Dr. Ros Barber - Shakespeare Unmasked (Act III: The Case for Marlowe) - PRE-RELEASE
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Greetings from the North, citizens of Earth, welcome.

Tonight we return to our series called Shakespeare Unmasked, which is a sub-series of the greater one called From Solomon's Temple to Arcadia, where we specifically examine the authorship question. And we're going to present the most likely, the most famous contenders, each having his or her own episode.

And today is no exception. We have come to the third act. And here's a teaser for that. Remember how we've been digging into those codes and ciphers hidden in Shakespeare's works? Right. Buckle up, because this time we're taking a different route. This throws a curveball into the Shakespeare authorship question. Okay.

We're zeroing in on a real person this time. Christopher Marlowe. Yeah, the timing of his supposed death in 1593 is just too suspicious. Like right when William Shakespeare pops up as an author, it's a huge deal for anyone who thinks Shakespeare might not have been who he said he was. Okay, I can already tell this is going to be juicy. So for our listeners who are just tuning into the Forum Borealis series, or maybe need a little refresher, can you give us the rundown on this Christopher Marlowe guy? So picture this.

A rock star playwright. That was Marlowe in Elizabethan England. He was born the same year as Shakespeare. Wow. But here's the difference. Marlowe had a documented university education. Oh, fancy. Fancy indeed. And get this. He was connected to the who's who of the time. Powerful people. Even some mixed up in espionage. No way. Oh, yeah. But there's a twist. He was also accused of some pretty serious stuff. Atheism and heresy. Uh-oh.

Not exactly something you'd want to brag about back then. Nope. Definitely not a good look in those days. Okay. So, dangerous accusations. And his death, you mentioned, it was suspicious. What makes scholars question the official story? Well, think about it. The inquest was rushed. Okay. The witnesses, they had questionable reputations linked to, you guessed it, intelligence services. Wow. So, like spies. Exactly. And the

the location of the incident. Don't tell me another government safe house. You got it. Not your average tavern brawl, right? Not at all. This is where it gets really interesting. So we have Marlowe dying under mysterious circumstances and then bam, William Shakespeare enters the scene.

What happened next? Well, get this. Just 12 days after Marlowe supposedly dies, a poem called Venus and Adonis gets registered under the name William Shakespeare. 12 days. Right? You're telling me someone maybe on the run decided to make a new pen name and publish a poem faster than I can finish a crossword puzzle. It's actually a cornerstone of what's called the Marlowvian theory. Okay. And that is? The idea that Christopher Marlowe might be the real brains behind the Shakespearean work. Oh.

There's got to be more to this story. What kind of evidence links Marlowe's writings to Shakespeare's? Now, that's where things get really fascinating.

scholars have found some pretty striking stylistic similarities. And I'm not talking about random overlaps. It's more like an evolution of a distinct voice. So not just a new writer suddenly appearing? Nope. It's like a continuation. So we're talking more than just a coincidence. Yeah. Like maybe some hidden links between Marlowe's known works and what we consider early Shakespeare. Exactly. And if we entertain the idea that Marlowe was actually alive and kicking the whole pseudonym thing, makes perfect sense.

Remember those accusations of heresy and atheism? Not the kind of publicity you want when you're trying to make it big in Elizabethan England. Yeah, a pseudonym would have given him the freedom to write, you know, without constantly looking over his shoulder. Right. And think about it.

He already had connections to the world of espionage. Yeah, you mentioned that. If anyone could disappear and like reinvent themselves. Yeah. Wouldn't it be a spy? It's like something out of a movie. Yeah. A secret agent who's also a playwright living a double life. So where do people think he went if he was in hiding? One popular theory is Italy. Italy, huh? It was like...

the place to be back then for artists and intellectuals, you know. Perfect for a writer to blend in. Plus, think about all those Shakespeare plays set in Italy, Verona, Venice, all the hits. 14 of them, to be exact. And they're not just like name-dropping locations. The level of detail in those plays, like the customs and even the language. Yeah. It suggests someone who really knew Italy.

Right. Not just someone who read about it in a book somewhere. Yeah, exactly. And that's always been a head scratcher for traditional Shakespeare scholars. How could a guy from Stratford-upon-Avon with limited education have such deep knowledge of Italy? Yeah, it's a good question. OK. But if Marlowe was hiding out in Italy, wouldn't someone have recognized him? There had to be some record, some trace of him being there.

Right. Well, that's the million dollar question, isn't it? But remember, this was way before photographs and social media and even widespread literacy. Disappearing was a lot easier back then, especially if you had powerful friends helping you stay off the grid. Yeah, those espionage connections would definitely come in handy. But let's talk about the plays themselves.

