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William Shakespeare did not write any of his plays | Jerm Warfare · UK Column Radio

0:38
Robert Frederick, thank you for joining me in the trenches.
0:42
Jeremy, it's great to be with you.
0:44
Camera doesn't work so we'll we'll go with an image.
0:48
We were just chatting before I hit the record button about
0:54
musicians using ghost writers and even ghost musicians and I I
1:00
suggested to you that maybe The Beatles, particularly Rubber
1:05
Soul, wasn't wasn't their own and you reckon it could have
1:09
been their own. Yeah, I feel pretty strongly
1:13
about this argument. And I I'm a musician, I'm a
1:17
songwriter. I had a listener, you know,
1:20
basically push me to watch the Sage of Quay for our version,
1:25
and I did. And if I had more time, if I
1:28
wasn't so buried in my own project, I would, I would go
1:31
through it point by point and and concede some of his points,
1:36
but but strongly refute the overall thesis.
1:40
And OK, yeah, maybe they got a, a song handed to them.
1:44
Maybe there were some ghost musicians, but that's all
1:48
totally normal. And yeah, I do think they were
1:54
just extraordinarily talented musicians.
1:56
And you, you know, you were dragging on Ringo a little bit,
1:59
but. He was a terrible drama.
2:01
Musicians have said the opposite of that.
2:04
And he was really creative. They brought in a ringer.
2:07
But he played drums in a completely unique way in his own
2:10
style. He was self taught.
2:12
He listened to Abbey Road, you know, he kind of talks with his
2:17
drums. He was unique.
2:18
And John came on and said, hey, Ringo would have been a star
2:22
without us. We, you know, he didn't need us.
2:26
And another thing John said there was any time I think we're
2:28
demigods, I just look over at Ringo and it brings me back down
2:32
to earth. So I just think they they were
2:36
extraordinary musicians in the in the story holds up.
2:38
Rubber Soul is a stretch. It's true.
2:40
They they got all that album done in 35 days.
2:45
It's a stretch. But it also sounds completely
2:47
different. You know, I'm willing to go back
2:52
and really listen to the album again and the album before,
2:57
because it's all kind of one big sound to me.
3:00
The Beatles, I didn't actually, I'm not old enough to actually
3:04
have grown up with them album by album, but I know the music
3:09
well. I would look at that again.
3:11
I mean, he makes that's his best argument is that and he's got it
3:16
down, you know, to the day, to the minute, to the hour of they
3:20
were so busy, you know, making movies and stuff that it is if
3:25
if they did do it, it's a it's an extraordinary accomplishment.
3:28
But music is really, really different than a lot of arts.
3:33
I mean, Art Tatum, the jazz pianist could play back a a
3:38
piece by Brahms hearing it one time.
3:44
You know, Mozart wrote a Symphony when he was seven years
3:46
old and these kind of stories. Do you?
3:49
Think that's true though? Come on, come on.
3:52
Writing a Symphony at 7? Do you think that's true?
3:55
Oh yeah, our Tatum's known to be able to listen to a a piece by
4:01
Brahms and play it, and then he would compose over those things.
4:05
Music is weird. Music itself is weird.
4:08
Musical inspiration is weird. Like, where do people get
4:11
inspired? How did they go around hearing
4:14
music? Does Oliver Sacks has a book out
4:17
called Musicophilia. I never read it, but apparently
4:20
it's full of these really remarkable stories of music that
4:26
defy science. I could just don't know how
4:30
people come up with these melodies and all the great
4:33
composers. I mean, just listen to Beethoven
4:36
sometime. It's just melody after melody
4:39
after melody, and good melodies are really hard to write.
4:43
Where does it all come from? How is that possible?
4:46
It's all a giant mystery. So I'm, I'm, I'm encouraged by
4:51
that. That music is such a mystery
4:53
already that The Beatles could have done Rubber Soul.
4:56
But I'm willing to really listen to the whole album and listen to
4:59
the album that came just before it and get back to you.
5:04
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned George Martin and he was a, you
5:06
know, musical genius. But remember, Full Spectre was
5:09
also part of the the lineup. And we know that he had the
5:12
Wrecking Crew. And we know that the Wrecking
5:13
Crew did a huge amount of work on other albums, like on Pet
5:17
Sounds, also by The Beach Boys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
5:20
I had, I read that book actually about the Wrecking Crew.
5:23
It's quite a story and that's incredible.
5:25
Come out about The Beatles, you know, if they did any real a lot
5:30
of ghost writing and ghost playing it, it would have come
5:34
out. And nobody ratted them out, you
5:37
know, no, no other musicians ratted them out.
5:39
And they openly say, yeah, Eric Clapton played on this.
5:43
And so and so played on this and so and so was in the studio that
5:47
day. And they had the best engineers
5:51
and the best producer in the world, and that really helps a
5:56
lot. And apparently they could just
6:00
come up with these harmonies and just sing them.
6:02
They didn't need to practise a whole lot.
6:04
They could. They had amazing ears.
6:06
And some people are like that with music, especially if they
6:09
played since they were a kid and George and Paul played since
6:12
they were little kids and Paul had a musical father.
6:16
And some people can just boom, they can hit those harmony notes
6:21
very just. Before we go any further, would
6:24
you mind just turning up your mic volume?
6:26
So, Robert, the segue, yeah, I think it's fairly easy.
6:30
You've spent a long time looking into the history of Shakespeare,
6:36
and let me still mend this so that I've I've got it correct.
6:43
William Shakespeare did not write most, if not all, of his
6:49
plays and poems. Yeah, not a word, not a single
6:55
word. And this is the great segue
6:57
because The Beatles, you know, are pictures of them holding
7:02
guitars with they're like 12 and 13.
7:05
The thing with Shakespeare is that these plays and poems are
7:09
extremely dense. Like, ridiculous.
7:12
The more I read them, the more dense they get with book
7:16
learning and knowledge and education.
7:19
And William Shakespeare appears like he couldn't even write his
7:24
name. There are no surviving letters
7:27
from the most brilliant man in all of England.
7:30
In an era of constant letter writing, there's not one letter
7:34
from this guy. The only examples of his
7:37
handwriting are 6 signatures on things like legal documents, and
7:42
they're all spelled differently and all scrawled on there like
7:47
his right hand was broken and he wrote with his left hand.
7:51
In an era where literate people had these fancy signatures, they
7:56
took great pride in their signatures and had these flowery
7:59
things. William Shakespeare's parents
8:02
were illiterate. William Shakespeare's children
8:06
were illiterate. William Shakespeare didn't have
8:09
a single book in his house that anyone knows about, or a single
8:14
book in his will. And he would have needed access
8:17
to hundreds of books, some of them in ancient Greek, some of
8:21
them in Latin, some of them in French, some of them in Italian.
