William Shakespeare did not write any of his plays | Jerm Warfare

Hey, it's Cole Swindle, and when I spend 200 days a year rolling down the highway, the bus can start to feel smaller than a guitar case.

Everyone wonders how I stay chill while the hours crawl by.

Truth is, one good luck spent on Chamba, and suddenly the trip does a whole lot shorter.

Found in your space, even when there isn't much to spare.

Need some chill? Let's Chamba!

No purchase necessary, VGW Group Boyd were prohibited by law, 21 plus TNC supply, sponsored by Chamba Casino.

Robbock Frederick, thank you for joining me in the trenches.

Jeremy, it's great to be with you.

The camera doesn't work, so we'll go with an image.

We were just chatting before I hit the record button about musicians using ghost writers and even ghost musicians.

And I suggested to you that maybe the Beatles, particularly Rubber Soul, wasn't their own, and it could have been their own.

Yeah, I feel pretty strongly about this argument, and I'm a musician, I'm a songwriter.

I had a listener, you know, basically pushed me to watch the Sage of Quay for our version, and I did.

And if I had more time, if I wasn't so buried in my own project, I would go through it point by point and concede some of his points,

but strongly refute the overall thesis.

And okay, yeah, maybe they got a song handed to them. Maybe there were some ghost musicians, but that's all totally normal.

And yeah, I do think they were just extraordinarily talented musicians, and you know, you were ragging on Ringo a little bit.

He was a terrible drummer.

I just have said the opposite of that.

I mean, he was really creative. They brought in a ringer.

But he played drums in a completely unique way in his own style. He was self-taught.

He listened to Abbey Road.

You know, he kind of talks with his drums. He was unique. And John came on and said,

Hey, Ringo would have been a star without us. You know, he didn't need us.

And another thing John said, though, is anytime I think we're demigods, I just look over at Ringo and it brings me back down to Earth.

So I just think they were extraordinary musicians in the story holds up.

Rubber's Soul is a stretch. It's true. They got all that album done in 35 days.

It's a stretch. But it also sounds completely different.

You know, I'm willing to go back and really listen to the album again and the album before,

because it's all kind of one big sound to me, the Beatles.

I didn't actually, I'm not old enough to actually have grown up with them album by album, but I know the music well.

I would look at that again. I mean, he makes, that's his best argument.

And he's got it down, you know, to the day, to the minute, to the hour of they were so busy,

you know, making movies and stuff, that it is, if they did do it, it's an extraordinary accomplishment.

But music is really, really different than a lot of arts. I mean, our Tatum, the jazz pianist,

could play back a piece by Brahms, hearing it one time.

You know, Mozart wrote a symphony when he was seven years old, and these kind of stories resound.

Do you think that's true, though? Come on, come on. Briding a symphony at seven.

Do you think that's true?

Oh, yeah. Our Tatum's known to be able to listen to a piece by Brahms and play it.

And then he would compose over those things. Music is weird. Music itself is weird.

Music inspiration is weird. Like, where do people get inspired?

How do they go around hearing music?

Oliver Sachs has a book called Musical Filia. I never read it.

But apparently it's full of these really remarkable stories of music that defy science.

I could just don't know how people come up with these melodies and all the great composers.

I mean, just listen to Beethoven sometime. It's just melody after melody after melody.

Good melodies are really hard to write. Where does it all come from?

How is that possible? It's all a giant mystery.

So I'm encouraged by that. That music is such a mystery already that the Beatles could have done rubber soul.

But I'm willing to really listen to the whole album and listen to the album that came just before it and get back to you.

Yeah. I mean, you mentioned George Martin and he was a musical genius.

But I remember full specter was also part of the lineup.

And we know that he had the wrecking crew. And we know that the wrecking crew,

that a huge amount of work on other albums, like on Pat Sounds, also by the Beach Boys.

Yeah. Yeah. I read that book actually about the wrecking crew. It's quite a story.

And that's not going to come out about the Beatles.

They did any real, a lot of ghost writing and ghost playing. It would have come out.

And nobody ratted them out. You know, no other musicians ratted them out.

And they openly said, yeah, Eric Clapton played on this.

And so and so played on this. And so and so was in the studio that day.

They had the best engineers and the best producer in the world.

And that really helps a lot. And apparently they could just come up with these harmonies and just sing them.

They didn't need to practice a whole lot. They had amazing ears.

And some people are like that with music, especially if they played since they were a kid.

And George and Paul played since they were little kids.

And Paul had a musical father.

And some people can just boom. They can hit those harmony notes.

Before we go any further, would you mind just turning up your mic volume?

So Robert, the segue, yeah, I think is fairly easy.

You've spent a long time looking into the history of Shakespeare.

Yeah.

And let me steal madness so that I've got it correct.

William Shakespeare did not write most if not all of his plays and poems.

Yeah, not a word, not a single word.

And this is the great segue because the Beatles, you know, are pictures of them holding guitars with their like 12 and 13.

The thing with Shakespeare is that these plays and poems are extremely dense, like ridiculous.

The more I read them, the more dense they get with book learning and knowledge and education.

And William Shakespeare appears that he couldn't even write his name.

There are no surviving letters from the most brilliant man in all of England in an era of constant letter writing.

There's not one letter from this guy.

The only examples of his handwriting are six signatures on things like legal documents.

And they're all spelled differently and all scrolled on there like his right hand was broken and he wrote with his left hand.

