Oxford Mania

Any psychologists out there care to help me?

I'm wondering whether there's already a name for it - Something-or-other Syndrome - or whether we might actually be in a position to identify a previously uncategorised condition and give it a name ourselves.

Let me explain.

My wife, the Adorable Kim, sent me a link yesterday to the Spectator blog.  She drew my attention, in particular, to the comments beneath the post.

First, the post itself, which was titled - with breath-taking insouciance - Shakespeare was a nom de plume - get over it.  The author claimed to have found the smoking gun, that one clinching piece of evidence that people knew, even as far back as 1595, that Shakespeare wasn't really Shakespeare.  He provides a photo (above) of a detail from a page of William Covell's Polimanteia where, in the margin, we see a note:

All praise worthy. Lucrecia. Sweet Shakspeare.

But no.  That's not relevant.  Because, to the side of that, in the main text, Covell writes about Samuel Daniel's Delia sonnets and his Cleopatra, remarking that -

"Oxford thou maist extoll thy courte-deare-verse happie Daniell"

Now, to the casual eye, this is a harmless enough piece.  Covell, a clergyman from Cambridge, notes that Samuel Daniel, who was educated at Oxford, could be admired and extolled by his old university.  Daniel was, in Covell's words, "court-dear-verse happy", which appears to suggest that his poetry pleased the royal court of Queen Elizabeth.  Meanwhile, in the margin, Covell adds "All praiseworthy" (probably in regard to Samuel Daniel) and then "Lucrecia Sweet Shakspeare", on the grounds that Daniel's Delia sonnets and his Cleopatra were published roundabout the same time as Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece.

But maybe our eyes are too casual.  Because to the conspiracy nuts, that small snippet is PROOF that "Shakespeare" was really Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

See - beside the margin note (Sweet Shakspeare) we have the word "Oxford".  See?  And after Oxford we get the words "courte-deare-verse", which is OBVIOUSLY a clue, isn't it?  Can't you see it?  It says "Our De Vere"!

Or rather, it doesn't.

Now, if you click on the link to the Spectator blog, you'll see that this spectacularly irrelevant sample of conspiracy-fail is bigged up to the nth degree.  All us Stratfordians (i.e., those of us who pay attention to what people actually said about Shakespeare back in his day) are illiterate morons in the pay of dark forces determined to maintain a 400-year old fraud.

It gets worse when you look at the comments, and the unseemly slanging match of insult and aspersion.  My particular favourite - our whatever the opposite of "favourite" is - is this comment:

"Hopeless? Trying to fit a commoner - a petty thief from Stratford - into some supremely advantaged individual possessing rights of equality with a peer as published in quarto dedications. - The temerity of this commoner might be unique?
That he could influence English arts and culture and history by some kind of osmosis witht native fauna? - Are you for real?
First tell us the kind of excellence you seek in the defense of this Dumbness. Perhaps during those hard times you see Stratford men as a case for socioeconomic blindness? You see your literary comparatives defend - what? The poetry from the Stratford man's childhood?
Give us some merit to follow in at least a few of your arguments."

Setting aside the fact that the argument here is difficult to follow ("word salad", anyone?) let's be honest: the comment comes from someone who just hates William Shakespeare.  He was a "commoner" (ooh, steady on, old chap) and a "petty thief from Stratford" (evidence?  Oh yes, he supposedly poached a deer - see my book, where I deal with that).  So how could he possibly have possessed "rights of equality with a peer"? (that's an old argument, and shows a blind ignorance of what life was like in Shakespeare's day.  Ever heard of Ben Jonson?)

An astonishing outburst, which is a good 200-odd years out of date.  But then, something tells me that the individual who left this comment happens to believe that titled lords are the biz!  Please, bring back the aristocracy - they're the only people who can string a sentence together, and who deserve to be immortal and to "influence English arts and culture and history".  The rest of us are just trash living in our own middens.  Please, won't some grand Earl come along and show us the way, for we are mere scum?!

Nonsense.  Absolute nonsense.

There is no smoking gun.  There is NO evidence that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays,. and PLENTY of evidence that he did.  There is NO evidence that somebody else wrote them for him.  It is a silly story.

And yet, a certain kind of person clings to it with a kind of religious devotion ("Dear Lord [Oxford], give me the strength to serve you here in the midst of idolatry and evil ...").  That's what it's like.  A kind of religious mania ("Protect us, Lord Oxford; we who are persecuted for thy sake by the blind and the ignorant who have erected a commoner in thy place ...").