Besides the Italian settings, are there any other clues in Shakespeare's works that might point to Marlowe? There are definitely some interesting parallels. For example, a lot of Shakespeare's plays deal with themes of exile, false accusations, hidden identities. Wait a second. That sounds familiar. Right. It's almost like someone was drawing inspiration from their own life experiences. Whoa.

It's like Marlowe is using the stage to work through his own situation. You know, exploring what it means to live a double life. Yeah. And there's another intriguing detail. Shakespeare's plays show a pretty deep understanding of law and legal terminology. Okay.

Now, the traditional Shakespeare, from Stratford upon Avon, there's no evidence he had any legal training. But Marlowe did. He did. He studied law at Cambridge. Some even believe he might have worked as a lawyer for a bit. So that would explain the legal stuff in Shakespeare's place. Makes you think, doesn't it? It really does.

This is fascinating. But I have to ask, if Marlowe was really the one writing these plays, why not just write under his own name? Especially if he was supposedly safe in exile. Uh, some believe he might have planned to reveal his true identity eventually. You know, like leaving behind little hints and codes within his plays. Like, he's challenging us to figure it out.

To uncover the truth. So it's like a giant puzzle he left for future generations. Right. And some researchers think those clues might be more than just literary games. They could be evidence of a bigger conspiracy, maybe involving those same intelligence networks that helped him disappear in the first place. OK, so we've got intrigue.

possible conspiracies, and a playwright who might be living a double life. How can we ever solve this mystery? There are some serious scholars out there doing amazing work. They're going through historical records and the plays themselves with a fine-tooth comb. Looking for clues. Exactly. They're searching for those subtle hints and connections that could either prove or disprove the Marlovian theory.

Like those codes and ciphers we talked about in earlier deep dives? Maybe. You'll have to stay tuned to find out. But let me just say, this has been like a little taste. A teaser? Exactly. Of the kind of evidence and arguments that scholars are wrestling with. So there's way more to come. That's exciting. Okay, here's something to chew on. If Marlow really did fake his death and then wrote as Shakespeare, what does that tell us about the stories we tell ourselves about history?

about authorship, about the very nature of identity. It challenges us to think critically, to question what we think we know, and to be open to the possibility that even the most accepted narratives might have hidden layers just waiting to be uncovered. That's a great point. Yeah. It reminds us that history is full of surprises. Exactly. Keep questioning, keep exploring, and keep those minds open. Now let me present tonight's guest.

Dr. Rosalind Ross Barber, award-winning writer, scholar and therapist. She was born actually in Washington DC to a physician father and a special needs teacher mother. But her family relocated to England during her early years and already in her 20s she became a published poet and a smallholder with beekeeping and poultry management.

Already back in '84, she began her undergraduate studies in biology at the University of Sussex, specializing in evolution theory and genetics. In '87, she graduated with a BSc in biology from the same university,

During the 90s she earned additional degrees including an MA in creative writing, the arts and education and a PhD in English literature all from the University of Sussex. She also completed a BA in English literature and philosophy from the Open University and worked all the while as a computer programmer and systems analyst.

In 1998 she transitioned to a literary career, publishing poetry and pursuing creative writing. In 2004 she published her first poetry collection, How Things Are on Thursday, which was highly regarded for its wit and craftsmanship. In 2005 she released her second poetry collection, Not the Usual Grasses Singing.

In 06, all the way up to 10, she completed her PhD in English literature while working on the side as a trauma therapist. Her doctoral thesis focused on the Marlowian theory of Shakespeare authorship. In 08, she published her third poetry collection, Material, which became...

A Poetry Book Society recommendation. The title poem was later included in the Faber Anthology Poems of the Decade and featured in England's School Sixth Form Syllabus by Seventeen. It is a set text for the Edexcel English Literature A-Level in England and Wales.

And in 11, Dr. Barber was awarded the Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for Distinguished Work on Christopher Marlowe and the Shakespeare Authorship Question. In 12, she published her debut novel, The Marlowe Papers, which incidentally is written in blank verse.

A novel in verse exploring the theory that Christopher Marlowe was the true author of Shakespeare's works. In the book, Marlowe's death is a ruse and he writes plays in Shakespeare's name. The Marlowe Papers won the prestigious Desmond Eliot Prize and the Authors Club First Novel Award.

It was also long-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 13. And Barber made an appearance in 12 at the Brighton Fringe, where she and Nicola Haydn wrote a one-man stage adaption of the Marlowe Papers, which was performed in 16. In 15, she published her second novel, Devotion, a science fiction exploration of love, faith and the boundaries of human understanding.

It was shortlisted for the Encore Award. In 15, she co-authored and edited 32nd Shakespeare, a concise exploration of Shakespeare's life and work. Between 13 and up to date, she has served as a senior lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, teaching creative and critical writing.

