stories that were very relatable. Even now, it's not highfalutin stuff. It's just. It was written at a time where it seems that way.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But, yeah, it was intended for common audiences. Like, the average person would laugh or cry at those plays. And I think also it, like, really kind of supports your point that 400 years later, those plays can still make people today laugh and cry. Like, they still hold up, I guess, is what you're saying. And have you ever heard of Sister Wendy?

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh Clark]

She is. She's a nun. I don't believe she's still with us. And I think in the 90s, she made this series of videos where she just went around to 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. Of killing several hours watching Sister Wendy explain paintings. Because she was. She had, like, a natural gift at just not only understanding what she was looking at, but explaining it really understandably.

[Chuck Bryant]

I love that. And I think in Sister Wendy's case and my Professor Shakby, it comes from a place of. They have such great admiration, and they want us. They really want people to understand this stuff who might ordinarily go like, well, I don't get it. I don't get paintings like this. Or I don't get plays like this.

[Josh Clark]

I hate art.

[Chuck Bryant]

So should we get in? Speaking of art. Great segue.

[Josh Clark]

Thank you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Should we get into this mess of the bust of Shakespeare?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I mean, it's another. It's very much like his tombstone where people are like, it means this. No, it means that. You know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So 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 Orlin said it's highly likely that 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And it looks like one way you can interpret this. 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, why anyone would ever present it in that position.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

It doesn't make any sense. And so weird looking. Right. So what the Anti Shakespeare, anti Stratford 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 riding skills. And the pro strap for people are like, don't be ridiculous. This is obviously a pillow. 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 because he's got a piece of paper on it and a quill in his other hand. But the anti Shakespeare people jump on that and say, like, see, it was altered to. To fit this. To cover up this conspiracy later on.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. And that quill has been stolen and replaced, I think, so many times over the years that now I don't know if it currently has the quill or if it has the quill and it's now behind glass.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that could. That's a good way to get around it. Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm not really sure, but, you know, that became a. You know, obviously something you could just snatch out of his hand and you've got Shakespeare's quill on your door.

[Josh Clark]

Speaking of being snatched, apparently that curse on his tombstone didn't 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Isn't that interesting? So somebody out there has Shakespeare's skull

[Chuck Bryant]

in their personal Collection that's probably Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. It's a great Shakespeare joke.

[Josh Clark]

That's good.

[Chuck Bryant]

There's some people out there that are like, nailed it.

[Josh Clark]

Good.

[Chuck Bryant]

Another thing, as far as evidence goes, is the First Folio, 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. And there was a. I guess, was it a foreword written by a guy named Ben Johnson who was a rival of Shakespeare's? He was kind of known as a jealous, sort of argumentative guy, but he calls Shakespeare the Swan of Avon and is sort of very laudatory in this foreword. But I think you found stuff later on where he was kind of like, I had my fingers crossed the whole time, kind of.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So the pro Stratford people who believe Shakespeare is Shakespeare say, look, man, this guy was known as a rival, a friendly rival, but a real rival, really critical, like, had a biting, biting criticism and sense of humor. And also was not one to just be like. To just bow to nobility or privilege or wealth or status. Right. So if this guy is saying that Shakespeare, the Swan of Avon, which places this man at Stratford on Avon, because Ben Jonson is calling him that, that proves that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. The anti Shakespeare camp says, like you said, Ben Johnson had his fingers crossed the whole time and that really what he was doing was providing cover for this larger, essentially conspiracy of people who actually were 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 seems unlikely as well too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I agree. One of the first public doubters in the 1800s was a woman named Delia Bacon. No relation to Frances Bacon, although you may think 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, you know, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So there's. Yeah. Either 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 at the nobility. Or there's another theory called the stigma of print that was introduced in, I think, the 1870s, and that was that they just. Just out of noble nobility. Noblesse. I guess they wouldn't deign to have their stuff published. It would. It would erode their social reputation, even accepting the idea that they would be beheaded for treason. So there are a couple of reasons that. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And that, you know, it makes a little bit of sense as far as Delia 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 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 hang out there and try to convince, I guess, the tomb keeper or whoever takes care of the cemetery.