In an era where literate people had these fancy signatures.

They took great pride in their signatures and had these flowery things.

William Shakespeare's parents were illiterate.

William Shakespeare's children were illiterate.

William Shakespeare didn't have a single book in his house that anyone knows about or a single book in his will.

And he would have needed access to hundreds of books.

Some of them in ancient Greek, some of them in Latin, some of them in French, some of them in Italian.

But he never, there's actually zero evidence he ever went to school at all.

There was a school in Stratford upon Avon.

And he would have learned basic Latin there.

But there's no evidence he went.

And if he did go, even the hardcore Strat Fordians who are what people who believe Shakespeare wrote the plays are called Strat Fordians, I would be an anti-strat Fordian.

The Strat Fordians would say, you know, he learned enough Latin.

But he did leave school at 13 to help around the house.

Because that's all you got.

You got like five or six years of education.

But you wouldn't have learned enough Latin in six years as a schoolboy in a country school to read, you know, Horace and Cicero and Seneca.

Because the plays are based on some other plays that were not translated yet.

And that's just the beginning of the information we have about William Shakespeare.

I could go on and on and on.

There's just no evidence he wrote the plays besides that his name was put on the plays.

And that was a common practice back then to put a fake name on the play.

The evidence we do have for him is that he was a pinch penny and, you know, kind of a miser and a money grubber, but he never got paid for the plays.

And in his last will and testament, there's no mention of the plays, which would have been worth some money.

So as people started investigating his life in detail, they were everyone's astonished like how this guy could have possibly written a play.

And then the argument of the Strat Fordians is like, oh, you're just a snob.

You don't think a commoner could write those plays. They're so learned. It's commoners not possible.

And I'm like, no, I love commoner geniuses. You know, I love Mark Twain. I love Bob Dylan.

These guys came out of nowhere and created genius level work. That's not it.

It's just that these particular works are not just some cool dude with great stories, making you laugh with, you know, his, his folky insights into human nature.

These are these are works that quote hundreds of obscure philosophical references and historical references and medical references.

I mean, the learning is so deep that only a few people could have written them.

And I'm of the opinion and most people are that study this that it had to have been a group of writers.

The amount of learning is so deep and the amount of the work produced is so deep.

It probably was not just Francis Bacon and even Strat Fordians now agree that Shakespeare had help writing the plays, which is a new tack for them.

They're like, okay, okay, okay. You know, the Stratford man didn't write all of them.

But it's been a raging debate for almost 200 solid years that Shakespeare did not write the plays.

And the controversy actually goes back to the very, very beginning of the Shakespeare hoax, the Shakespeare era.

It's a poem published called Venus and Adonis, which again is based on the ancient Greek myths, in a very, very learned way, multiple references to multiple myths.

And the language is really complicated and profound. And it's a twist on the myths.

It's a really original take on this ancient, very important myth of Venus and Adonis.

And right away, there was an answer poem from a guy named John Marston, who was a playwright in a guy called John Hall and something Marston.

And they start going, oh, you know, this is paraphrasing because they wrote in a very elliptical esoteric way back then.

Like, this is clearly bacon, clearly bacon and the other one's answering back.

And this answer poem back where they're ragging on this poem is obviously not written by William Shakespeare, was shut down right away by a guy named John Whitgift.

Because he knew, people knew this was an operation. This was a very important project.

And what I've come to understand after years of this is that this was meant to create a national poet.

This project was meant very long term to make a poet capable of inspiring a people to empire.

And the Greeks had Homer and the Romans had Virgil and little old England needed one because what these people wanted was empire.

And this is documented, students of the British Empire. It didn't just happen. It was desired and it was planned for.

And bacon was obsessed with empire, people that write about bacon, who aren't at all interested in his, than the idea that he was Shakespeare,

are pulling this stuff out that he's constantly writing about empire and he's constantly writing about men who built empires.

And he even predicted that England and Scotland joined together would one day be a great empire.

So there's a reason for this hoax as well, which I think I'm original with this.

Because I asked like why, why the hoax and the answer from typical anti-strat Fordians is that well you couldn't have an aristocrat be a playwright, the place where for commoners.

And you couldn't put your name on them so they wrote them secretly.

But that argument doesn't hold up with me because then they would have wanted the attention later or it's actually wasn't that strict.

Aristocrats could be playwrights and they could be poets and they often were.

But France's bacon was, he was a writer and an exceptionally good writer at that.

Yeah, he was exceptionally good writer.

And he was knowledgeable.

Yeah, he was precocious genius, he was another Mozart of language like out of the gate.

They noticed this kid was super precocious and they immediately gave him probably the best education anyone's ever had.

So the elite tutors really valued books and book learning and they put their aristocrats,

sons and even daughters into very rigorous type of education that included Latin and Greek.

But also drawing and dancing and sports.

But he had access as a child to really extensive libraries and there's evidence that a special education program was designed just for him.

By the country's leading educator, a guy named Asham Ascom.

And his whole idea was make learning fun, make it enjoyable. He wasn't beaten into him.

And one of his biographers, a guy named W.T. Smedley, who's actually from New York and did a ton of research into bacon.

And other people too claim that bacon by the age of 12 was just extraordinarily learned by the age of 20 he had read every book in England.

And there's a reference to that in the Shakespeare plays.

And they sent him to London at the age of 15.

So this is Normie history. He dropped out of college at 15 announcing he was bored.