In 14 she won the Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for the second time for her contribution to Marlow Scholarship. She became a patron of the Marlow Society, a UK-based organization dedicated to the study of Kit Marlow and his works. In 15 her novel Devotion was released, receiving an Encore Award shortlist.

In 18, Ross received the Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for the third time, showcasing her consistent scholarly excellence in the field of Malovian studies. In the 20s, she created and presented the course Introduction to Who Wrote Shakespeare, reaching a global audience.

while continuing her role as Director of Research at the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, promoting questions about the authorship of Shakespeare's work. In 24, she started also teaching as a workshop facilitator at stresslessorg.uk, teaching rapid stress elimination techniques to C-suite executives to maximize effectiveness and minimize health risks.

Rosalind Barber is frequently featured on BBC radio programs including Front Row, Women's Hour, Freethinking and The Verb. She's delivered talks at notable venues such as Shakespeare's Globe, the London Book Fair and the Shakespeare Festival in Oregon. She's featured on podcasts such as That Shakespeare Life, Don't Quill the Messenger and others.

As you understand, Rosalind is a polymath. She also has comedy training and is a survivor of domestic abuse. She's shared her experience to support others through her writing and public speaking. She was diagnosed with HDAD and prosopagnosia, which is face blindness. Fascinating ailment, I must say. Conditions that she has openly discussed to raise awareness of.

Through her teaching, writing and public appearance, she continues to inspire discussions on creativity, identity and the enduring mysteries of literary history. And you can find everything relevant at her website rossbarber.com Now, before we open the curtains, let us be reminded of who some of the key characters are, so that especially non-Brits can follow the story.

Francis Bacon, 1561 to 1626, also known as Lord Verulam, was a philosopher, scientist and statesman, a key figure in the development of the scientific method. Rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and her close confidant, Earl Robert Dudley, and raised by Sir Nicholas Bacon and Lady Anne Bacon as their biological child.

Francis belonged to the court of both Elizabeth and later James, deeply involved in politics and intellectual life. He was also mentored by John Dee and involved with the Rosicrucian project, leading a new great instauration. His name pops up all over the Shakespearean project, notwithstanding in quotes, and there is much circumstantial evidence to suggest he was involved in its publications.

Anthony Bacon, 1558-1601, the elder brother of Francis, was a diplomat and intel agent during the reign of Elizabeth. Known for his connections to powerful patrons like Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, Anthony played a key role in gathering information for the English court. Ben Johnson, 1572-1637, was an accomplished playwright and poet.

A contemporary and sometimes rival of Shakespeare, known for his sharp wit and satirical works like Volpone, Johnson contributed significantly to the development of English drama. He praised Shakespeare in print and is acknowledged to have known the true authorship of the Shakespearean canon and a key player involved in concealing it.

Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth I, 1533-1603, known as the Virgin Queen. She was the last monarch of the House of Tudor, who oversaw England's golden age of art, exploration and culture. Her court was a hub for poets, playwrights and scholars.

She encouraged theatrical patronage, though her reign also saw censorship and control over controversial ideas. Many consider her reign foundational to the flourishing of the theatre, including Shakespeare's works, and the authorship debate tie her court to alternative candidates like Bacon or Mary Sidney. Indeed, she's even been suspected for being the true author herself.

James Charles Stuart, 1566-1625, was King of Scotland as James VI from 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from 1603. As Elizabeth's successor, he united the crowns of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, thus laying the foundation of the future Great Britain.

His reign also supported theatre and literature. As a scholar and patron of the arts, he authorised the King James Bible, which remains one of the most influential texts in English. Some believe Shakespeare's later works, such as Macbeth, reflect themes of James' rule and interests.

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, 1561-1621, was the sister of Philip Sidney, whom many think was the author. Mary, though, was a celebrated poet, translator and patron of the arts, who created a literary circle that included some of the era's most influential figures.

As a well-educated noblewoman, her contributions to the English literary canon are significant. She is also suggested as a candidate for the authorship, as we explored in the second part of this series. John Dee, 1527-1609, was a polymath, mathematician, astrologer, astronomer, antiquarian, cryptographer, spymaster and alchemist, serving as scientific advisor to Elizabeth and deeply involved

in the study of navigation and occult philosophy. He famously attempted communication with angels, leading to the Enochian alphabet, which has popped up even in UFO lore. Dee is often suspected for being the influence which led to the Rosicrucian project, as well as the Shakespearean project. He advocated the foundation of English colonies in the New World to form a British Empire, a term he is credited with coining.

His reputation as a mystic also gave him unique access to foreign courts where his activities had both scientific and political objectives. As an agent, he signed his correspondence as 007, a cryptic reference later popularized in fiction. His work involved coded messages and esoteric communication as well as diplomatic missions to gather intel, particularly in Poland and the Holy Roman Empire.