Look around, though, and you'll find many examples of such wayward extremism these days.  Climate Change Denial?  Check.  UKIP supporters?  Check.  People who don't like wind farms?  Check.  The Tea Party?  Check.  Etcetera, etcetera ...

They all use the same methods.  Weird claims, based on a fundamental refusal to read the evidence and a crazy belief in "smoking guns", coupled with outright abuse directed at anybody who challenges them.

Standards of debate are slipping.  Why?  Because these people never give in (it's a form of religious mania, remember).  You can beat them 100 times in a fair and open debate, and they'll just keep coming back with insults and wild, abusive, hysterical claims.  They are the only ones who know "The Truth", so be damned with you, and your evidence, and your facts.

So - any psychologists out there care to help me define this strange syndrome?  There seems to be something millenarian about it, as if the End of the World were nigh and we must all repent our sinful ways (admiring a commoner - you fools, you'll all burn in Hell!)  Can anyone in the know help me to put a name to this outrageous behaviour, this determination to shout down anyone with the facts at their disposal, this refusal to see things as they are?

What makes somebody leap to such an extreme?  What is their major malfunction?

And how do we stop them infecting the ether with their insanity?

Get in touch if you think you can help.

The Shakespeare Deniers

I was recently sent an electronic document - quite a large one, in fact.  The author had deconstructed the entire sequence of Shakespeare's Sonnets (in reverse order!) with the determined intention of proving that they were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (pictured).

Oxford is not the sole candidate for the enviable role of the "real" William Shakespeare, but he is certainly the front runner.  The point, though, is why should we even consider the possibility that a man who died in 1604 - twelve years before the death of Shakespeare - was the true author of the plays and poems we attribute to Shakespeare?

Let me first of all state that I have some sympathy with the conspiracy theorists who propose that Oxford (or one of fifty-or-so other candidates) actually did all the hard work, for which William Shakespeare took the credit.

I have some sympathy because the standard biography of Shakespeare is so woefully inadequate.  There does seem to be a disconnect between the picture of William Shakespeare presented by so many of his biographers and the genius behind the Complete Works.

However, it's one thing to suspect that the Shakespeare of countless biographies might not have been up to the task of creating some of the world's finest works of literature.  It's another thing altogether to leap to the conclusion that somebody else must have written them.  Such a wild leap in the dark overlooks a far more obvious, and more realistic, interpretation - that the standard biography of Shakespeare is grossly misleading.

Or, in other words, Shakespeare wrote the works of Shakespeare.  But the Shakespeare we're told about wasn't who Shakespeare really was.

The history of Shakespeare denial is long and far from honourable.  We can trace it back to Rev. James Wilmot, who left London and moved to Barton-on-the-Heath, near Stratford, in the late 18th century.  He began to have concerns about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, wondering (in 1785) how the humbly-born Shakespeare of Stratford could have mingled so freely with the great and the good.  Clearly, it was impossible - and so somebody else must have been the real Shakespeare.

English society had changed a great deal between Shakespeare's and Wilmot's day.  The aristocracy had distanced itself from the peasantry, and to Rev. Wilmot the very idea that a middle-class lad could become friends with lords and ladies was unthinkable.

But let's consider this: Ben Jonson was more humbly-born than Shakespeare.  He went to Westminster School, but did not finish his education.  He became a bricklayer instead (although he hated it, and it haunted him for the rest of his days).  He attended neither of the universities.  And yet, Jonson freely mixed with the aristocracy, had various aristocratic patrons, lodged with a cousin of the king and became Britain's first (unofficial) Poet Laureate.

Going by Rev. Wilmot's logic, none of that was possible, and so Ben Jonson cannot have been Ben Jonson.  Somebody else must have written the plays, poems and court masques, for which Jonson took all the credit.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever made that suggestion about Ben Jonson.  We don't seem to mind the fact that he - an overweight, alcoholic bully - could have made the journey from obscurity to celebrity and enjoyed the patronage of lords and ladies.  So why do we assume that Shakespeare could not have done so?

