This is Alexander Waugh.
Alexander, you're a leading light in the Shakespeare authorship debate.
You're a senior visiting fellow at the University of Leicester.
And thank you for coming today to be- >> My pleasure.
>> Interviewed on the authorship question.
I'm going to start with,
what got you interested in the Shakespeare authorship question?
>> Shakespearean biographies, as they exist.
Mark Twain memorably said, a Shakespearean biography is a brontosaur
made out of nine bones and 600 barrels of plaster of Paris.
And what he meant by that is actually true,
we know a few facts about Stratford Shakspere, and the rest is in the fill.
And so generally speaking, a biography of Stratford Shakspere is just
filled with the thoughts and ideas of the person who's writing it.
I read The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate, and
one of the, and realized the great hole that was in the story and
felt slightly insulted to be honest.
I felt insulted that, that something was wrong here and
people weren't being open about it.
We have a very extraordinary situation, actually,
which I don't think pertains to any other writer in English,
that everything written about him by his contemporaries is cryptic.
So all of that is avoided in these biographies.
So it really is in the fill, and what we've really got for
facts is he was born here, he was buried there.
Nothing saying that he's a writer.
And I don't want to sound like a prig or anything but I have a driven desire for
the truth.
And I don't care if the truth stings or
if it's painful because in the end the truth is fundamentally boring.
>> [LAUGH] >> But if you hide the truth or
obscure the truth, then there's a pain and unpleasantness that can go down for
generation after generation.
And I've heard people coming to me time and
time again saying does it really matter who wrote Shakespeare?
What does it matter so long as we got the plays?
And my answer to them is always the same.
It matters to a historian.
It's not interesting to me whether you sit in front of the plays and
have a lovely time watching a fellow in ignorance of who wrote it.
It's not interesting.
What's interesting to a historian is that the facts are correct?
And there's no point writing history books, that are full of tosh.
So its a really driven desire to get to the bottom of this.
And I've been working very very intensely at it morning, noon and night.
>> Mm-hm. >> And for six, seven, eight years now.
And I found a lot of things.
>> Yeah, wonderful.
And what for you is the most compelling argument that
Stratford Shakspere didn't write the words of Shakespeare?
>> Wouldn't it be lovely, and I think the whole thing would be over,
if we could all put these things into one simple sentence.
The problem we have, and you're aware of this problem,
is the types of evidence falls into different brackets.
So there's the lack of evidence, for instance,
that nobody said he was a writer at the time.
That's compelling, but it's quite negative.
But when you add it all up, and you look at all his contemporaries, and
how everybody knew they were writers, and nobody needs to argue about it.
It looks a bit embarrassing for Stratford Shake, but that's one part of it.
The second part of the evidence of course,
what contemporaries were saying about him at the time.
And a lot of them, well all of them actually in the 1590s,
right up to about 1620 and beyond, are going nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
It's a pseudonym, don't you know?
And most of them are actually telling you who did it.
But they are always doing it it slightly cryptically.
And then there's Shakespeare himself,
why don't we just start with something Shakespeare himself said?
I mean, he seems to be admitting that he's using a pseudonym, and
that pseudonym is Will.
We know in the sonnets that he wrote 154 sonnets,
number 136 he says, My name is Will.
Now some Stratfordians said, well, that's it, done and dusted.
>> Yeah.
>> As if a great poet like William Shakespeare would write such a useless
line as, my name is Will.
I'm called Derrick, by the way.
That's not a poetic line.
And you only have to read that particular sonnet which is only 14 lines long to
realize that he's being very cryptic.
He says, my name is Will.
And my will, one.
Among a number, one is reckoned none.
Then in the number, let me pass untold.
He's pretty well telling you, there and then, Will equals one, I equals nought.
Let me past untold in that number.
Nice to have the man himself telling us that but once again,
with every piece of evidence we have, it's slightly cryptic.
>> And the problem with poetry more than even other texts is that there are always,
there's always another way of reading it.
There's always an alternative interpretation but that,
it seems to me with the sonnets that that orthodox scholars have struggled
to come up with very good interpretations for them.
And that sometimes the heterodox interpretation like the one you
just gave is actually stronger and
it gives a clearer reading if you allow yourself to take on that perspective.
Do you have another sort of cryptic reference that you like?
>> It frustrates me that all the allusions to Shakespeare are cryptic.
But the wonderful thing about being non-Stratfordian is you can tackle that
crypticness and understand it.
And actually when you realize it is the identity of Shakespeare that's the issue
then you realize that all these cryptic references makes sense.
That we have extraordinary situation where Professor Stanley Wells,
Sir Stanley Wells, top of his tree really as a Stratfordian professor says time and
time again, this reference to Shakspere or Shakespeare, he'll call him, is cryptic.
The monument to Stratford upon Avon it’s cryptic, he says.
A little epigram by Davies of Hereford, he says is very,
very cryptic, he can't claim to understand it.
A reference from from William Covell 1595, cryptic, don't get it.
Well we do get it, because we understand what they're talking about, and
they're talking of the simple fact that Shakespeare isn't who we think he is.
Now there's a man called John Warren who wrote a poem published in 1640,
and it's prefatory poem to Shakespeare's poems published in 1640.
And he's addressing Stratford Shakspere.
And he says something like, lofty, lofty Shakespeare,
how odd it is to see you twice lived.
And he says, the glory, so he says, the labor is his,
the glory is still thy own.
And you have to look back a line to see who his is.
But he's gone and left out two syllables.
This is the game, you see, they're always playing games and
if you're not prepared to play the games, you're not going to learn anything.
All those lines, like so many poems have 10 syllables, but the line before doesn't.
It says, 'tis love that thus to thee is shown.
He's missed out two syllables,
he's missed out the name of the person who’s actually written it.
Tis love that thus to thee is shown.
The labor's his, the glory's still thine own.
Now all you have to do is fill in those two little syllables.
Now the Stratfordeans are totally aware of this problem, totally aware of it.
Stanley Wells in the Oxford edition has just put the word Bensons into there
because he knows there's a missing name.
Benson is the publisher, so he's trying to pretend, oh yes,
Benson did all the work in getting the publishing done.
But don't worry Shakespeare, the glory is still yours even though the labor's his.
>> So he just inserted the name Benson?
>> In the Oxford edition of Shakespeare without a footnote,
saying I've just put that in.
>> Wow.
>> This exists In the 1640 poems.
There is no other source for it and he just put Benson's in.
It's worth looking up, that poem.
Because I think it's one, and they're all cryptic, but
I think this is one of the easiest to understand.
And that's why for instance Chambers in his two volume book of all Shakespeare's
facts and problems, he leaves it out.
because it's too scary.
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