Indeed, he probably taught Bacon cryptography, which is infused all over the first folio of Shakespeare. William Cecil, 1st Baron Burley, 1520-1598, was one of the most powerful men in England. Queen Elizabeth's chief advisor for most of her reign, twice Secretary of State and Lord High Treasurer, regarded as the real power behind the throne.

He was by marriage uncle to Bacon and father-in-law to Edward de Vere. Burley's influence is reflected in Shakespeare's portrayal of politically astute characters like Polonius in Hamlet. A staunch supporter of stability and Protestantism, he maintained control over court politics and national policy. He oversaw a highly organized and effective intel network that operated...

to secure the state against internal dissent and foreign threats, especially from Catholic forces. As head of the Privy Council, Burleigh was a strategist and policymaker and relied on Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen's principal secretary, who was the true head of Elizabethan espionage.

Receiving Walsingham's intel reports to make political decisions. Walsingham, managing day-to-day operation, developed sophisticated spy networks of operatives across Europe and his methods included double agents, cryptography and surveillance, intercepting and decoding secret communications and uncovering Catholic conspiracies,

such as the Babington Plot of 1586, which led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and mother of King James. Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, 1563-1612. He is the son of William Cecil, Lord Burleck.

and continued in his father's footsteps and served as Lord High Treasurer and also serving as Elizabeth's Secretary of State and continued in a similar role under King James. Known for his scheming nature, he played a key role in maintaining state security and managing royal propaganda. He was largely despised by the likes of Bacon, De Vere and many others suspected to being involved in the Shakespearean project.

Robert is believed to have inspired various Machiavellian characters in Elizabethan drama. And finally, the star of today's episode, Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593, a playwright and poet involved in espionage known for works like Dr. Faustus and Tom Burlane. His life was cut short under mysterious circumstances, fueling speculation about the staged death and the possibility of his authorship disappearing.

of Shakespearean plays. Marlowe's innovative use of blank verse and dramatic themes heavily influenced Elizabethan drama, notwithstanding the Shakespearean plays. And with that, the scene is set for tonight's act. Welcome, kind watcher, to this curious play. A riddle spun from ancient times to date.

We trace from Solomon's most sacred fane To O'Kyle's whispers o'er the misty main Yet hold, let us confine our seeking eyes To who behind the bard's famed visage lies What mask doth will the shaker of the spear

Conceal whose quill this greatest work did steer. One thing is plain, no Stratford brute unlearned could craft such gold from fields so roughly turned. A broker's greed, a mask of little wit.

He played his part yet knew he held no script Now enters Lord Verulam, wise and sly A bastard prince beneath the Tudor sky Grand Master Sage and rosy crosses air His Templar-minded secrets deep ensnare Was he the hand behind the poet's name?

Or did he guard another's deathless flame? Then Edward comes, a lord both sharp and slight

A courtly muse in shadows cloaking light O Oxford, once ignored thou text to the stage A noble pen unbound by time or age But hark! There's Marlow, poet-spy supreme Whose death, methinks, was but a cunning scheme

If cloaked in life, his words did still abound. A rebel soul in hidden laurel crown. More voices join the shadowed mask of men. Florio, Neville, Greville, each wields the pen. The Derby claim.

The Pembroke Lady Fair Or Raleigh's sail that seeks the bardic air And Tudor whispers at ironic yes Could England's queen herself the truth attest Thus eighty names contend for poets' throne Their threads entwined in circles once well known

Philosophers, conspirators, or kin Did one or many weave this work within Perchance a Freemasonic veil design To aid King James in schemes and tasks divine Now sit thee still and let thy doubts abate The tale unfolds, the players hold their fate

And finding enlightenment hid deep within.

Welcome to Forum Borealis Ross.

Thank you very much, Harald. It's good to talk to you. Yeah, finally, huh? Yes. I must come clean and admit that I screwed up our first appointment, which very rarely happens. But I'm so glad that you graciously gave us a second chance, and I'm sure it's going to be worth it. Yeah, it's a pleasure.

And I'm glad we remembered in the last minute to hit the record button too. Yes, absolutely. It has happened. Yeah, just chat for a couple of hours and forget to record it. Exactly. It happened with my best show ever. It's a nightmare.

No, you can't just reconstruct it either because it's going to be a tired rehash the other time around, right? Yes, absolutely. And especially like you and me, we have never talked before. So it's going to be like a fresh experience. It's a new. In fact, I never discussed this specific topic. I'm in a Malovian angle with anyone either, right? So it's to have the, you know, the first discovery can't be, it can't be. You can't reproduce that. No, no, no.

So you live in Britain. May I ask where in the country? Yeah, so I live in Brighton, which is on the south coast, about 50 miles south of London. And I work in London. Okay, okay. Well, I've been a lot to the south, but further south, like Plymouth. Ah, yes, yeah. Love it. Yeah, yeah, it's lovely, the southwest. Absolutely. It's another, like London is another nation compared to...