In fact, Shakespeare's dealings with the aristocracy were fairly limited, in comparison with Jonson's.  The only patron we know of, where Shakespeare is concerned, was the teenage Earl of Southampton, who came from a Catholic family.  Shakespeare dedicated two long poems to him (in 1593 and 1594) and appears to have written a number of sonnets to the young earl.  But it was not a notably long association, and it does not seem to have survived Southampton's coming-of-age.

So the theory that Shakespeare couldn't have been Shakespeare because he lacked the appropriate social standing is utter nonsense.  Poets had aristocratic patrons; they hung around noble households.  What seems surprising about Shakespeare is that he kept his contacts with the nobility to a minimum.

The real issue, when it comes to the various "Alternative Authorship" theories, is something else.  It starts from a desire to make Shakespeare - the best writer we've ever had - into something that he wasn't: an aristocrat.  Behind this lies a very strange assumption - that only those of noble birth are capable of marvellous things.  Realistically, we know that to be untrue.  But not everybody has reconciled themselves to democracy, and there are still plenty of people out there who harbour the delusions of an earlier age.  And, if you believe that blue blood is inherently better than any other kind, it will follow that you want to claim Shakespeare for the ruling elite.

So the denialists start out with a fundamental belief (the aristocracy are universally brilliant; everyone else is an idiot) which they then seek to prove.  We call this sort of thing "confirmation bias".  You start out with a theory and then bend the evidence to suit it.

Sir Derek Jacobi - one of the more consistent anti-Stratfordian voices - once claimed that there is absolutely no evidence that Shakespeare wrote the plays.  Well, you can make that claim if you decide to exclude every bit of evidence that he did.  But you have to ignore the testimonies of Robert Greene (1592), Richard Field (1593/4), Francis Meres (1598), William Jaggard (1599), the students at Cambridge University (1601) and a host of others, including John Fletcher, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson.  Or, rather, you have to conjure up a conspiracy of epic proportions, so that the churchman Francis Meres could praise both Oxford and Shakespeare in his Palladis Tamia without realising that they were (allegedly) one and the same, and Ben Jonson could collude in a ridiculous plot without giving the game away (this is probably the best argument against all the Alternative Authorship theories: Ben Jonson wouldn't not have been able to keep the secret).

Basically, everybody at the time knew that Shakespeare wrote the plays.  It wasn't until more than 150 years after Shakespeare's death that anybody began to imagine that he didn't.  And the basis for that imaginary claim was groundless - it grew out of the refusal to acknowledge the social realities of Shakespeare's time.

But here's the problem.  The Shakespeare denialists are very much like climate sceptics (or "contrarians", as they're sometimes called) or Creationists.  They've started out with a fixed idea based on a kind of blind faith, and nothing will shake their conviction.  No amount of evidence will force them to rethink.  They'll just adapt their theory, regardless of how far from reason and reality they have to travel to accommodate the inconvenient facts.

You can't argue with them, because they made up their minds before they started.  Everything becomes some strange kind of "proof" that they are right (and, consequently, anyone who points to the facts is engaged in the original conspiracy - the reasoning becomes decidedly circular).

It's all incredibly frustrating, because the denialists can lose the argument one hundred times but will still come back claiming that they've won.  Just as with climate sceptics, who get very creative with the facts, they won't give in.  Why should they, you might ask.  Well, for the simple reason that they're absolutely wrong!

There is no evidence - none at all, not a shred - that somebody else wrote Shakespeare's plays.  They were written by William Shakespeare, gent, of Stratford-upon-Avon (although others had a hand in a few of them).  There is no argument about this, and it is facile to pretend that there is.

But the big worry is that the obsessives who want to believe that Shakespeare simply wasn't posh enough to be Shakespeare will keep misleading the public.  If we're honest, there isn't a debate.  There are a few loud voices continually trying to shout down the experts.  There is, as it were, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

These people are trying to drag us back to a past which we ought to have got rid of.  No one in their right minds believes that only aristocrats can write well.  So let's be honest: nobody in their right minds believes that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays of Shakespeare (including those plays which were written after Oxford's death).  It is a kind of madness to imagine that he did, and it's a madness we could all do without.

Please, devote your energies to researching who William Shakespeare really was, because that's where the Stratfordians have let us all down.  But don't take the lunatic view that Shakespeare was "illiterate".  That simply shows that you left your reason at the door when you blundered into the debate.

And stop trying to mislead people.  In my book, that's an unforgivable sin.  Whether it's climate change or who was William Shakespeare - there is no excuse for trying to force people into believing things that are not true.