And said, I'm going to take on play to an Aristotle. I don't think those guys are really up to snub.

Oh yeah, no, they're great. They're really great. But I can do better.

He literally said this at the age of 15.

And they packed him off to France as a spy. So his work as an intelligence began at the age of 15 after he dropped out of college.

And he sent him to Paris where he devised a method of cryptography which is still highly admired to this very day.

And seems to maybe even have inspired the computer code we use of ones and zeros.

He used two different fonts, font a and font a prime.

And it seems to maybe you inspired Leibniz. And this is way before his scientific writing.

So he was already involved in secrecy. Secrecy was extraordinarily important.

The tutor government created espionage apparatus unknown previously in history.

They developed spying to an extremely high art form.

And we're worried about surveillance today. I think they had the whole country of England under surveillance.

You know, everyone would report back to the crown.

In the 1500s. In the 1500s. The wrong words up north, you know, 10 wrong words about the king.

You could be visited by the secret police. It was it was up next day for sure.

But hang on Robert, can I can I jump in here? Of course.

Why Shakespeare? Why was he then selected?

Okay, that's a great question. So he was a man on the scene.

He left Stratford, the age of 18, I think.

Well, sorry, sorry. Before you go any further, just quickly deal with a question or a statement that most likely will come up.

And that is that Shakespeare didn't exist. I have seen this before.

Oh, no, no, he existed. He's a real person. There's tons of evidence for him.

People did know him. But all the records about him are him as a grain dealer.

As a part-time actor, part-time theater owner, there are 60 or 62 actual documents relating to Shakespeare.

He was hauled into court a couple times.

That's when he had to sign his name. There was a will. He had children.

Okay, so he was real. He's a real person whose name was Shakespeare.

Who wasn't Shakespeare was Shakespeare. He had a father and a mother and kids.

And he was in London. And he hung around the theaters.

The theaters were like the fun part of town. Some new kid in town would hang around the theater and maybe pick up a few coins.

There's records he held horses outside the theater for the well to do.

And I think he probably was, you know, quick on his feet, intelligent lad, found work,

a little bit as an actor and they think he was dealing in costumes.

So he was a hangar on the theater scene.

And somebody said, you know, we need a frontman for our project.

We can't let these play. This is also maybe I'm a little original here on this.

These plays have to inspire the nation. They can't be written by an insider.

They can't be written by a high-ranking aristocrat.

Because the cover of these plays will be blown.

Because the plays are so nationalistic and so pro monarchy.

They have to come from a man of the soil.

They have to come from an unknown, you know, from the Midland.

Some like home spun genius really, really cement the narrative of the national poet.

Which wouldn't work. Bacon was, you know, right there the whole time.

All the other poets were too. They were all aristocrats, really high-ranking.

You know, multi-general aristocrats.

So the plays would not have worked. They needed a frontman.

And here is this guy.

Shack Spur.

They changed his name to Shakespeare, which is an inside joke having to do with the goddess Athena.

Whenever you see a statue of the goddess Athena, she's got a spear.

And she's a Greek goddess who's known as Minerva and Rome.

And she was the goddess of war and wisdom.

And she had a cloak of invisibility.

So it was really, really perfect symbol.

And on the occult side of things, they're into goddess worship.

Like the Gnostics believe Sophia, the sort of type of a goddess created this world.

So they could have a goddess in there too, who shook her spear at ignorance.

And this is, you know, classic learning goddess Athena had a spear.

And she shook it at ignorance.

So Shakespeare.

And she had a serpent and an owl.

So there's an inside joke with the name.

And that's, that's well documented by Baconians.

So they used him and they paid him.

And exactly the same year that his name started to appear.

So 1593 on the Palm Venus and Adonis.

And then 1594.

Oh, and I think Richard III or Love's Labor's Lost, his name went on the plays.

Which sometimes were published anonymously.

And coincidentally, he bought a big house and straffored that year.

The second biggest house in town.

Nobody knows how he got that money.

You know, hardly any plays had been published.

But they gave him a big chunk of money and said, keep your mouth shut.

And he did.

And they kept publishing under his name sometimes.

And sometimes not.

And back in the day, nobody cared who wrote the plays.

The plays were popular. Some of his plays were popular.

But going to the theater was really popular. It was really fun.

It was pretty wild. It was a wild scene.

And everyone just wanted to be entertained.

And today it's the same.

Nobody knows who wrote Game of Thrones.

Nobody knows who wrote Mad Men.

A few do. Other writer.

Oh, you caught me out.

I have a soft spot for Game of Thrones.

So whoever wrote it was a genius.

But it wasn't it.

Okay, but you don't know.

So you love Game of Thrones.

You don't know who wrote it.

No, man. It's what's his name, all at least.

What's his name?

Yeah, the writer, man. What's his name?

I don't know.

I only saw a few minutes of it.

But nobody knows.

Even you don't know.

Wait, hang on. Let me just look it up quickly.

I bet you know the actor's names.

How about the actor's names?

What's your name?

I don't know.

George R.R. Martin wrote Game of Thrones.

Did you write the whole thing?

It was a team.

Because I was teasing my daughter about,

she doesn't know who wrote Mad Men.

And she looked it up there like 20 writers.

And I think they did know one name of Mad Men.

I mean, it is her new, the name of the actors.

They knew five actors names.

Yeah, I mean, it's plausible that George R.R. Martin

didn't write all of Game of Thrones.