8:28
But he'd never, there's actually zero evidence he ever went to
8:33
school at all. There was a school in Stratford
8:35
upon Avon and he would have learned basic Latin there, but
8:42
there's no evidence he went. And if he did go, even the
8:46
hardcore Stratfordians, who are what people who believe
8:49
Shakespeare wrote the plays are called Stratfordians.
8:51
I would be an anti Stratfordian. The Stratfordians would say, you
8:57
know, he learned enough Latin, but he did leave school at 13 to
9:01
help around the house 'cause that's all you got.
9:03
You got like 5 or 6 years of education, but you wouldn't have
9:07
learned enough Latin in six years as a schoolboy in a, in a
9:11
country school to read, you know, Horace and Cicero and
9:17
Seneca. Cause the plays are based on, on
9:20
some other plays that were not translated yet.
9:24
And that's just the beginning of the information we have about
9:27
William Shakespeare. I could go on and on and on.
9:29
There's just no evidence he wrote the plays besides that his
9:34
name was put on the plays and that was a common practise back
9:39
then to, to put a fake name on the play.
9:43
The evidence we do have for him is that he was a pinch penny
9:46
and, you know, a, a kind of a miser and a money grubber.
9:50
But he never got paid for the plays.
9:53
And in his last will and testament, there's no mention of
9:56
the plays which would have been worth some money.
10:00
So as as people started investigating his life in
10:04
detail, they everyone's astonished, like how this guy
10:10
could have possibly written a play.
10:12
And then the argument of the Stratfordians is like, oh,
10:15
you're just a snob. You don't think a commoner could
10:18
write those plays? They're so learned.
10:21
Commoner is not possible. And I'm like, no, I love
10:25
commoner geniuses. You know, I love Mark Twain, I
10:27
love Bob Dylan. These guys came out of nowhere
10:30
and create a genius level work. That's not it.
10:33
It's just that these particular works are not just some cool
10:37
dude with great stories making you laugh with, you know, his
10:42
his folky insights into human nature.
10:45
These are these are works that quote hundreds of obscure
10:52
philosophical references and historical references and
10:57
medical references. I mean, the learning is so deep
11:02
that only a few people could have written them.
11:04
And I'm of the opinion, and most people are that study this, that
11:07
it had to have been a group of writers.
11:08
The the amount of learning is so deep and the amount of the work
11:13
produced is so deep. It probably was not just Francis
11:18
Bacon and and even Stratfordians now agree that Shakespeare had
11:22
help writing the plays, which is a new tack for them.
11:26
They're like, OK, OK, OK. You know, the Stratford man
11:29
didn't write all of them. But it's been a raging debate
11:32
for almost 200 solid years that Shakespeare did not write the
11:39
plays. And the controversy actually
11:42
goes back to the very, very beginning of the Shakespeare
11:47
hoax, the Shakespeare era. There was a, a poem published
11:50
called Venus and Adonis, which again is based on the ancient
11:54
Greek myths very in a very, very learned way, multiple references
11:59
to multiple myths and the language is really complicated
12:04
and profound and it's a twist on the myths.
12:07
It's a really original take on this ancient, very important
12:11
myth of Venus and Adonis. And right away there was an
12:16
answer poem from a guy named John Marston, who was a
12:20
playwright and a guy was it Marston Hall?
12:23
John Hall and something Marston and they start going, oh, you
12:28
know, this is I'm, I'm paraphrasing 'cause they wrote
12:31
in a very elliptical, esoteric way back then.
12:35
Like this is clearly Bacon. Clearly Bacon and the other
12:40
one's answering back and this, this answer poem back where
12:46
they're ragging on this poem is obviously not written by William
12:50
Shakespeare, was shut down right away by a guy named John
12:53
Whitgift because he knew people knew this was an operation.
12:58
This was a very important project.
13:03
And what I've come to understand after years of this is that this
13:09
was meant to create a national poet.
13:13
This project was meant very long term to make a poet capable of
13:21
inspiring a people to empire. And the Greeks had Homer and the
13:27
Romans had Virgil and and little old England needed one because
13:33
what these people wanted was empire.
13:35
And this is documented students of the British Empire.
13:38
It didn't just happen, it was desired and it was planned for.
13:44
And Bacon was obsessed with empire.
13:47
People that write about Bacon who aren't at all interested in
13:50
his then the idea that he was Shakespeare are pulling this
13:54
stuff out that he's constantly writing about empire and he's
13:58
constantly writing about men who built empires.
14:02
And he even predicted that England and Scotland joined
14:06
together would one day be a great empire.
14:09
So there's a reason for this hoax as well, which I think I'm
14:14
I'm original with this because I, I asked like why, why the
14:19
hoax? And the and the answer from
14:21
typical anti Stratfordians is that, well, you couldn't have an
14:25
aristocrat be a playwright. The plays were for commoners and
14:30
you couldn't put your name on them.
14:31
So they wrote them secretly. But that argument doesn't hold
14:35
up with me because then they would have wanted the attention
14:39
later. Or it's actually wasn't that
14:42
strict. Aristocrats could be playwrights
14:45
and they could be poets, and they often were, but.
14:48
Robert But but Francis Bacon was He was a writer, and an
14:53
exceptionally good writer at that.
14:55
Yeah, yeah, he was exceptionally good writer.
14:59
And he was super knowledgeable. Yeah, he was precocious genius.
15:03
He was another Mozart of language.
15:05
Like out of the gate, they noticed this kid was super
15:10
precocious and they they immediately gave him probably
15:16
the best education anyone's ever had.
15:19
So the elite tutors really valued books and book learning.
15:24
And they put their aristocrats, sons and even daughters into
15:30
very rigorous type of education that included Latin and Greek,
15:35
but also drawing and dancing and, and you know, sports.
15:42
But he had access as a child to really extensive libraries.
15:47
And there's evidence that a special education programme was
15:53
designed just for him by the by the country's leading educator,
15:57
a guy named Ashham Askham. And his whole idea was make
16:03
learning fun, make make it enjoyable.
16:05
He wasn't beaten into him and one, one of his biographers, a
16:11
guy named WT Smedley, he's actually from New York and did a
16:16
tonne of research into Bacon. And other people too claim that,
16:20
you know, Bacon by the age of 12 was just extraordinarily
16:25
learned. By the age of 20, he had read
16:27
every book in England and there's a reference to that in
16:31
the Shakespeare plays. And they sent him to London at
16:34
the age of 15. So this is normie history.
16:37
He dropped out of college at 15, announcing he was bored and
16:42
said, I'm going to take on Plato and Aristotle, I think.
16:45
I don't think those guys are really up to snuff.