Keep your madness to yourself, and stop trying to take Shakespeare from us.

How Conspiracies Work

Buoyed by the news that Who Killed William Shakespeare? has sold out its first print-run within two months of publication, I've been wondering what Shakespeare would think if he came back today.

At first glance, you'd imagine he'd be pretty chuffed.  Nearly 400 years on from his death in 1616, he is still far and away the leading figure in his chosen field.  No one comes near him.  Shakespeare is, without doubt, the most famous poet-playwright ever to have walked the planet.

He might find the internet exciting.  He would surely be impressed that the journey from Stratford to London can be done in two hours, as opposed to the two days it took on horseback.

But, to be honest, I think he would be appalled - and certainly very uncomfortable.  After all, it's one thing to be celebrated as the world's greatest dramatist and poet.  It's another thing altogether to be completely misremembered.

The Shakespeare industry is as busy as it ever was.  New books about Shakespeare appear all the time.  And most of them spout unadulterated rubbish about him.

There seem to be, essentially, two sides to the argument.  On the one hand, Will Shakespeare was a humble Warwickshire lad of extraordinary gifts - and, more than anything, humble and self-effacing; he went to London, made his fortune, wowed the Queen and then the King, and then he thought, "Ah well, I've had a good run, time to go home", and he sort of vanished.

The alternative argument goes something like this: That semi-transparent and quite frankly boring individual, better known for grain-dealing in Stratford, could never have been the universal genius who penned those marvellous comedies, histories and tragedies.  So somebody else must have done all the hard work.  William Shakespeare was just a frontman, a cardboard cut-out, undeservedly remembered as the greatest writer in the English language.

Both arguments are fundamentally flawed and - to put it bluntly - stupidly simplistic.  The latter arises from the former.  For as long as the academics, the Shakespeare experts and the tourism industry insist on selling us a see-through Shakespeare, a man who kept himself to himself and wrote entirely from his own imagination, steering well clear of the controversies of his day, there will always be those who cry "Foul!" and demand to know who the real William Shakespeare was.

And, if they happen to be of the all-aristocrats-are-excellent-and-infinitely-better-than-the-rest-of-us school (which dominates so much comment these days), they will insist that Shakespeare must have been an aristocrat - like the Earl of Oxford (who died while Shakespeare was still busily writing plays) or, more crazily, Queen Elizabeth I (ditto).

These are two extreme positions: Shakespeare was just an ordinary bloke, and Shakespeare must have been someone of high social standing.  They are the curse of Shakespeare studies.  Neither standpoint does any credit to William Shakespeare himself.

In a sense, what we are looking at is two sides of a conspiracy theory.  The first - and, apparently, the more innocuous - side claims that Shakespeare was just a patriotic middle-class Englishman; the second argues (quite rightly) that such a Shakespeare is a sham.  But, ultimately, both sides are wrong.

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I examine the circumstances of Will's life and death.  It's been described as a conspiracy theory.  Which it isn't.  The real conspiracy theory continually pours out of Stratford and the cloisters of academe, fiercely countered by the fanatics who want to believe that somebody else altogether was the true genius.

Let us take a moment to consider the similarities between Shakespeare's lifetime and that of Arthur - the first historical Arthur on record, that is; not the silly and mythical King Arthur.

First of all, even though these two individuals lived a thousand years apart, their periods were subject to very similar strains.  In Arthur's day, a foreign religion (Christianity) was taking root at the same time as Germanic settlers were forcibly conquering much of southern Britain, beginning with the eastern side of the country.  In Shakespeare's day, a sort-of foreign religion (Protestantism) had entered the country from Germany, working its way across the land from the eastern counties.  One of the results of the spread of Protestantism was enormous social change.  The old gentry was almost entirely ruined, as Protestant parvenus stole fortunes and scrambled for precedence.

In other words, both in Arthur's day (late-6th century) and Shakespeare's day (late-16th century), a dangerous and disruptive movement was spreading across the country from the east and seeking to destroy and/or seize everything in its path.  The old religion (paganism, first; Catholicism, later) was under concerted and violent attack.  If you adhered to the old form faith and the social order which had obtained before the 'tempest' blew up, you were more or less doomed.