But it also is plausible that he did.

I mean, do you think Tolkien didn't write all of Lord of the Rings?

Oh, yeah, but that's a novel.

And people did know the names of novelists.

But with TV shows, they kind of don't care.

Are you talking about the book series?

Are you talking about the books?

No, I'm talking about TV series.

I'm talking about TV.

Oh, okay, I got you. Sorry.

Yeah, TV is compared to the theater.

And people love their TV shows.

And they love the actors and they'll quote the lines.

And they don't even care who wrote them.

I mean, I'm a nerd like that.

I'm a literary nerd.

I care.

I look into it sometimes.

I'm like, wow, who wrote it?

That's the hard part.

You know, acting's not easy, but writing's much harder.

And it was the same back then.

Nobody cared except for the insiders,

except for the intelligent services

who kept a close eye on the theater to prove that.

Robert.

Yeah.

But going back to the evidence

weighing against Shakespeare being the writer.

Yeah.

You were now basically saying that his

legal knowledge was just too vast for it to have been,

you know, some guy left school at 13.

Oh, yeah.

All the knowledge, legal especially,

that's a big soft sore point.

There's just tons of legal language in the plays.

And especially while at the same time,

Francis Bacon had a lot of legal knowledge.

Yeah.

He was, he was the attorney general of England.

He became Lord Chancellor.

He was, and also knowledge of the court

and the aristocratic life.

He was right there since birth.

He was a courtier.

He was Queen Elizabeth's counsel extraordinaire.

There's just a lot of knowledge

that Shakespeare could not have had,

but Bacon did have.

Some knowledge Bacon probably didn't have.

There's knowledge about seafaring

and the military life.

People point like, oh, Bacon wouldn't have known about that.

But that's why they think it was a group of writers.

But also you, you know, you have a lot of military scenes.

You would, that's where you would bring in, you know,

the help that's where you bring in the ringer.

There were tons of writers back then.

Just like rock bands now.

Or rock bands in the, in the 80s and 90s and nots.

Like everyone's in a rock band, you know.

You get George Clapton to play on this tune.

You could have done that.

Let's get John Don to write this scene.

Let's get Henry Neville or Thomas Sackville.

And they just, incredible time.

The amount of genius in Elizabethan London

really astonishing.

What about Francis Bacon's?

I don't know if you've been answered the promise, promise.

Yeah, yeah, the promise.

That's an incredible document.

That's a serious smoking gun.

There's two hardcore, hard evidence documents

that pull Bacon right into the Shakespeare authorship

that don't exist for any other author.

And the promise notebook is, is number one or tied for number one.

And it was discovered in the British Library in the 1860s

by a man named Spedding, forget his first name, Spedding,

who was compiling the collected works of Francis Bacon.

And it's 14 volumes and it was literally everything Bacon wrote.

So not just his published works, but his addenda, his drafts,

his letters, scraps of paper, like everything.

And so this guy Spedding had access to the archives

at the British Library.

And he found a notebook entitled Promise.

And it turned out to be a type of notebook

that a writer might keep, which writers do many.

They carry a notebook around to jot down something.

So you don't forget it.

And it was filled with aphorisms and proverbs,

mostly in English, but some in French, one or two in Greek.

And Spedding doesn't mention it.

And he doesn't even really publish it.

But word gets out and other people get a hold of it.

And they find that there are hundreds of direct parallels

to the Shakespeare plays, like word for word, line for line.

These lines are in the plays.

And it's really, really remarkable.

Some of the most famous lines in all of Shakespeare

are in the Promise notebook, like To Thine Own Self Be True

and All's Well that ends well.

And the first woman who wrote about it,

an early Baconian, Constance Pot, claimed there were

over 1,000 direct parallels.

But later, a man named, what's his name?

JB, something he wrote a book called The Bacon Shakespeare

Question.

He was a lawyer.

He wrote this enormous book that's so patient and detailed

and he went through the entire promise.

And he knows the plays really well.

And he claims there's 600 direct parallels

from the Promise notebook to the Shakespeare plays.

And that's just one little bit of his evidence.

But it's really a remarkable or remarkable document.

And it's in Francis Bacon's handwriting.

There's no dispute about that.

Everybody knows what his handwriting looks like.

That's his handwriting.

And it was a notebook that he kept for only one year.

So the theory is he had a dozen or more of these notebooks.

And there you go.

It's just nothing else really compares to that for any other

candidate.

Because now, of course, people put up alternative candidates.

And of course, the Earl of Oxford, 17th Earl of Oxford,

is number one at the moment.

And the last great book that was written on the Shakespeare

authorship question by Elizabeth Winkler called Shakespeare

was a woman and other heresies.

It just came out about three years ago.

Because there's a couple of women in there,

Amelia Bassano and Philip Sidney's sister.

And she, of course, covered Bacon.

But she'd left out the promise notebook, like the key evidence.

I think she covered the Northampton, the Northumberland document.

But I actually met her at a book signing and I told her,

you left out the promise notebook.

She goes, I did?

I thought I put it in there.

Because she's an Oxfordian.

She won't admit to it.

But people have a crush on the Earl of Oxford because he was a bad boy.

And they want their poets and playwrights to be bad boys and wild men.

Or Bacon says, you know, he's a stuffy insider lawyer, attorney general.

It'd be like finding out, you know,

Ed Meece, this is probably before your time,

but an American, famous American jerk Nazi Vietnam guy.