16:47
Oh, yeah, no, they're great. They're really great.
16:49
But I can do better. He literally said this at the
16:53
age of 15. And they packed him off to
16:56
France as a spy. So his his his work as an
17:01
intelligence began at the age of 15 after he dropped out of
17:05
college and they sent him to Paris where he devised a method
17:10
of cryptography which is still highly admired to this very day
17:15
and seems to maybe even have inspired the computer code we
17:20
use of ones and zeros. He used two different fonts,
17:24
font A and font A prime. And it seems to maybe even
17:29
inspired Leibnitz. And this is way before his
17:32
scientific writing. So he was already involved in
17:36
secrecy. Secrecy was extraordinarily
17:39
important. The Tudor government created
17:42
espionage apparatus unknown previously in history.
17:46
They developed spying to an extremely high art form.
17:51
And we're worried about surveillance today.
17:53
I think they had the whole country of England under
17:55
surveillance. You know, everyone would report
17:58
back to the Crown. In the in the 1500s.
18:01
In the 1500's, the wrong words up north, you know, 10 wrong
18:05
words about the King. He could be visited by the
18:07
secret police. It was a it was a police state.
18:10
For sure. But hang on, Robert, can I?
18:12
Can I jump in here? Of course.
18:16
Why Shakespeare? Why was he then selected?
18:21
OK, that's a great question. So he was a man on the scene.
18:24
He left Stratford the age of 18, I think and.
18:29
Well, well, hang on. Sorry, sorry.
18:30
Before you go any further, just quickly, quickly deal with a
18:33
question that or a or a statement that most likely will
18:36
come up and that is that Shakespeare didn't exist.
18:38
I have seen this before. Oh no, no, he existed.
18:42
He's a real person. There's tonnes of evidence for
18:44
him. People did know him, but all the
18:48
records about him are him as a grain dealer, as a part time
18:52
actor, part time theatre owner. There are 60th, 60 or 62 actual
18:57
documents relating to Shakespeare.
19:00
He was hauled into court a couple times.
19:03
That's when he had to sign his name.
19:05
There's a will. He had children.
19:07
OK, so. He was real.
19:10
He's a real person whose name was Shaq Spur.
19:13
It wasn't Shakespeare, it was Shaq Spur.
19:15
He had a father and a mother and kids and he was in London and he
19:20
and he hung around the theatres. The theatres were like the fun
19:22
part of town. Some new kid in town would hang
19:26
around the theatre and maybe pick up a few coins.
19:29
There's records. He held horses outside the
19:31
theatre for the for the well to do.
19:35
And I think he probably was, you know, quick on his feet,
19:39
intelligent lad, found work, made a little bit as an actor.
19:44
And if they think he was dealing in costumes, so he was a hanger
19:49
on on the theatre scene and somebody said, you know, we need
19:54
a front man for our project. We can't we can't let these
19:57
play. This is this is also maybe I'm a
20:00
little original here on this. These plays have to inspire the
20:03
nation. They can't be written by an
20:05
insider. They can't be written by a high
20:08
ranking aristocrat because the cover of these plays will be
20:12
blown because the plays are so nationalistic and so pro
20:16
monarchy. They have to come from a man of
20:19
the soil. They have to come from an
20:21
unknown, you know, from the Midlands.
20:25
Some like homespun genius really, really cements the
20:30
narrative of the national poet, which wouldn't work.
20:34
Bacon was, you know, right there the whole time.
20:37
All the other poets were too. They were all aristocrats,
20:40
really high ranking, you know, multi general aristocrats.
20:45
So the plays would not have worked.
20:48
They needed a front man. And here is this guy Shakspur.
20:55
They changed his name to Shakespeare, which is an inside
20:58
joke having to do with the goddess Athena.
21:02
Whenever you see a statue of the goddess Athena, she's got a
21:05
spear and she's a Greek goddess who's known as Minerva in Rome.
21:11
And she was the goddess of war and wisdom and she had a a cloak
21:17
of invisibility. So it was really, really perfect
21:20
symbol. And on the occult side of
21:23
things, they're into goddess worship.
21:26
Like the Gnostics believe Sophia, the sort of type of a
21:31
goddess created this world. So they could have a a goddess
21:36
in there too who shook her spear at ignorance.
21:41
And this is this is, you know, classic learning.
21:45
Like goddess Athena had a spear and she shook it at ignorance.
21:49
So Shakespeare and she had a serpent and an owl.
21:54
So there's an inside joke with the name.
21:55
And that's that's well documented by Baconian.
21:58
So they used him and they paid him.
22:02
And exactly the same year that his name started to appear, so
22:05
1593 on the Palm, Venus and Adonis and then 1594 on, I think
22:13
Richard the Third or Loves Labour's Lost.
22:16
His name went on the plays which sometimes were published
22:20
anonymously. And coincidentally he bought a
22:23
big house in Stratford that year, the second biggest house
22:26
in town. Nobody knows how he got that
22:30
money. You know, hardly any plays had
22:32
been published, but they gave him a big chunk of money and
22:37
said keep your mouth shut. And he did.
22:41
And they kept publishing under his name, sometimes and
22:45
sometimes not. And back in the day, nobody
22:48
cared who wrote the plays, that the plays were popular.
22:52
Some of his plays were popular, but going to the theatre was
22:54
really popular. It was really fun.
22:58
It was pretty wild. It was a wild scene, and
23:03
everyone just wanted to be entertained.
23:05
And today it's the same. Nobody knows who wrote Game of
23:08
Thrones. Nobody knows who wrote Mad Men.
23:11
A few do. Other writer.
23:13
Oh, oh, oh, you caught me out. I have a soft spot for Game of
23:20
Thrones, so whoever wrote it was a genius.
23:22
But wasn't it? OK, but you don't know.
23:25
So you love Game of Thrones and you don't know who wrote it?
23:29
No, man, it's, it's what's his name, Or at least what's his
23:32
name? The guy?
23:34
Yeah, the the writer, man. What's his name?
23:36
I don't know. I only saw a few minutes of it,
23:41
but nobody knows. Even you don't.
23:43
I'm not. Wait, hang on, let me just look
23:45
it up quickly. I bet you know the actors names.
23:48
How about the actors names? What's your name?
23:54
RR Martin, isn't it? I don't know.
23:57
George RR Martin wrote games, Did he?
23:59
Write the whole thing. Was it a team?
24:01
Because I was teasing my daughter about she doesn't know
24:04
who wrote Mad Men. And she, you know, looked it up
24:08
there like 20 writers and I think they did know one name of
24:12
Mad. Men, I mean they.
24:13
Sure knew the name of the actors.
24:15
They knew 5 actors names. Yeah.