Compared to both Scotland and Cornwall. Yeah, London's its own country. It's very separate from the rest of England and Wales and Scotland. Yes. Okay. So you picked up that we have an ongoing series about this stuff, right? Yes. Yes.

Today I'm going to inquire about, I understand you're one of the foremost authorities on the Malovian angle. We're going to give it as much time as you want. And this is our Shakespeare series, our other Shakespeare series. We have one where we're going into codes of Shakespeare. Right, yeah. Where that is, it's like you probably registered it, right? That there is a huge thing about secret messages in Shakespeare. Yeah.

Yeah, lots of people send me their code breaking. Half of them are cooks. The other half are geniuses, by the way. And those are the ones we are featuring. And it's such a thrill. And actually, that is...

kind of how I, well, I always known there's been discussions, you know, ever since the Baconians came on the scene a hundred years ago. Yeah. So I have noticed that, but it was via the cause I actually realized how weak they, you don't even need a cause. No. This is why I have these areas because it's such a incredible phenomenon that alone the historical case is grounds for revisionism and

You know, first I was a very, I just tell you, my audience know, I was a very passionate biconian. Okay. And then the more I listened to people's

takedown of the Shakespearean or the Stratfordian case, the more I realized everybody has good arguments. So I started to become a little more open. Today, I would say I'm leaning towards a group theory, but there's so many of those, so a specific one. So even if I'm not sold on Marlowe after we're done here today,

It's certainly going to play a big role into my group theory. And nonetheless, I need to know more about all the players. We non-Brits, we don't have this great education into your literary histories. It's going to be very useful even so. But I'm even open to become a Malovian.

Well, I love that open minded stance because I think the biggest problem that I meet is people who are just very committed one way or another. So, of course, Stratfordians, because they're defending what they think is reality. People are going to fight that pretty hard when they think this is just fact, you know.

You're all lunatics. But I often see that people just jump straight into another candidate and they get about as committed to that as Stratfordians are. And the problem with that, of course, is confirmation bias, which we are all prey to. And the fact that if you overcommit to something as being factual, being the truth,

then we will see things that confirm that and our brains will filter out anything. We'll either ignore the contrary evidence or we'll reinterpret it to fit our view. And

I generally espouse uncertainty on this issue. I'm known for representing the speaking out and being knowledgeable about the Marlovian case because that's where I came into it through that because I was writing a novel based on the Marlovian theory. But I've

I've become knowledgeable around, just generally on the question. I'm Director of Research at the Shakespearean Authorship Trust and

Wait a minute. Isn't that for all sorts of non-Stratfordians? Yeah, right. Exactly. So it's like an umbrella organization for doubters. And in fact, we do have some Stratfordian members. I mean, we're simply... No. Yes, we do. And we've had Stratfordian speakers at our conferences. We try and allow...

everybody to represent, you know, to put their cases forward. And we're trying to do it in a collegial way so that people are, you know, instead of attacking each other and calling each other idiots, that we're there to sort of listen. And what I find with listening to the cases for other candidates who aren't Marlowe is I've learned a huge lot. I've sort of overstepped

out my understanding of what the issues are generally in terms of a non-Stratfordian position. And it's always very helpful. So I love to listen to speakers from the other camps, as it were. And it's not to say that I won't unpick things because I

I will essentially take apart any argument that I think is weak, whether a Marlevian's putting it forward or an Oxfordian or a Stratfordian or a Baconian.

I like to sort of gather up the strong arguments and see if I can dispense with the weak ones. But you know the advantage of the group theory? That is that every time you hear someone like you, you actually just, like there's no, everything just gets stronger. Yeah. We have a new candidate for the gang. Yeah. But I mean... Yeah, let me just say this, that I agree with you that there are some out there who can be a little...

But I still, from my analysis, is that the Stratfordians have never moved from their case. Most non-Stratfordians, even how passionate they are about their own thing, usually was something else. I've even seen Baconians become...

Oxfordians, etc. Right. So at least they shifted first from Stratford, then to Bacon, then to De Vere. So that shows a little more open mindedness than those who still are on the Stratfordian case. Well, I would say, OK, so I've been involved in this question since I was preparing to do my PhD, which was... By the way, folks, she actually has a PhD in a relevant

topic for once. We've had other PhDs on this, but you have actually an English literature. Yes. And in fact, the subject was the authorship question. Oh, wow. Yeah. And it was the second in the world. So Roger Stripmutter did the first PhD that was authorship question based in the world. He's based in the US. Mine was the first in the UK and the second in the world to have a focus on the authorship question. And it was...

Yes, it's English literature. I partly was submitting my novel, but I did 50,000 words of critical writing, specifically looking at the weaknesses of the case for the Stratford man.