Edwin Meece, I might even be getting this wrong, was Bob Dylan.

You know, the greatest poet of America was secretly the attorney general

and advocating for, you know, dropping napalm on the Vietnamese.

They can't handle it because they love Shakespeare so much.

They love Shakespeare.

But hold on.

Hang on, let's just take a commercial break there.

Bob Dylan has written some great music.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's your favorite?

Oh gosh, I don't know.

I'm a Dylan nut.

I'm supposed to be some Ghana way out of here.

There you go.

I think that's my favorite, but, but not his version.

I actually prefer Jimmy Hendrix's version.

Yeah, that's one of the rare covers better than the original.

That's, that's a whole, that's a whole podcast right there.

Covers better than original.

But the original is amazing.

The harmonica on that song, he plays.

No.

No.

Yeah, I can.

No, he was listening to it again.

Oh, he still is.

He still is a rubbish singer.

And, and the other one that he wrote that was covered by the birds.

For every season, turn, turn, turn, what was that song?

No, that's Pete Seeger.

Oh, I beg your pardon.

Mr. Tambering, man.

Yeah, Mr. Tambering, man.

That's it.

Very good.

Yeah.

I mean, just go and listen.

Just go and listen to Bob Dylan singing.

He did it on purpose.

That's what's really weird is he did it on purpose.

You know what I like about him, though.

I love that he has never explained his music.

He's never explained it.

He's never filled out.

Yeah, he never filled out.

He's never gone to the Grammys or whatever.

I never got a Grammy.

But he's been invited and he doesn't go.

He did.

He did finally go.

And there's a great performance.

I did.

And then he turns Christian.

He turns hardcore Bornegan Christian.

What?

In 1979 at the height of the liberty, you know, end of the hippie thing.

He's suddenly a Bornegan Christian.

And he goes to the Grammys and he plays, you've got to serve somebody.

It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you've got to serve somebody.

It just throws it right in their face.

And he writes these two really hardcore Bornegan Christian albums.

Like, Jesus is the same as old Jesus with this amazing band.

Amazing band, you know, these great black women singing back up.

And this incredible guitarist.

And then the third one, it's called Shot of Love.

It's the third Christian album.

And you can see he's coming out of it.

And to, you know, back into the secular world, there's some mixture of more secular songs.

But the first two are all hardcore Bornegan Christian albums.

Just blew everybody's mind.

And he still stands by those songs.

He still sings some of them.

And he just re-released an album a couple years ago of those songs live.

I don't have it.

It's an amazing band.

You can see it all on YouTube.

And you can find that performance, the Grammy performance of God has served somebody.

So they finally did let him in, because it was just too undeniable.

And they gave him the Nobel Prize, which, of course, the Nobel Prize doesn't mean anything anymore.

No.

I mean, Obama got it.

And not Tom Wonger.

And not Tom Wonger.

Yeah, Tom Wonger wants the Peace Prize.

I'm pretty sure it's been politicized too, anyway.

But going back to Shakespeare, another thing that is actually quite obvious is today we've got the Internet.

But in the 1500s, right, to have knowledge that goes outside of your hometown would have required traveling or talking to people.

And Shakespeare didn't have much of that either.

Now, he never left the country.

You couldn't leave the country without permission from the Queen or someone next to the Queen.

So it would have been known if he left the country.

But he had a lot of knowledge about what was going on in the world.

Oh, he knew all about Italy.

He knew about France.

He had an enormous amount of knowledge.

He knew details of the history of ancient Rome and ancient Greece.

Like extraordinary, extraordinary amounts of knowledge.

To this day, scholars are writing about Shakespeare.

I just looked it up the other day.

I'm shocked.

Peer reviewed academic journals about Shakespeare.

I think I saw ten on just the first page.

There's books coming out all the time.

There have to be like a million books written about Shakespeare plays.

And then their scholarship about the scholarship.

Because there's almost 400 years of writing about these plays.

So people write about the history of what people have thought about the plays,

which is where I come in.

Because I find these things in the plays that I can't believe that are really dark and disturbing.

And I have to wonder like who else saw this.

So I'm coming through sometimes, you know, a couple centuries of criticism of Shakespeare.

Which interesting, this is an interesting thing I've learned,

is that Harvard didn't have an English department until like 1870, 1875.

So people didn't actually discuss English literature in America until the late 1800s.

So there wasn't a lot of concern about it.

But that's about when it exploded.

That's when the controversy really exploded.

When people started to study the plays and notice, these aren't just wild stories.

Emotionally charged or historically oriented stories.

These are like super dense.

What's going on here?

And you know, the articles and books started coming out.

And this incredible praise started to develop for this writer,

because it's just so incredible what's in these plays.

Oh my God.

And right around that time people started questioning, well, then this guy from Stratford couldn't have written these plays.

He didn't even own a single book.

His children were illiterate.

It's impossible.

But the notion of who had written them was so solidly entrenched that most people,

certainly in academia, and certainly in Stratford where there's a billion dollar tourist industry,

would never admit that an incredible hoax had been pulled.

And as Mark Twain said, it's easier to fool someone and to convince someone they've been fooled.

There you go.

It's just really hard to let go.

Because people literally worship this man, Shakespeare.

They turned him into a religion.

And part of my work is to show that.

Which is pretty easy to show.

In fact, it's called Bartolatry.

And some books have been written about that recently.