24:17
I mean, it's, it's plausible that George RR Martin didn't
24:21
write all of Game of Thrones, but it just, it also is
24:24
plausible that he did. I mean, do you think Tolkien
24:27
didn't write all of Lord of the Rings?
24:29
Oh yeah. But that's a novel.
24:31
And people did know the names of of novelists, but with TV shows,
24:35
they kind of don't care. Are you talking about the book
24:39
series? Are you talking about the books?
24:40
Oh no, I'm talking about stuff. I'm talking TV like.
24:43
Oh, OK, I got you. Sorry.
24:45
Yeah, TV is compared to the theatre, and people love their
24:49
TV shows and they love the actors and they'll quote the
24:52
lines and they don't even care who wrote them.
24:54
I mean, I'm a nerd like that. I'm a literary nerd.
24:56
I I care. I look into it sometimes.
24:59
Like, wow, who wrote it? That's the hard part, you know,
25:03
Acting's not easy, but writing's much harder.
25:07
And it was the same back then. Nobody cared except for the
25:12
insiders, except for the intelligence services who kept a
25:16
close eye on the theatre to prevent.
25:21
Robert But going back to the evidence weighing against
25:28
Shakespeare being the writer, you were now basically saying
25:34
that his legal knowledge was just too vast for it to have
25:40
been, you know, some guy left school at 13.
25:43
Oh yeah, all the knowledge, legal especially.
25:46
That's a big soft sore point. There's just tonnes of legal
25:51
language in the plays and. Especially while at the same
25:54
time Francis Bacon had a lot of legal knowledge.
25:58
Yeah, he was. He was the attorney general of
26:00
England. He became Lord chancellor.
26:05
He was and also knowledge of the court and the aristocratic life.
26:09
He was right there since birth. He was a courtier.
26:12
He was Queen Elizabeth's council extraordinaire.
26:16
There's just a lot of knowledge that Shakespeare could not have
26:20
had. But Bacon did have some
26:24
knowledge Bacon probably didn't have.
26:26
There's knowledge about seafaring and the military life.
26:30
People point like, oh, Bacon wouldn't have known about that,
26:34
but they could. That's why they think it was a
26:36
group of writers. But also you need, you know, you
26:38
have a lot of military scenes. You would that's where you would
26:42
bring in, you know, the help. That's where you bring in the
26:44
ringer. And there were tonnes of writers
26:46
back then, just like rock bands now or rock bands in the in the
26:51
80s and 90s and knots like everyone's in a rock band, You
26:54
know, get George Clapton to play on this tune.
26:57
You could have done that. Let's get John Don to write this
27:01
scene. Let's get Henry Neville or
27:04
Thomas Sackville or then they just incredible time that the
27:09
amount of genius and Elizabethan London really astonishing.
27:15
What about Francis Bacon's? I don't know how you pronounce
27:19
it. The promos Promise.
27:21
Promise. Yeah, yeah, promise.
27:24
That's an incredible document. That's a serious smoking gun.
27:30
There's two hard core, hard evidence documents that pull
27:36
Bacon right into the Shakespeare authorship that don't exist for
27:40
any other author. And the Promise Notebook is is
27:45
number one or tied for #1 and it was discovered in the British
27:51
Library in the 1860s by a man named Spedding.
27:57
I forget his first name, Spedding, who was compiling the
28:01
collected works of Francis Bacon.
28:04
And it's 14 volumes and it's literally everything Bacon
28:09
wrote. So not just his published works,
28:12
but his addenda, his, his draughts, his letters, scraps of
28:18
paper, like everything. And so this guy Spedding had
28:22
access to the archives at the British Library, and he found a
28:26
notebook entitled Promise. And it turned out to be a type
28:30
of notebook that a writer might keep, which writers do many, you
28:36
know, they carry a notebook around to jot down something so
28:38
you don't forget it. And it was filled with aphorisms
28:43
and proverbs, mostly in English, but some in French, one or two
28:48
in Greek. And Spedding doesn't mention it,
28:53
and he doesn't even really publish it.
28:57
But word gets out and other people get a hold of it, and
29:00
they find that there are hundreds of direct parallels to
29:03
the Shakespeare plays. Like word for word, line for
29:06
line. These lines are in the plays.
29:11
And it's really, really remarkable.
29:14
Some of the most famous lines in all of Shakespeare are in the
29:18
Promise Notebook. Like to thine own self be true.
29:22
And all's well that ends well. And and the first woman who
29:27
wrote about it, an early Baconian Constance Pot, claimed
29:33
there were over 1000 direct parallels.
29:38
But later, a man named, what's his name, JB something, he wrote
29:45
a book called The Bacon Shakespeare Question.
29:49
He was a lawyer. He wrote this enormous book
29:52
that's so patient and detailed. And he went through the entire
29:55
promis and he knows the plays really well.
29:58
And he claims there's 600 direct parallels from the Promis
30:02
notebook to the Shakespeare plays.
30:05
And that's just one little bit of his evidence.
30:09
But it's really a remarkable, A remarkable document and it's in
30:14
Francis Bacon's handwriting. There's no dispute about that.
30:19
His everybody knows what his handwriting looks like.
30:21
That's his handwriting. And it was a notebook that he
30:25
kept for only one year. So the theory is he had, he had
30:28
a dozen or more of these notebooks.
30:32
And there you go. It's just nothing else really
30:35
compares to that for any other candidate.
30:37
Because now of course, people put up alternative candidates
30:42
and of course the Earl of Oxford, 17th Earl of Oxford is
30:46
number one at the moment. And the last great book that was
30:50
written on the Shakespeare authorship question by Elizabeth
30:55
Winkler called Shakespeare was a Woman.
30:58
And Other heresies just came out about 3 years ago 'cause there's
31:05
a couple women in there, Amelia Bassano and Phillip Sidney's
31:09
sister. And she of course covered bacon,
31:16
but she'd left out the Promus notebook.
31:18
Like the key evidence. I think she covered the
31:20
Northampton, the Northumberland document.
31:24
But I actually met her at a book signing and I told her, you left
31:27
out the Promus notebook. She goes, I did.
31:31
I thought I put it in there because she's an Oxfordian.
31:35
She won't admit to it, but people have a crush on the Earl
31:39
of Oxford because he was a bad boy and they want their poets
31:44
and playwrights to be bad boys and wild men.
31:47
Or Bacon's, you know, he's a stuffy insider, lawyer, attorney
31:51
general. It'd be like finding out, you
31:54
know, Ed Meese of this is probably before your time, but
32:02
an American, famous American jerk, Nazi Vietnam guy, Edwin
32:09
Meese, I might even be getting this wrong, was Bob Dylan.