So it was unusual. And I had a Stratfordian supervisor who's, he got hell for it. But he was an old school academic then who actually, he didn't let his own personal bias come in the way. Yes, well, he would say, I mean, he would say, I don't agree with you, but I think you're making a good argument. And that was the important thing. He was very, really good to work with, actually, because he, it was,

It was like playing a racquet sport against a really hard opponent, you know? But isn't it, is it normal in England? I know in Norway, if you take a doctorate degree, there's going to be this mock trial.

where they play the devil's lawyer and you have to, I don't know what it's called, dispute your case or something. So they ask, so in a way he should be, if it's the same in England, right, then you are the devil's lawyer maybe in his view, but

nonetheless you have to like dispute back and forth for the case no isn't that how you do it over there yeah so we would have um supervisions you know where i sit with him for an hour and i would talk about um you know maybe i'll produce a piece of writing and he'd critique it or i'd talk about what i was reading and we would discuss it but when it came down to um the thesis when i wrote my doctoral thesis you don't have to defend it like yeah you have to defend it so you have a what they call a viva over here which is you have an in-person defense and you have

an internal examiner, which is someone from the same university, which was Sussex University, and then an external examiner. That was what the thing that concerned me was getting an external examiner who wouldn't just throw it out because they were... Because...

all the English literature academics in the UK, apart from me now, because I now have an academic post. But certainly then, all the UK academics were Stratfordians, apart from this guy called Bill Leahy. But he's now moved to Ireland, so he's not in the UK. But he was a professor at Brunel at the time. But

It was felt that if I because he was a non-Stratfordian, it was felt that if he was my external examiner, it would everyone would just say, well, it's it's not a proper PhD because there's bias there. So we had to get someone who was essentially a Stratfordian. Both of the external examiner and my supervisor got into a lot of trouble after I got my PhD.

Yeah, I bet. Today will be worse. In this cancel culture times. Well, it's interesting because you say that you don't think there's been any change in the Stratfordian position, but I have seen change. So that's why I was really coming in. I've been in this since sort of 2006. I began my PhD. So it's quite a while now, isn't it? Yeah. And I've seen a big shift in the last 10 years, 20,

15 years, really. A classical pauper paradigm shift and the old God is dying out. It's not completely, but I mean, there are concessions that they can't make, for sure. Anyone who's committed to this position publicly, they can't backtrack, really. However, the official position has become one of co-authorship.

So since the new Oxford Shakespeare was brought out... Oh, really? Yes, they... It's now... Ah, so now they cling to that Shakespeare had help from a few friends. Well, yeah, so they are... It's their way of...

losing graciously. I mean, not that they're losing. No, no, give them an out. I'm fully behind it. They're finding that they're gently finding their out and we shouldn't, you know, we should allow them to retire with dignity. Yes, yes, absolutely. Because we just want the truth, right? We just wanted to. Yeah, I would like them to stop calling us names and things. But, yeah,

But I think that it is an interesting shift to behold that certainly in England and America, the...

The mainstream Shakespeare position now, the Stratfordian position, is a little bit group theory-like, not like full-on non-Stratfordian group theory. Not like my analytic version. No, no, no. I promise you that, but still. Well, they would always, you see, they still have the man from Stratford as the main writer, right? But they are allowing now the possibility of other hands, and they are saying the official position is that a third of the folio plays are co-authored.

Now, that's a big shift. It is. And that shift has mitigated. See, because the culture has changed. So there's more intolerance in academia now. But then in the actual field you're in, it has shifted the other way. So I guess so that's a very interesting thing, because if they were as stonch now as they used to be,

and add the cancel layer on top, especially in America. Maybe, I don't know in Britain, actually. But then I think any non-stratfordian would be smacked down. But does it help to have the fact that you made it first to get to the target line? Could that help others coming behind you? Of non-stratfordians, I mean? Yeah, I mean, to some... Or are you the odd duck out? No.

I mean, there are more people with PhDs in the subject matter now because they were running a PhD program at Brunel for a while until Bill Leahy left and went to Oxford.

to Limerick in, in Ireland. But, so there are, but there's no one else in post in an English literature department still who's open, but it does mean that doubters have a port of call. You know, they have a sort of someone they can write to. I do get probably far too many of those kinds of emails of people's sort of theories of,

Yet another alternative candidate. And my issue is that I feel in the limited time that I have left, if you like, because I'm getting on. I see when you're born, you're not that. No, but in terms of... I think you're the youngest yet. But I think the issue is this, right? I will only be in a... Unless I can really make a huge splash...

I won't be able to keep my... I need to become an emeritus professor before I retire so that I can keep my research facilities. Ah, you don't have... You see what I mean? So once I've left the university, once I've retired, which, you know, I might have 10 years, is what I'm saying. I need to make a big enough impact in the next 10 years that I can keep my research facilities until I die. Ah.