Both Arthur and Shakespeare stood for what could be called the 'true' Britain.  Arthur was no Christian, but there were Christians in his circle.  Shakespeare tried to pose as a Protestant, only to return to the faith of his forefathers when he saw just how vicious and corrupt the regime of Elizabeth I really was.  Neither of them was a fundamentalist, in any meaningful way; rather, they saw that what Britain needed was an end to the religious strife that covered a multitude of sins.  As Shakespeare had John of Gaunt say in Richard II:

"That England that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself."

I believe - and have offered evidence to support my belief - that both Arthur and Shakespeare were treacherously betrayed.  Murdered, to all intents and purposes.  Why?  Because both of them, in their different times, stood in the way of the triumph of Britain's enemies - the greedy, the self-serving, the corrupt, the dishonest, the over-zealous, the cruel and the depraved.

Now, here's where we enter the realms of conspiracy.  And the simple fact is that no conspiracy can succeed if (as is commonly supposed) it comprises just a handful of shady individuals.  Any conspiracy of that kind is likely to fail, or at least to be quickly exposed.

If it had been that simple - if, that is, the premature deaths of both Arthur and Shakespeare, had been brought about by just one or two fanatics - then we would have known the truth for some time.  But I would argue that such a scenario is pretty much the opposite of a conspiracy.

The real conspiracy requires many, many more people to engage in the cover-up.  It needs generations of commentators to collude in the crime.

In the case of Arthur, the treachery stemmed from the early Church - and, one could say, a particular religious establishment set up by one prominent churchman.  In the case of Shakespeare, the treachery stemmed partly from professional rivalry and partly from the paranoia that was loose at the court of King James.

Now, consider this: could future generations, wedded as they were to the cause of Christianity, acknowledge the role played by the early Church in the assassination of Arthur and the destruction of Britain?  Were there own beliefs not essentially the same as the beliefs which led to Arthur's death and the betrayal of Britain to her enemies?

And consider this of Shakespeare: the very people whose devious and bloody-minded behaviour was exposed in his plays ended up running the country.  Protestantism, which provided so many of these ogres with the excuse they needed to rob and slaughter their fellow countrymen, became the official religion of the land.  Future generations of scholars set out to prove that this was an inevitable and desirable process: it's what made Britain great.  And so, if Shakespeare had opposed this very kind of extremism, and his vocal opposition had led to his death, then it was absolutely necessary that the biography of William Shakespeare should be rewritten and the circumstances of his death ignored and forgotten.

The original conspiracies - the murders of Arthur and Shakespeare - required only a few determined and unscrupulous individuals to succeed.  Initially.  After that, though, huge numbers of likeminded people had to play along, to connive in the original crime, to become complicit in the cover-up (for reasons of faith and/or political expediency).  They became accessories after the fact.

It continues to this day.  There are still scholars who spout absolute gibberish about Arthur.  They steadfastly refuse to explore his northern roots.  They get unreasonably angry at the very suggestion that the first Arthur on record might have been the original Arthur.  Why?  Because they are colluding in the conspiracy that led to Arthur's death.  They are studying Arthur purely from the point-of-view of his enemies.  They are happy to continue the cover-up, because their mindsets and belief systems would have led them to participate in the original crime.

The same goes for Shakespeare.  His story is repeatedly written up by his enemies - even though they claim to love and admire him - because they harbour the same set of beliefs, ultimately, as the men who killed him (the one who wielded the weapon, the one who commissioned the crime, and the faction which kept it quiet).  So the conspiracy continues, perpetuated by the very character-type that was involved from the start.  Naturally, these academics cannot tell the truth about Shakespeare.  They might not have been there at the actual assassination, but they can continue to assassinate him by lying about his life, his works, his beliefs and covering up the harsh reality.

That's how conspiracies work.  If it were just a hugger-mugger huddle of plotters, their crimes would soon be exposed.  But it isn't.  It's an ongoing propaganda war.  Those who would have applauded and approved of the crime continue to cover for the criminals.  They misrepresent Arthur and Shakespeare and attack anyone who points to the realities of the time.

So Shakespeare, I believe, would find his visit to today's world a truly depressing experience.  His enemies triumphed.  They continue to tell his story, and to tell it all wrong.

And here's where we should take note.  Conspiracies can only prosper in a society, in a world, where there is sufficient fanaticism for the crimes to be covered up.  We don't all have to wield the knife - only to lie to ourselves and each other about what really happened.  And we do so because our belief systems are so horribly skewed.  We will justify atrocities because our blind prejudices assure us that they were justifiable.