32:12
You know, the greatest poet of, of America was secretly the
32:18
attorney general in advocating for, you know, dropping napalm
32:22
on the Vietnamese. They can't handle it because
32:25
they love Shakespeare so much. They love Shakespeare.
32:29
But hold on, hang on, let's just take a commercial break there.
32:32
Bob Dylan has written some great music.
32:34
Yeah, yeah. What's your favourite?
32:38
Oh gosh, I don't know. I'm a I'm a Dylan Nutt.
32:43
There must be some Ghana way out of here.
32:47
I think that's my favourite. But but but not his version.
32:50
I actually prefer Jimi Hendrix's version.
32:52
That's one of the rare covers better than the original.
32:56
That's that's a whole, that's a whole podcast right there.
33:00
Cover's better than original, but the original is amazing.
33:03
The harmonica on that song he plays.
33:05
No, no. Yep, Yep, I didn't.
33:07
No, he was. Oh.
33:09
Listen to it again. Well, he still is.
33:10
He still is a rubbish singer and and the other one that he wrote
33:20
that was covered by the birds for for every season.
33:27
Turn, turn turn. What was that?
33:28
Song. That's Pete Seeger.
33:30
Oh, I beg your pardon? Yeah, Mr Tambourine man.
33:36
Yeah, yeah, Mr Tambourine, man, that's it.
33:38
Very good. Yeah, I mean, just go and
33:41
listen. Just go and listen to Bob Dylan
33:43
sing. He did it on purpose.
33:49
That's what's really weird is he did it on purpose.
33:52
You know what I like about him, though?
33:53
I love that he has never explained his music.
33:56
He's never explained it. He doesn't.
34:02
He's never gone to the Grammys or the OR whatever.
34:04
He never got a Grammy. But he's been invited and he
34:08
doesn't go. He did.
34:10
He did finally go and there's a great performance of and then he
34:13
turns Christian. He turns hardcore born again
34:16
Christian in 1979 at the height of the libertine, you know, end
34:23
of the hippie thing. He's suddenly a born again
34:26
Christian and he goes to the Grammys and he plays, you got to
34:32
serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be
34:36
the Lord, but you got to serve somebody.
34:38
And he just throws it right in their face and he writes these
34:42
two really hardcore born again Christian albums like Jesus and
34:48
Save My Soul Jesus with this amazing band, amazing band, you
34:54
know, these great black women singing back up in this
34:57
incredible guitarist. And, and then the third one,
35:01
it's it's called Shot of Love. It's the third Christian album.
35:07
And you can see he's coming out of it into, you know, back into
35:11
the secular world. There's some mixture of more
35:13
secular songs, but the first two are all hardcore.
35:17
Born again Christian albums just just blew everybody's mind.
35:22
And he still stands by those songs.
35:24
He still sings some of them. And he just re released an album
35:28
a couple years ago of those songs live.
35:31
I don't have it. It's amazing band.
35:33
You can see it all on on YouTube and you can find that
35:36
performance, the Grammy performance of Got to Serve
35:40
Somebody. So they finally did let him in
35:44
because it was just too undeniable.
35:45
And they gave him the Nobel Prize, which of course, the
35:48
Nobel Peace Prize doesn't mean anything anymore.
35:50
No, I mean, Obama got it. Had been.
35:55
And not Trump wants. War monger yet Trump wants the
35:58
Peace Prize literature. It's been politicised too
36:01
anyway. But going back to Shakespeare,
36:06
another thing that is is actually quite obvious is today
36:10
we've got the Internet, but in the 1500s, right, to have
36:14
knowledge that goes outside of your hometown would have
36:18
required travelling or talking to people, and Shakespeare
36:22
didn't have much of that either. No, he never left the country.
36:27
You couldn't leave the country without permission from the
36:31
Queen or someone next to the Queen, so it would have been
36:35
known if he left the country. But he had a lot of knowledge
36:38
about what was going on in the world.
36:40
Oh, he knew all about Italy. He knew about France.
36:44
He had an enormous amount of knowledge.
36:47
He knew details of the history of ancient Rome and ancient
36:51
Greece, like extraordinary, extraordinary amounts of
36:55
knowledge. To this day, scholars are
36:58
writing about Shakespeare. There's, I just looked it up the
37:02
other day. I'm shocked.
37:04
Peer reviewed academic journals about Shakespeare.
37:07
I think I saw 10 on just the first page.
37:09
There's there's books coming out all the time.
37:12
There have to be like a million books written about Shakespeare
37:16
plays. And then there's scholarship
37:20
about the scholarship 'cause there's, you know, almost 400
37:23
years of writing about these plays.
37:26
So people write about the history of what people have
37:28
thought about the plays, which is where I come in because I
37:31
find these things in the plays that I can't believe that are
37:34
really dark and disturbing. And I have to wonder, like, who
37:37
else saw this? So I'm combing through
37:40
sometimes, you know, a couple centuries of criticism of
37:44
Shakespeare, which interesting. This is an interesting thing
37:47
I've learned is that Harvard didn't have an English
37:52
department until like 18701875 S People didn't actually discuss
38:00
English literature in America until the late 1800s.
38:03
So there wasn't a lot of concern about it.
38:07
But that's about when it exploded.
38:09
That's when the controversy really exploded, when people
38:14
started to study the plays. And notice these aren't just
38:18
wild stories, emotionally charged or historically oriented
38:22
stories. These are like super dense
38:26
what's going on here. And the, you know, the articles
38:28
and books started coming out and this, this incredible praise
38:34
started to, to develop for this writer because it's just so
38:39
incredible what's in these plays.
38:41
Oh my God. And right around that time,
38:44
people started questioning. Well, then this, this guy from
38:47
Stratford couldn't have written these plays.
38:49
He didn't even own a single book.
38:51
His children were illiterate. It's impossible.
38:55
But the the notion of who had written them was so solidly
39:00
entrenched that most people, certainly in academia and
39:07
certainly in Stratford where there's a billion dollar tourist
39:10
industry, would never admit that an incredible hoax had been
39:13
pulled. And and as Mark Twain said, it's
39:16
easier to fool someone and to convince someone they've been
39:19
fooled. There you go.
39:22
It's just really hard to let go because 'cause people literally
39:25
worship this man Shakespeare, they turned him into a religion.
39:30
And part of, you know, my work is to show that, which is pretty
39:34
easy to show. In fact, it's called Bardolatry
39:39
and some books have been written about that recently.
39:41
They literally made a religion out of Shakespeare and a kind of
39:45
a worship of him that in my opinion, created a sense of
39:51
destiny for the English people. Like if this, this nobody from
39:55
Stratford, the son of the soil could become the greatest, one
40:00
of the greatest poets of all time.
40:03
Like up there with Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Like we are
40:07
a great people. There is a great destiny for us.