[Josh Clark]

The crypt keeper?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, the crypt keeper. I didn't want to say it to be let in and almost got in at one point, apparently, but I think she got sick and couldn't. But she thought that the deep secret was within that tomb.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, she kind of kicked off the nuttier camp of the questioning of Shakespeare. In addition to kicking off the whole thing, she put kind of a nutty sheen to it. Like the idea that you could get your answers just from reading the plays. The clues were in there. The thing is, Francis Bacon was known to amuse himself by including hidden codes and messages in his writings. 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 Bacono.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Or didn't he?

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. No evidence that he ever wrote any kind of plays. Or did he?

[Josh Clark]

Right. Then there was this other thing that kind of came along. So Delia 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 Wilmot, 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 Delia Bacon's Francis Bacon theory.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, interesting.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So they weren't discovered until 1931, which is pretty convenient. And it's entirely possible that they, they were just forged.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, should we take another break here?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, let's.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll take another break. We'll talk a little bit more about whether Shakespeare wrote that stu.

[Josh Clark]

Foreign.

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[Josh Clark]

So one more thing about Delia Bacon before we wrap it up. Like you said, she was a good writer. And her exhaustive examination of the text of Shakespeare's plays resulted in a 620 page book. Yeah. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

And like, ironically, because she kind of, I mean, you know, various tawdry 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 was kind of embarrassed and stuff like that.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So Francis Bacon was not the only person put forth. And there's probably, as far as, like, believers go, somebody who at least rivals, if not eclipses him. And that would be the. The 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. It's called the Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean Authorship. And there is, you know, some stuff to it. He was a poet, which Ed points out. That's so much for the stigma of print. And that also you can compare his poetry and in 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 end there, if I'm not mistaken. And that to me, it was the 6th Earl of Derby who has a little more to offer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really? I didn't say much about Derby.

[Josh Clark]

There was one other thing. So Derby has his own group, the Derbyites.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right? Of course they do, man. This is what I mean. It's an onion. It's a blooming onion.

[Josh Clark]

So there was one other thing about de Vere that is pretty suspicious. There were two. Two narrative poems that Shakespeare dedicated to a man who was raised in the same household as de Vere. And from what anybody could tell, there's no reason Shakespeare would know this person. And why would Shakespeare dedicate two poems to this nobleman? He didn't know, but de Vere 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 De Vere's life and Shakespeare's plays are what kind of back up the Oxfordian theories.

[Chuck Bryant]

Interesting because that Christopher Marlowe is another one who is a contemporary and friend of Shakespeare's and they collaborated and they influenced one another. And the details around Marlow's death are hinky enough to where some people thought, or at least the conspiracy is that is that he faked his death because he was gonna be executed by the Crown and continued to write and then used 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, it's just a little far fetched if you ask me.

[Josh Clark]

Well, yeah, if you're supposing that Marlow faked his death in order to continue writing, you've now got a conspiracy theory wrapped in a conspiracy theory.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, maybe that's what bothers me.

[Josh Clark]

But it's interesting because, you know, Marlow 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 flimsiest person you could attribute Shakespeare's writings to because Marlowe was gloomy and super atheist and he was. His plays just didn't have that same kind of humanism and funniness that Shakespeare's plays had. And also, why wouldn't Marlowe just write these plays under his own name? He had no reason to write these plays under different names.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, kind of a. I don't know about flimsy, but it kind of demeans 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Like, how could a man write women like this? Come on.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, went all over social media that just had the picture of this black woman and said, this is Emilia Bassano. She really wrote Shakespeare stuff. She was not allowed to be a published author because she was a black woman at a time where she was suppressed. And all this stuff, none of this stuff was true. First of all, she was maybe Moroccan. She was definitely not of African descent.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I saw she was Venetian.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, 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, well, look at that. Shakespeare was. It was all written by this lady back then.

[Josh Clark]

Problem solved.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, problem solved. And that's just not how it works.

[Josh Clark]

One of the other things I saw that, and I think the people who are like, Shakespeare is a woman are like, well, okay, if we're starting to 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 weren't allowed to do this kind of stuff. So there was a critic who in 1593 wrote of a. Who praised a gentlewoman 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 critics said he didn't want to reveal who it was because he didn't want to basically get her in trouble. So that's what some other people kind of look at and say, see, Shakespeare was a woman.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I mean, I think this theory makes a lot more sense than 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.