They literally made a religion out of Shakespeare and a kind of a worship of him.

That, in my opinion, created a sense of destiny for the English people.

Like if this nobody from Stratford, this son of the soil, could become one of the greatest poets of all time,

like up there with Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, like we are a great people.

There is a great destiny for us.

You know, we need to anglicize the world.

And they did.

And it worked.

And I can tie that whole idea to Francis Bacon.

So the hoax wasn't just a fun thing.

Let's write some plays.

Let's have some fun.

Which they did have.

They had a blast doing this.

Because they must have rehearsed them.

And you know, they all have mansions.

And they all had their own acting troops.

Like I said, people with their bands.

You know, these all these rich actors with their rock bands.

They all had their own acting troops.

And they must have had a blast.

But it wasn't just for fun.

There was an ulterior motive, a deep meaning to these plays that exists on multiple levels.

What's new and what's incredible is that it's taken 300, 400 years for this to be understood.

But there's an enormous amount of free masonry and alchemy in the plays.

And that wasn't noticed.

The earliest book I can find that discusses the alchemy in Shakespeare's from like 1989.

Now it's like everybody's talking about the alchemy in Shakespeare.

An alchemy was a very weird pursuit.

You know, another huge topic.

So I was taking me so long to write the book because now I got to learn about alchemy.

But I mean, alchemy isn't necessarily a bad thing.

No, it's not.

But it's also used, you know, for power.

There's a hidden language.

There's an occult language.

And Bacon, everyone knows, turned alchemy into modern science.

And he did it for power.

His most famous quote is knowledge is power.

And he saw what could be done with a practical science.

And that's why he didn't like Plato and Aristotle.

Because the Greeks, they had all this amazing knowledge and mathematical knowledge and engineering skill.

But how did Bacon benefit ultimately from all of this?

He didn't.

His benefit was to build an empire.

That's what he wanted to do.

And, you know, he lived well.

And he wrote, and it's what he wanted to do.

He wanted to do literary work.

He told his uncle, the second most powerful person in the kingdom.

Like, I don't want to be a lawyer.

His uncle said, get back in school, buddy.

He didn't want to be a lawyer, but he did.

And he could learn it quickly.

And he knew it well.

And I'm sure he could have been one of the greatest lawyers of all time.

He considered one of the greatest lawyers in English history.

But he, you know, he didn't really dedicate himself to it.

Although he did become Attorney General and Lord Chancellor.

But, I mean, okay, so another way of asking the question is,

then would Shakespeare have been a hobby for him?

No, it was much more than a hobby.

It was much more than a hobby.

He was very, very dedicated to it.

And the plays are really, really profound.

I mean, I think he must have written plays earlier than he accepted canon

because they're so polished.

Well, let's go ahead.

I mean, let's look at the obvious ones, like Romeo and Juliet.

Oh, my God.

I mean, that's the most famous, probably.

There's a few that are contend for being the most famous.

And it's hard to decide what is most famous.

Like for intellectuals at Hamlet, you know, for kids, it's Romeo and Juliet.

Worldwide, it might be Macbeth, because it's so short and easy to understand.

And, you know, Grizzly and, you know, raises the hair on your back.

How would Shakespeare have known about Teopatra, for example?

Yeah, he couldn't have.

He couldn't have.

He would have needed access to multiple books in ancient Greek

that weren't available to him.

Very few people had access to those books.

Only the very, very wealthy in the, you know, the...

I guess you maybe could have got them at the two or three universities

in England at the time.

Yeah, they were very hard to come by.

It's really one of the key elements of the hoax

and why Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays.

And the hardcore strat for audience will say, I don't care how he got the books.

He got the books.

Some people say, oh, he read them in the bookstalls in St. Paul's Churchyard.

Right.

He read these dense books in ancient Greece standing by a bookstall.

You know, memorize them and put them in the plays.

No, it doesn't work like that.

And they just won't accept it.

And that's one of the things that's great about Elizabeth Winkler's book.

I'm plugging her book twice.

Is that she goes to the belly of the beast.

And she gets an interview with this guy named Stanley Wells,

who's the number one strat forwardian.

I think he runs the Shakespeare birthplace trust and stratford.

And she pegs him.

He tried to avoid the meeting.

He tried to get out of it, but she gets him face to face.

And she makes him look like a fool, like why he won't confront the obvious.

And she does that to some major Shakespeare scholars too.

Like, why don't you care who wrote the plays?

Because they'll acknowledge that, yeah, it's kind of weird this thing with Shakespeare, how do you know?

But I don't care.

The work speaks for itself.

But that's not true.

Biography always informs every work of art.

And that's why we're obsessed by the artists that we love.

And books get written about their biographies.

And that goes into interpreting the work.

And Shakespeare scholars are constantly doing that.

Like, oh, the work's your lad.

Must have learned about this from this.

And they'll try to tie, you know, that Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet as part of Hamlet.

In fact, there's a movie out right now called Hamnet,

which is about his son that died, inspiring the play Hamlet,

which has nothing to do with having a son at all.

It's so ridiculous.

And they'll just ignore it.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

I don't want to talk about it.

Would Francis Bacon have been the only writer?

No, there was a group.

It had to be a group.

There were so many brilliant writers.

And Bacon was smart enough that say, OK, I want to make something astonishing.

I want to make something that lasts for all time, like Homer did.

And he'd mention that all the time, that empires fall, but books last.