40:11
You know, we need to anglicise the world.
40:14
And they did and it worked. And I can tie that whole idea to
40:19
Francis Bacon. So the hoax wasn't just a fun
40:23
thing. Let's write some plays, let's
40:25
have some fun, which they did have.
40:28
They had a blast to doing this because they must have rehearsed
40:31
them. They had, you know, they all
40:32
have mansions, I'm sure. And they all had their own
40:35
acting troops. You know, it's like, like I
40:37
said, people with their bands, you know, these, all these rich
40:40
actors with their rock bands, they all had their own acting
40:43
troops and they must have had a blast.
40:45
But it wasn't just for fun. There was an an ulterior motive,
40:50
a deep, a deep meaning to these plays that exists on on multiple
40:56
levels. Because what's new and what's
40:59
incredible is that it's taken 304 hundred years for this to be
41:04
understood. But there's an enormous amount
41:07
of Freemasonry and alchemy in the plays, and that wasn't
41:11
noticed. The earliest book I can find
41:14
that discusses the alchemy in Shakespeare's from like 1989.
41:19
Now it's like everybody's talking about the alchemy in
41:22
Shakespeare, and alchemy was a very weird pursuit, you know,
41:27
another huge topic. So it's taking me so long to
41:29
write the book because now I got to learn about alchemy.
41:32
But I mean, alchemy isn't necessarily a bad thing.
41:34
No, it's not, but it's also used, you know, for power.
41:41
There's a hidden language, there's an occult language and
41:45
Bacon everyone knows, turned alchemy into modern science and
41:49
he did it for power. His his most famous quote is
41:52
knowledge is power. And he saw what could be done
41:59
with a practical science. And that's why he didn't like
42:01
Plato and Aristotle, cause the Greeks, they had all this
42:04
amazing knowledge and mathematical knowledge and and
42:06
engineering skill. How did but but how did bacon
42:10
benefit ultimately from from all of this?
42:13
He didn't, he didn't he, he's been, his benefit was to build
42:18
an empire. That's what he wanted to do.
42:22
And you know, he lived well and he, he wrote and he what's what
42:26
he wanted to do. He wanted to do literary work.
42:29
He told his uncle, the second most powerful person in the
42:32
Kingdom. Like, I don't want to be a
42:34
lawyer, his uncle said, get back in school, buddy.
42:41
He didn't want to be a lawyer, but he did.
42:44
And he could learn it quickly and he knew it well.
42:47
And I'm sure he could have been one of the greatest lawyers of
42:50
all time. He is considered one of the
42:51
greatest lawyers in English history.
42:53
But he, you know, he didn't really dedicate himself to it,
42:58
although he did become attorney general and Lord chancellor.
43:01
But I mean, OK, so another way of asking the question is then
43:04
would Shakespeare have been a hobby for him?
43:08
No, it was much more than a hobby.
43:11
It's much more than a hobby. He was, he, he was very, very
43:15
dedicated to it. And the, the plays are really,
43:19
really profound. I mean that, right.
43:22
I I think he must have written plays earlier than the accepted
43:26
Canon because they're so they're so polished.
43:31
Flips Act Go. Ahead, I mean, let's look, let's
43:33
look at the the the obvious ones like Romeo and Juliet.
43:38
Oh my God. I mean, that's the most famous
43:41
probably. There's that's there's a few
43:45
that are that contend for being the most famous and it's hard to
43:48
decide what is most famous. Like for intellectuals, it's
43:52
Hamlet, you know, For kids, it's Romeo and Juliet.
43:57
Worldwide, it might be Macbeth. Because it's so short and easy
44:00
to understand and, you know, grizzly and, you know, raises
44:06
the hair on your back. Roman yeah, I mean, how would
44:09
how would Shakespeare have known about Cleopatra, for example?
44:13
Yeah, he couldn't have. He couldn't have.
44:16
He would have needed access to multiple books in ancient Greek
44:22
that weren't available to him. Very few people had access to
44:25
those books, only the very, very wealthy and the, you know, the,
44:30
I guess you maybe could have got them at the two or three
44:33
universities in England at the time.
44:35
Yeah, They were very hard to come by.
44:37
And that's really one of the key elements of the hoax and why
44:42
Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays.
44:44
And the hardcore Stratfordians will say, I don't care how he
44:50
got the books. He got the books.
44:53
Some people say, oh, he read them in the book stalls in Saint
44:56
Paul's churchyard, right. He read these dense books in
45:01
ancient Greece, standing by a book stall, you know, and then
45:05
memorise them and put them in the place.
45:08
No, it doesn't doesn't work like that.
45:11
And they just won't accept it. And that's one of the things
45:14
that's great about Elizabeth Winkler's book.
45:16
I'm plugging her book twice is that she goes to the belly of
45:19
the beast and she gets an interview with this guy named
45:22
Stanley Wells, who's the number one Stratfordian, think he runs
45:26
the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford and she pegs him.
45:30
He, he tried to avoid the meeting.
45:32
He tried to get out of it, but she gets him face to face and
45:36
she makes him look like a fool. Like, why?
45:38
He won't confront the obvious. And she does that, too.
45:43
Some major Shakespeare scholars, too, like, why don't you care
45:47
who wrote the plays? Because they'll acknowledge
45:49
that. Yeah, it's kind of weird, this
45:51
thing with Shakespeare. How do you.
45:52
But I don't care. The work speaks for itself.
45:57
But that's not true. Biography always informs every
46:02
work of art, and that's why we're obsessed by the artists
46:05
that we love and books get written about their biographies
46:09
and that that goes into interpreting the work.
46:12
And Shakespeare scholars are constantly doing that, like, oh,
46:16
the Warwickshire lad must have learned about this from this.
46:20
And they'll try to tie, you know, that Shakespeare had a son
46:24
named Hamnet as part of Hamlet. In fact, there's a movie out
46:28
right now called Hamnet, which is about his son that died
46:33
inspiring the play Hamlet, which has nothing to do with having a
46:38
son at all. It's so ridiculous.
46:42
So they'll and they'll just, they'll just ignore it.
46:44
They say no, it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter.
46:46
I don't want to talk about. It would Francis Bacon have been
46:51
the only writer. No, there was a group.
46:54
There had to be a group. There were so many brilliant
46:58
writers and Bacon was smart enough that say, OK, I want to
47:02
make something astonishing. I want to make something that
47:06
that's that lasts for all time like Homer did.
47:10
And he'd he'd mention that all the time that empires fall, but
47:13
books last. I have every comma.