Otherwise, after 10 years... Wait a minute. You have tenure, right? Yes, I have tenure. But once we retire, unless you are emeritus professor... I always pronounce things wrong, by the way, and it's partly because I've been brought up in America and they pronounce words differently, like advertising or advertisement. I don't know. Since I was a kid... You know, you're home. You're coming home because as a Norwegian who was...

I was schooled in proper British. Right. But the culture has been American. So I'm all over the place. I never know how to pronounce words. I'm always putting the stress on the wrong thing and then second guessing myself. Anyway. Yeah. The issue is that you'll lose access to things like, you know, all the journals, the digital archive. You know, they're very expensive to access if you're a private citizen. And the only way, you know, I have free access to those as someone with tenure.

But I need once I'm retired to still have access in order to be able to do useful work. So I really have to sort of focus on what's useful. And to me, my mission on the authorship question is to get the authorship question accepted in academia as a valid question, as a valid subject for research. Yeah.

Because then other people can more easily follow after me. And, you know, they won't struggle to get tenure. They won't struggle to have their PhDs taken seriously. When I first proposed my PhD, the first person I proposed it to just said, can I do a sanity test? Who do you think wrote Shakespeare?

Oh, my God. And I thought, well, OK, you're clearly not the right person to be my supervisor. You think this is a sanity test? You know, and unfortunately, it should be a science test. But honestly, in this soft science, it's not much science often. So, yeah. No. So, I mean, the point is, I need to clear the way, make it easier for people to follow me. And so I rather than

spending any time focusing on like reading people's often very long cases for brand new candidates I've never heard of, you know, books and things that they send me.

I feel I just need to focus on where I can be useful, which is trying to shift the existing paradigm by publishing things in respected journals. You know, that's really trying to get academia to open up to this question as a valid question. That's my mission. So and that's another reason why I don't.

I know a lot about the Marlowe case, but I really focus on the case against the Stratford man, which I think is step one of opening everything up. And step two, which is who actually did write it, is less important to me at this stage because I feel my experience of just talking to a lot of people about this is that someone who's a sort of default Stratfordian, a...

have two layers of resistance. The first layer is that they've already, you know, they believe that it's the Stratford man. Now you can wobble that, but if you immediately go in with, and it was this other person and you make a case for them,

you're sort of doing it through a candidate. You're introducing a sort of unnecessary extra layer of resistance. I actually think group theory is great for this reason in that it just... It's a bridge, right? It's a bridge and it's very soft and it's much more open and it's a...

You can actually link it to as well the fact that you say, well, orthodox Stratfordians now think that up to a third of those plays in the folio are co-authored. And a few years ago, they didn't think any were. And now they think a third were. And, you know, what if even more are?

I mean, how do we even define what Shakespeare is? When you're looking at one of my other areas, which is linked, is that I used to be a computer programmer. And so I got involved in the digital humanities. And there were these claims that from the New Oxford Shakespeare team of scholars, that they had devised an algorithm that could tell Marlowe's work from Shakespeare's work. Yeah, I've heard about it. No, what I've heard is that they have found that

the highest hit of who the Shakespearean literature matches with is Marlowe. That's right. I mean, yeah, for a long time in the early days of computational stylistics, as they sometimes call it, in the earliest tests, they were quite shoddily popular.

put together to be honest. This is like 1990s work. There's a couple of people called Elliot and Belenza who did some very early work on the authorship question. They published a paper called And Then There Were None, which was about dispensing with all the claimants to Shakespeare because they were Stratfordians. But in that test, they were sort of testing against these sort of texts

like a data set, if you like. And they were deciding, here's Shakespeare. We're going to take these bits of these plays and that's our Shakespeare bucket. And then let's do a non-Shakespeare. What was hilarious is that in their non-Shakespeare data set, they had...

I think it was about four. I'm going to have to go and burn up. But I think it was about four Marlowe plays. And then when they tested Marlowe against their Shakespeare bucket and their non-Shakespeare bucket, it matched quite well, of course, with their non-Shakespeare bucket. Why? Because some of it was the same material. It was Marlowe's play. So that was obviously ludicrous. That's a completely false test. Plus, I suppose some people were inspired by Marlowe too, don't you think? Well, so...

The issue is that right from the 19th century onwards, there were scholars who detected Marlowe's style in the early Shakespeare plays in particular, and also noticed that Shakespeare seems to be referencing and echoing Marlowe right throughout the whole Shakespeare canon. That's their argument, isn't it? To dismiss it. Like he's particularly obsessed with Marlowe and he was so influenced by it. So they will say this is influence, but...