Have you been on Facebook lately?  Read the below-the-line comments beneath any online newspaper story?  Fanaticism is flourishing.

Somewhere out there is today's Arthur, today's Shakespeare.  They will be betrayed and put to death.  And future generations will be none the wiser.  Because there are enough maniacs out there who will happily spread lies in support of their extremist positions.  And that's all that is needed for conspiracies to succeed.

Oxford Marmalade and Smoky Bacon

"Are you the writer?"

Two gentlemen, a father-and-son combo, had come to finish off a bit of work on our patio (ha! you wanna see it: it's not really a patio).  I'd been asleep when they first came because - as my good lady wife explained to them - I had worked through the night.

I confessed that, yes, I am the writer (other writers are, of course, available).

Sure as night follows day: "What sort of things do you write?"

I told them I've got a book on Shakespeare coming out very soon.  To which the son responded, "I heard it was Francis Bacon who wrote the plays."

Not such an isolated incident, as it happens.  I showed a photo of Shakespeare's skull to a friend who happens to be a martial arts expert.  "What's happened to him?" she asked. "Looks like he's been attacked with a machete!"  Yes, it does.  But then she told me that her father had made a bit of a study of Shakespeare and concluded that somebody else wrote the plays - though she couldn't remember who, exactly.

Stratford-upon-Avon is just ten miles away.  And yet a lot of people in these parts seem to doubt that William Shakespeare really was William Shakespeare.

If the locals aren't even sure that Shakespeare wrote his own plays, how bad must things be farther afield - in America, say, where the determination to "prove" that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays of Shakespeare seems to be particularly rampant (Oxford died in 1604; Shakespeare continued to write topical plays until about 1612 - figure that one out).

In the great scheme of things, the belief that someone else wrote Shakespeare's plays ranks with believing that the Earth is flat or that climate change isn't happening.  The astronomer Carl Sagan provided an excellent "Baloney Detection Kit" in The Demon-Haunted World.  Climate sceptics and Shakespeare deniers both practise the arts of Baloney with merry abandon.  But why, oh why, do so many people believe their ludicrous theories?  Why - even right here on Shakespeare's doorstep - do so many people think that Will Shakespeare wasn't the real Shakespeare?

Conspiracy theories flourish where there is a paucity of credible, reliable information.  In the case of climate sceptism, the problem has as much to do with scientific illiteracy (most people don't really understand how science works) as it does with political lobbying and religious extremism.  As for Shakespeare, the problem seems to be that very few people really believe what the experts keep telling us about Shakespeare.

There are perfectly good reasons for this.  The Shakespeare you get in Stratford is marketed at tourists.  It's an image of Shakespeare which has as little to do with the man himself as a picture postcard Cotswold village has to do with real life in the UK.  It's a cosy, processed and packaged, Merrie Englande idea of Shakespeare.  It's not a real person.  It's a reflection of what certain people want England and its Bard to be.

Nurturing and promoting this mythical, fantasy-figure of Shakespeare requires a heavy dose of deception.  Life wasn't like that.  Shakespeare wasn't like that.  England wasn't like that.

And so we get a rather fetching portrait (probably) of Sir Walter Raleigh presented to us as a "new" portrait of Shakespeare.  It's all part of the deception.  Whether we're just flogging this nonsense to the tourists or actively deluding ourselves, the upshot is the same.  "Here's what we want you to think William Shakespeare was - now don't ask any questions."

Is it any wonder, when even Stratford-upon-Avon cannot be relied upon to give us reliable, credible information about Shakespeare, that some people (even here, just 10 miles away) have their doubts?

If they told us the truth about William Shakespeare - his life and times, his family and friends, his hometown, his beliefs, and what an appalling place England was in his days - things might be different.  Then we'd understand who Shakespeare was, and what he was trying to tell us.  And here, I could put in a plug for my forthcoming book (Who Killed William Shakespeare? The Murderer, The Motive, The Means - published this August by The History Press), only I can't be bothered.

But for as long as the Shakespeare scholars continue to promote their self-serving, sanitised idea of Shakespeare, people will go on believing that somebody else wrote the plays.  Because, deep down, most of us have our own Baloney Detection Kits.

The Shakespeare they sell you in Stratford certainly isn't Bacon.  But he is Baloney.