47:17
Well, commas didn't exist, but I have every letter of Homer for
47:22
the same for 2000 years and and all that stuff is gone, you
47:26
know, and and the book survive and and and it even says in the
47:29
sonnets this my immortal line or something, or these words will
47:33
last forever. He needed them to be that great
47:39
that people would pour over them and marvel and marvel at the you
47:43
know, the genius of these works. So he would bring in people
47:49
because he was an agent of espionage.
47:51
He knew how to how to make something work, and he needed
47:55
other writers, and they were right there.
47:57
He knew them and talked to them, especially Ben Johnson, who's a
48:01
brilliant writer and who appears to have helped cement the hoax.
48:07
It's what's called the First Folio, the most influential
48:11
secular book of all time, according to Wikipedia, where
48:15
they put all 36 plays together in one book.
48:19
Seven years after Shakespeare, the man from Stratford died,
48:22
Shakespeare died. And three years before Francis
48:27
Bacon died, the First Folio came out.
48:30
And Ben Johnson is the one who really perpetuates the hoax
48:34
'cause he was a famous playwright and people did know
48:37
him. And he's all over the First
48:39
Folio calling Shakespeare, you know, one for the ages of this,
48:45
this wonderful Shakespeare. And he wrote two poems.
48:50
And that legitimised Shakespeare because nobody else ever
48:54
mentioned him as a writer. Nobody ever mentioned him once
48:58
while he was living as a writer. So he's been dead for seven
49:01
years when this book of place comes out.
49:05
And that created the hoax. And the Bacon would've brought
49:11
in other writers. I mean, especially for some of
49:14
the scenes with women. He he didn't like women.
49:16
He had a real mommy issues and he would have brought in women
49:20
to like flesh out the women. He would have brought in people
49:23
that knew about war to flesh out the war scenes.
49:26
And and plays are typically can be typically written by multiple
49:30
hands and they go through a development process while you're
49:33
acting them out. You know, you watch a
49:35
performance, you go rewrite it. You go, oh, that that character
49:38
is a little thin. Don't you help me with flesh out
49:42
this character. Let's get Mary Shelley in here
49:45
to help with this portrayal of Cleopatra or whatever.
49:50
So, yeah, no problem. And, and when the First Folio
49:53
came out, 18 of the plays had never been published.
49:56
I think 18 or some number of plays had never even been heard
50:00
of. So they had a lot of time to
50:04
rejigger everything and put it into the shape that we find it
50:08
today. In a in a poetic way, this is
50:15
kind of like a Shakespearean tragedy.
50:17
Yeah, it's totally Shakespearean.
50:21
There's always disguises and false identities and and hoaxes
50:27
and traps. It's absolutely He was a spy
50:30
through and through. And this is what most of the
50:33
Baconians miss. But Bacon helped create MI 5 and
50:39
MI 6 and all the propaganda we see today in entertainment
50:43
that's connected to the CIA can trace right back to Bacon
50:48
because everybody knows the British intelligence created the
50:52
CIA and these techniques were being used in Elizabethan
50:58
England. And even the, you know, the, the
51:02
nasty stuff with the little boys was happening back then.
51:06
And you know, like we say is happening in Hollywood now and
51:09
coming out to the fore with Epstein and stuff.
51:12
It was, it was going on back then.
51:13
It was a part of the process. It's really remarkable, the
51:17
whole thing, it's mind blowing. Speaking of tragedies, I don't
51:22
know why, but during this conversation I was thinking
51:25
about the verve and and the disaster that happened with them
51:28
and Bittersweet Symphony. Do you remember that?
51:32
I do, it's a great song. I don't know anything about the
51:34
band though. Well, I mean, in 997, I think
51:37
that that song came out as one of the greatest songs I think of
51:39
all time. And they used like a super
51:45
cryptic sample of something from The Rolling Stones, which they
51:51
themselves also used from some song from the 70s or something.
51:58
I mean, it's so it's so cryptic that you would not even hear it.
52:02
And, and they nonetheless got permission to use this.
52:06
It's part of that main, that main hook and, and, and then
52:13
they got sued by The Rolling Stones and the Verve lost that
52:18
case and all the royalties and rights of that song got handed
52:22
over to to the Stones and, and they lost all their money and,
52:29
and the song was used in that movie Cruel Intentions.
52:32
And they made no money from that.
52:34
Obviously Super Bowl everything for 22 years, I think.
52:38
And I think it was like in 2018 or 2019 when Mick Jagger and
52:43
Keith Richards decided to make some deal and give the rights
52:48
back to the verve. But I mean by that stage, it's
52:52
it's gone, it's broken. The band, the band that the band
52:54
was destroyed and they made no money.
52:57
How's that for a tragedy? Shakespearean.
53:00
That's awful. More reasons to hate Mick Jagger
53:03
and Keith Richards. Unbelievable.
53:06
Did you not know that? I never heard that story, no.
53:10
Oh, and by the way, they were not allowed to even play that.
53:12
So in other words, they lost the rights and they couldn't play it
53:14
on stage. And Richard Ashcroft, I think he
53:17
played it for the first time, like in the late, well, the what
53:21
do you call it, the 20 teens or whatever you call that.
53:24
I can even see the video. The video was pretty good.
53:27
It was outstanding. He just was walking and knocking
53:30
people over. Yeah.
53:32
Great great video too. Which are rare great videos or?
53:36
Did Shakespeare make money from this?
53:39
There's no evidence he did, except under the tape.
53:42
Did he know? Actually, hold on, hold on.
53:43
Let's let's start there. Did he know that his name was
53:45
being? Used.
53:47
Yes, he must have. He must.
53:50
Have but did he not keep? Was was he not present at at the
53:55
theatre? There's different opinions on
54:00
that. I think the majority is that,
54:04
yes, he was, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut.
54:07
And like I said, nobody really cared who was the writer.
54:12
But the people in the acting company must have known 'cause
54:15
there are these extraordinarily erudite, dense plays and this
54:20
kind of clownish figure, you know, who was probably a whit
54:24
and you know, could think on his feet, could never have written
54:28
this stuff. So they, they would have
54:29
probably been told, listen, just keep your mouth shut.
54:32
The, the person who wrote this doesn't want a single word
54:36
breathed about it. And you know, they'd lop off
54:39
your ear if you, you know, if you broke a command from the
54:42
Queen. The Queen definitely knew,
54:45
William Cecil knew, Francis Walsingham knew.
54:47
They all had their own theatre troupes.
54:49
They all knew the the higher ups knew, but it was a state secret.
54:55
And why? Why expose it?
54:58
What would you get from exposing something like that?
55:01
You would get nothing. You would get in big trouble.
55:06
And to be in on the secret would have been really cool.
55:10
And it was just for fun. So yeah, why don't just keep her
55:14
mouth shut? Who cares?
55:15
The actors were all getting paid.