I have every comma.

Well, commas didn't exist.

But I have every letter of Homer for the same for 2,000 years.

And all that stuff has gone.

And the book survived.

And it even says in the sonnets, this my immortal line,

or something, or these words will last forever.

He needed them to be that great that people would pour over them

and marvel at the genius of these works.

So he would bring in people because he was an agent of espionage.

He knew how to make something work.

And he needed other writers.

And they were right there.

He knew them and talked to them, especially Ben Johnson,

who's a brilliant writer, and who appears to have helped cement the hoax,

which is what's called the first folio, the most influential secular book of all time,

according to Wikipedia, where they put all 36 plays together in one book.

Seven years after Shakespeare, the man from Stratford died,

Shakespeare died, and three years before Francis Bacon died,

the first folio came out.

And Ben Johnson is the one who really perpetuates the hoax

because he was a famous playwright, and people did know him.

And he's all over the first folio, calling Shakespeare, you know,

a one for the ages, or this wonderful Shakespeare, and he wrote two poems.

And that legitimized Shakespeare because nobody else ever mentioned him as a writer.

Nobody ever mentioned him once while he was living as a writer.

So he's been dead for seven years when this book of plays comes out.

And that created the hoax.

And Bacon would have brought in other writers.

I mean, especially for some of the scenes with women, he didn't like women.

He had real mommy issues.

And he would have brought in women to like flesh out the women.

He would have brought in people that knew about war, to flesh out the war scenes.

And plays are typically, can be typically written by multiple hands.

And they go through a development process while you're acting them out.

You know, you watch a performance, you go rewrite it, you go, that character's little thin.

You help me with flesh out this character.

And let's get Mary Shelley in here to help with this portrayal of Cleopatra or whatever.

So yeah, no problem.

And when the first folio came out, 18 of the plays had never been published.

I think 18 or some number of plays had never even been heard of.

So they had a lot of time to rejigger everything and put it into the shape that we find it today.

In a poetic way, this is kind of like a Shakespearean tragedy.

Yeah, it's totally Shakespearean.

There's always disguises and false identities and hoaxes and traps.

It's absolutely. He was a spy through and through.

And this is what most of the Beaconians miss.

But Bacon helped create MI5 and MI6.

And all the propaganda we see today in entertainment that's connected to the CIA,

can trace right back to Bacon because everybody knows the British intelligence created the CIA.

And these techniques were being used in Elizabethan England.

And even the nasty stuff with the little boys was happening back then.

And like we say is happening in Hollywood now and coming out to the fore with Epstein and stuff,

it was going on back then.

It was a part of the process.

It's really remarkable. The whole thing. It's mind blowing.

Speaking of tragedies, I don't know why, but doing this conversation,

I was thinking about the verb and the disaster that happened with them and but a sweet symphony.

Do you remember that?

I do. It's a great song. I don't know anything about the band though.

Well, I mean in 1997, I think that song came out as one of the greatest songs I think of all time.

Yeah, that's great.

And they used like a super cryptic sample of something from the Rolling Stones,

which they themselves also used from some song from the 70s or something.

I mean, it's so cryptic that you would not even hear it.

And they nonetheless got permission to use this.

It's part of that main hook and then they got sued by the Rolling Stones.

And the verb lost that case and all the royalties and rights of that song got handed over to the Stones.

No way. And they lost all their money.

And the song was used in that movie crew intentions and they made no money from that.

Obviously, Super Bowl, everything. For 22 years, I think.

And I think it was like in 2018 or 2019 when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

decided to make some deal and give the rights back to the verb.

But I mean, by that stage, it's gone. It's broken. The band, the band was destroyed and they made no money.

How's that for a tragedy, Shakespearean?

That's awful. More reasons to hate Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, unbelievable.

Did you not know that?

I never heard that story.

Oh, and by the way, they were not allowed to even play that.

So in other words, they lost the rights and they couldn't play it on stage.

And Richard Ashcroft, I think he played it for the first time, like in the late...

Well, what do you call it? The 20 teens or whatever you call that?

I can even see the video. The video was pretty good.

It was outstanding. He just was walking and knocking people over.

Yeah, great video too, which are rare. Great videos.

Did Shakespeare make money from this?

There's no evidence he did accept under the table.

Did he know, actually, hold on, hold on. Let's start there. Did he know that his name was being used?

Yes, he must have.

But did he not...

Was he not present at the theatre?

There's different opinions on that.

I think the majority is that yes, he was and he knew how to keep his mouth shut.

And like I said, nobody really cared who was the writer.

But the people in the acting company must have known, because they're these extraordinarily erudite, dense plays.

And this kind of clownish figure, who was probably a wit.

And you know, could think on his feet, could never have written this stuff.

So they would have probably been told, listen, just keep your mouth shut.

The person who wrote this doesn't want a single word breed about it.

And you know, they'd lop off your ear if you, you know, if you broke a command from the queen.

The queen definitely knew William Cecil knew, Francis Walson knew.

They all had their own theatre troops. They all knew. The higher ups knew.

But it was a state secret.

And why, why expose it? What would you get from exposing something like that?

You would get nothing. You would get in big trouble.

And to be in on the secret would have been really cool.

And it was just for fun.

So yeah, I'm just keep her mouth shut. Who cares?

The actors were all getting paid. The theatre owners were getting paid.

People did kind of like the plays. There's, you know, the jury's really out on that.