[Josh Clark]

But it reveals a point about being an anti Shakespeare. Anti. I guess Stratford person is. You have to. Part of it is you have to explain why somebody would want to fake authorship, would want to Hide behind Shakespeare's name.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. What do you call that? A motive?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. You got means, motive and opportunity. You put those three together, you got your Shakespeare.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, that's what I mean about the. Maybe women wrote them. I mean, there was definite motive there.

[Josh Clark]

Right, exactly. So there was one other thing that happened. I mean, a lot of stuff happened over the course of this hundred, almost 200 years now of questioning Shakespeare's authorship. Back in 1987, a Oxfordian, Charlton Ogburn, got the at least three sitting Supreme Court justices, John Paul Stevens, William Brennan and Harry Blackmon, to hold a mock trial to determine if Shakespeare actually was the author of Shakespeare's plays. And they did. On C Span, they held, like, a trial and heard the evidence, and Shakespeare had his own attorney arguing for him. And it was pretty interesting. But it went 2 to 1, I think, in favor of Shakespeare from Stratford as the author.

[Chuck Bryant]

But they did, like, real research and stuff. It wasn't just like a, you know, stunt.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

No.

[Josh Clark]

So the Supreme Court justices were kind of taking it tongue in cheek. But I got the impression that Charlton Ogburn was like, yes, finally going to prove it definitively one way or another. And it didn't even fall in his favor.

[Chuck Bryant]

Interesting.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it is interesting what people did in the 80s on C span.

[Chuck Bryant]

I got a few more little things here from that Atlantic article that point to his authorship as being genuine. One is that he had a narrative poem called Venus and Adonis that 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. 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 a rich man and was written about 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. Although not proof.

[Josh Clark]

No, because those people could be. They went and saw a play by Shakespeare. That doesn't mean that they met Shakespeare and talked to Shakespeare about the authorship

[Chuck Bryant]

of the plays and leaned over his shoulder while he wrote it.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Proof.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, was it? Okay, good.

[Chuck Bryant]

Was Shakespeare was apparently concerned that his dad's reputation sort of, and the family's reputation suffered later in life because of financial problems that his dad had. And he really wanted to kind of restore their name and get a coat of arms made, which is you could. You know, it's like you could be a true gentleman if he had a coat of arms. And apparently it's a really long process. They don't just hand them out to anybody. You gotta, like, have a certain level of achievement to get a coat of arms. So he went through this big, long process and had.

[Josh Clark]

He went all Barry Lyndon on there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, man, what a movie. He had a couple of different men in the Herald's office who defended Shakespeare's right to have a coat of arms. Cause other people were saying, who is this guy? Even, like, he came from? Not much and he 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.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

He was actually Ben Jonson's schoolmaster and apparently just knew everything 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 of the time, and he lists William Shakespeare of Avon in that book. So he said, that's the golden bullet. Again, if it's just a front, it's still no real proof of authorship.

[Josh Clark]

No, it's not. I mean, like, this guy could just be playing along, lending his.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or didn't know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's another one too. Like, that's the thing. Like, the anti Stratfordians have caused the pro Stratfordians to actually defend their position. And in doing so, it's kind of revealed that both of them are kind of on shaky ground. 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 their, you know, the playwright.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I was like, can we just like, love these plays?

[Josh Clark]

Right? Exactly. That's exactly right. That's the ultimate point. Let's just love the plays.

[Chuck Bryant]

People get serious about this though.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they definitely do. I mean, it's pretty interesting and I get it. Kind of fun to watch from the outside too. Yeah. You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

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 Shakespearean authorship, there is a giant gaping rabbit hole. You can jump down on the Internet and say sayonara to all of your other pursuits. And since I said sayonara, it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm going to call. This just came in over the wire. I thought it was kind of funny. From our friend Steven in Kagoshima, Japan about eating squid. Says, love the show, fellas. Reason not to be so touchy though, about eating squid. They are child murdering sea vermin. He said the reason squid die after they mate is a survival adaptation because if not, they would eat the eggs and newly hatched squid from themselves and other squid in the spawning areas. Squiddly diddly is an infanticidal maniac and should be cooked and eaten, albeit sustainably, of course. So that's the argument is that 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 is not great.

[Josh Clark]

All right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And kind regards from Steven in Kagoshima, Japan, a squid haven and a squid ink pasta destination.

[Josh Clark]

Stephen, 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. If you want to be like Stephen and get in touch with us and send us a potentially eye opening email, you can do that. Send it off to stuffpodcastheartradio.com

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