55:16
The theatre owners were getting paid.
55:18
People did kind of like the plays.
55:20
There's, you know, the jury's really out on that.
55:22
I mean, these are not plays much for commoners, although some of
55:27
them were. Some of them are extremely
55:29
bloody and violent, you know, like Macbeth, the Titus
55:32
Andronicus. Some of them were very
55:36
patriotic. And that was the whole purpose
55:38
at that time was to make them patriotic.
55:41
And they're extraordinarily patriotic.
55:44
The King John has that famous speech about this Sceptre Isle,
55:49
this shining island in the Silver Sea, You know, this, this
55:54
land of heroes and gods just like really stirs you up.
55:58
I mean, the poetry is amazing. So all those history plays are
56:02
very Marshall. They're very nationalistic.
56:05
They really build up the English.
56:07
And especially that Richard the Third was one of the very
56:10
earliest plays printed and performed that makes the tutors
56:15
look like they saved England, that the tutor line was sent by
56:20
God to save England and get England, you know, out into the
56:25
world. It's extraordinary.
56:28
It's it's so ham fisted and obvious by today's standards.
56:34
But Richard the Third, the evil king just it's just like a car
56:40
crash. You can't help but be fascinated
56:42
by it. And he shows Richard the Third
56:44
manipulate the entire court and become king through skullduggery
56:50
and treachery and murder and lies, just like the most
56:54
horrible creature ever to be saved by Henry the 7th.
57:01
Henry Tudor, the star of the Tudor dynasty, kills him at the
57:06
Battle of Bosworth and all is well.
57:08
It's so ham fisted, It's so over the top, it's so Disney.
57:12
But it worked and it still works.
57:15
And they found recently the bones of Richard the Third
57:19
because a bunch of conspiracy theorists got together and were
57:22
saying like, you know, Richard the Third, I think he was
57:24
actually a good guy. And others said, oh, really?
57:28
You doubt Shakespeare? You, you think Shakespeare
57:32
wasn't correct? And turns out, yeah, Shakespeare
57:36
lied. Shakespeare painted Richard the
57:38
3rd as the one of the vilest criminals in all of history.
57:43
And it was actually a pretty decent guy.
57:45
And he had the crown stolen by him, by Henry Tudor, who turns
57:49
out to be it was pure propaganda.
57:52
And I have a whole essay written on the birth of the birth of
57:54
propaganda. It's one of the podcast
57:57
episodes. It's the birth of modern
57:59
propaganda. And it worked.
58:02
And anybody that wants to know about this, I highly recommend a
58:04
feature film from England called The Lost King, the story of the
58:09
conspiracy theorist who literally found the bones of
58:13
Richard the Third unceremoniously tossed, you
58:17
know, in a grave. And it's credible true story.
58:21
And it exposes the Shakespeare hoax.
58:23
Brilliantly. Do you think Francis Bacon was a
58:26
good guy? No, no, I think he was evil.
58:31
I think he was really, really evil.
58:35
An extraordinary mind. And Shakespeare was just a pawn.
58:39
Yeah, Yeah. Shakespeare.
58:41
Yeah. Shakespeare was kind of a
58:42
lowlife. He would sue people for like a
58:45
few shillings. He would drag him into court.
58:47
Yeah, he was a lowlife. He, you know, he gave his wife
58:53
the second best bed. He seemed to have no real human
58:57
concern. He just wanted money.
58:59
He just wanted. But did he make a lot of money,
59:03
do you think? He did because he got that
59:05
steak, he bought that house, and then he dealt in wool and grain.
59:10
There's even evidence that he hoarded grain during a famine.
59:15
That's the kind of guy he was that's in all the books.
59:20
Like, that's one thing we know about him.
59:22
He didn't own any books, but he hoarded grain during a famine.
59:26
Does that sound like the guy who wrote dense learned plays?
59:32
He's hoarding grain, but all the Shakespeare scholars admit that.
59:39
They admit that. Yep, our guy hoarded grain
59:42
during a famine. But he also wrote Romeo and
59:47
Juliet. So goofy.
59:50
Yes, a quote by Mark Twain. To write with powerful effect,
59:55
he must write out the life he has LED, as did Bacon when he
59:59
wrote Shakespeare. Good one, man.
1:00:01
That's a good one. Yep, he wrote his life.
1:00:04
Those those stories are Bacon's life to a large degree.
1:00:09
And they find references to the to the court, you know, to the
1:00:13
Queens and the aristocrats in the plays and all that double
1:00:17
dealing. Every Shakespeare play has a spy
1:00:20
in it, has someone lurking behind the curtains, has fake
1:00:23
letters, deceptions, ruses, spying, nationalism,
1:00:29
warmongering. They're really dark.
1:00:31
Their plays are really dark. They leave you with a pit in
1:00:34
your stomach. They're awful.
1:00:36
They're really, really awful. I think Macbeth's not a play
1:00:39
about evil. It's it's literally an evil
1:00:40
play. It's just so dark and and you
1:00:44
cannot criticise Shakespeare. I found one person, Leo Tolstoy,
1:00:50
who who really rips Shakespeare apart.
1:00:52
That's it. If Shakespeare did it, it's
1:00:55
correct and it's good. It's really, really weird.
1:00:59
Well, let's do the final act, OK?
1:01:05
How can I follow your work? The best place is the website
1:01:12
thehiddenlifeisbest.com and everything's there and links to
1:01:21
all the podcast episodes and all the essays is there.
1:01:25
If you sign up at Substack The Hidden Life is best or Patreon
1:01:30
The Hidden Life is best. You get access to stuff that's
1:01:34
behind a paywall, which is some of the podcast episodes, some of
1:01:38
the deeper stuff, like there's a long high recommended episode on
1:01:46
Romeo and Juliet that's really shocking, like what I found in
1:01:49
Romeo and Juliet. But there's also an essay on
1:01:52
that if you want to just read the essay.
1:01:54
But stuff on Macbeth, The Tempest is mind blowing.
1:01:57
Julius Caesar I did a lot of stuff on, though not as much as
1:02:01
The Tempest. It's really, really fascinating.
1:02:04
If you're at all into Shakespeare, check it out.
1:02:08
If you're into the history of the British Empire, check it
1:02:11
out. But also, it appears that
1:02:16
Francis Bacon was the prime mover the Rosicrucian movement
1:02:21
and the Freemason. So if you're all at all into
1:02:24
Freemasonry, check it out the Hidden lifeisbest.com.
1:02:29
Up next, who really wrote and drew Asterix and Oblix?
1:02:36
Whoa, we're getting deep, man. Robert Frederick, thank you for
1:02:41
joining me in the Drenches. Jeremy, it's been a blast.
1:02:43
Thanks so much.