I mean, these are not plays much for commoners, although some of them were.

Some of them are extremely bloody and violent, you know, like Macbeth or Titus Centronicus.

Some of them were very patriotic.

And that was the whole purpose at that time was to make them patriotic.

And they're extraordinarily patriotic.

The King John has that famous speech about this scepter dial, this shining island in the silver sea.

You know, this land of heroes and gods just like really stirs you up.

I mean, the poetry is amazing.

So all those history plays are very martial.

They're very nationalistic. They really build up the English.

And especially that Richard III was one of the very earliest plays printed and performed

that makes the tutors look like they saved England.

That the tutor line was sent by God to save England and get England, you know, out into the world.

It's extraordinary.

It's so ham-fisted and obvious by today's standards.

But Richard III, the evil king, just like a car crash, you can't help but be fascinated by it.

And he shows Richard III manipulate the entire court and become king through skullduggery and treachery and murder and lies.

It's just like the most horrible creature ever to be saved by Henry VII.

Henry Tudor, the star of the Tudor dynasty, kills him at the Battle of Bosworth and all as well.

Well, it's so ham-fisted, it's so over-the-top, it's so disney, but it worked and it still works.

And they found recently the bones of Richard III because a bunch of conspiracy theorists got together and were saying,

like, you know, Richard III, I think he was actually a good guy.

And now they're saying, oh, really? Doubt Shakespeare?

You're saying Shakespeare wasn't correct.

And turns out, yeah, Shakespeare lied. Shakespeare painted Richard III as one of the vileist criminals in all of history and he was actually a pretty decent guy.

And he had the crown stolen by him, by Henry Tudor, who turns out to be...

It was pure propaganda and I have a whole essay written on the birth of propaganda.

It's one of the podcast episodes. It's the birth of modern propaganda and it worked.

And anybody that wants to know about this, I highly recommend a feature film from England called The Lost King,

the story of the conspiracy theorist who literally found the bones of Richard III, unceremoniously tossed, you know, in a grave.

And it's credible, true story. And it exposes the Shakespeare hoax.

Do you think France's bacon was a good guy?

No. No, I think he was evil. I think he was really, really evil.

An extraordinary mind. And Shakespeare was just a porn.

Yeah. Yeah, Shakespeare. Yeah, Shakespeare was kind of a low life.

He would sue people for like a few shillings. He would drag them into court.

Yeah, he was a low life. You know, he gave his wife the second best bed.

He seemed to have no real human concern. He just wanted money. He just wanted...

But did he make a lot of money, do you think?

He did because he got that stake. He bought that house and then he dealt in wool and grain.

There's even evidence that he hoarded grain during a famine.

That's the kind of guy he was. That's in all the books. Like that's one thing we know about him.

He didn't own any books, but he hoarded grain during a famine.

Does that sound like the guy who wrote?

Dense, learned plays. He's hoarded grain.

But all the Shakespeare scholars admit that.

They admit that, yep. Our guy hoarded grain during a famine.

But he also wrote Romeo and Juliet.

So goofy.

Yes, a quote by Mark Twain.

To write with powerful effect, he must write out the life he has led as the bacon when he wrote Shakespeare.

Good one, man. That's a good one.

Yep, he wrote his life. Those stories are Bacon's life to a large degree.

And they find references to the court, you know, to the queens and the aristocrats in the plays.

And all that double dealing, every Shakespeare play has a spine.

It has someone lurking behind the curtains.

Has fake letters, deceptions, ruses, spying, nationalism, war mongering.

They're really dark. Their plays are really dark.

They leave you with a pit in your stomach. They're awful.

They're really, really awful.

I think Macbeth's not a play about evil. It's literally an evil play.

It's so dark and you cannot criticize Shakespeare.

I found one person, Leo Tolstoy, who really rips Shakespeare apart.

That's it.

If Shakespeare did it, it's correct and it's good.

It's really, really weird.

Well, let's do the final act.

Okay, that's fine.

How can I follow your work?

The best place is the website, TheHiddenLifeIsBest.com.

And everything's there in links to all the podcast episodes and all the essays is there.

If you sign up at Substack, The Hidden Life is Best, or Patreon, The Hidden Life is Best,

you get access to stuff that's behind a paywall, which is some of the podcast episodes,

some of the deeper stuff, like there's a long, high-recommended episode on Romeo and Juliet

that's really shocking, like what I found in Romeo and Juliet.

But there's also an essay on that, if you want to just read the essay.

But stuff on Macbeth, The Tempest, is mind-blowing.

Julius Caesar, I did a lot of stuff on, though not as much as The Tempest.

It's really, really fascinating.

If you're at all into Shakespeare, check it out.

If you're into the history of the British Empire, check it out.

But also, it appears that Francis Bacon was the prime mover of the Rosa Crucian movement

and the Freemason.

So if you're at all into Freemasonry, check it out, TheHiddenLifeIsBest.com.

Up next, who really wrote and drew asterix and obliques?

Whoa, we're getting deep, man.

Robert Frederick, thank you for joining me in the Drenches.

Jeremy's been a blast. Thanks so much.

Tyler Redic here from 2311 Racing.

Victory Lane?

Yeah, it's even better with Chamba by my side.

Race to ChambaCasino.com.

Let's Chamba.

No purchase necessary.

VTW Group, voidware prohibited by law.

CTNCs, 21 plus.

Sponsored by Chamba Casino.