So in the 18th century was really when some scholars started going against the grain slightly and saying they didn't think it was influenced. They thought Marlowe actually wrote various things that they would say that Marlowe wrote. So Henry VI's plays were always up for grabs. There was always strong arguments that Marlowe was an author of parts or all of the Henry VI plays. Taming of the Shrew was another one. Titus Andronicus, another one. So you're looking at sort of fairly early stuff.

But then there was a kind of clamping down that happened in the 1920s.

They were called the disintegrators, the people who started breaking up the canon and introducing group theory at that point and introducing Marlowe in particular as a co-author were called the disintegrators. So we then had this kind of movement of two branches of Stratfordianism, one which was prepared to open up and one which was clamping it down. And then they laid down the law. So Peter Alexander in particular and E.K. Chambers, who's probably better known,

They said, if it's in the folio, it's by Shakespeare. That's the end of that. And they clamped it down successfully until, you know, really about 20 years ago when Brian Vickers published Shakespeare co-author. So this is the thing. Marlowe's always been in contention stylistically.

So Marlowe, he's the only candidate that we have evidence that he could write genius level blank verse. He's the only candidate that we have evidence could write really high quality,

in terms of looking at, for example, Hero and Leander set against Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece. They're very much the same thing. They're all coming from a classical source. There are motifs that they share. There are things stylistically they share. So that some scholars are saying, well, it looks like they were looking over each other's shoulders as they were writing. And you go, well, yes, or they were written by the same person because there is so much in common. There is so much crossover with late writing

Marlowe and early Shakespeare. And the point is that stylistically you can see the whole canon as a single, you can see the Marlowe Shakespeare combined canon as a single canon in which someone develops their style. So if you put all of the Marlowe plays in rough order, because we never know when things are actually written, but in sort of the best guess order of being written and the same with the

if you say the agreed traditional order of the Shakespeare canon, which obviously there's a lot of dispute on that, but let's do that. If you look at things like feminine endings and enjambment, these are sort of stylistic things that changed during the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. If you look at...

just percentages of feminine endings or percentages of enjambment in those plays and you put the whole combined canon on a graph you can see a very smooth development towards more enjambment and more feminine endings that just look like one author changing their style you know gradually developing

Yeah, because the British language wasn't set in stone back then. So I would think that would make it even easier to... If it was like a set grammar, then it would be harder. But because everything was open in a way,

Yeah, it's not set in stone now. It's still changing now and it's changing more rapidly because of the internet. Right, right. Well, that's the normal development. But the thing was... But we have a grammar now, right? We have an inherited grammar that we're supposed to follow. Well, there was a grammar then, but there was a lot more variation and there was a lot more variation in spelling. And one of the issues was that

English as a language for poetry was pretty new. And people like Thomas Watson, who was a friend, a documented friend of Marlowe's, wrote entirely in Latin. Now we're told that he wrote some stage plays. I can't imagine those stage plays would have been in Latin, but they don't exist. But he wrote his poetry in Latin and he,

English was still seen as a rather sort of poor language. You know, educated people wrote in Latin. They wrote poetry in Latin. They wrote plays in Latin. And English was just beginning to be developed. I mean, obviously, Chaucer had been around for a long time, but Chaucer is bawdy. Chaucer is, you know, sort of... It's...

It was a working class language. That's the point. It was sort of working class entertainment. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. I promise we'll return to Marlov. We're already deep into the evidence, right? Let's just backtrack. First, I want to say, by the way, it's very laudable, this attitude or strategy you have.

that you described about how to open up. So I just wanted to put that out there. Second, I want to say that when it comes to the group theory, even I can afford a place in my version for Will Shaksper. But then...

as a stooge, as a mosque, as someone they paid to take the blame rather than the credit. But let's start there. Let's start with hearing why you... Let's get the anti-Stratfordian thing first. What's the most important factors that made you doubt Shakespeare?

I think that Diana Price's evidence is extremely important. The fact that there is no literary paper trail for Shakespeare that's comparable to

to other writers of the period. Because an argument always was that, well, there's no evidence, you know, there's very little, it's all circumstantial evidence. But people like my supervisor used to say and has publicly said, but that's true for everybody. And Diana Price showed that it wasn't so.

And if we spend our lives writing, especially if we write for a living, even though over 400 years, many documents will be destroyed or just get lost by the wayside.

Where things exist, you would expect there to be some trace left behind of what you did for a living. If it was something that was rather public facing, like being a writer, if you like, or something you're producing works in the public domain. So you really would expect to see some

of the 10 categories of evidence that Diana Price looked for. So evidence of having been paid as a writer, letters to and from that person about writing, notice on death as a writer, etc. And you have actually a large amount of documentation for Shakespeare of Stratford.

But it is, you know, it's over 70 documents, but they are all of a legal nature. And the things that really get me are where there's a real, I mean, the signatures. I think you look at those signatures and you think,

That is not a person who wrote professionally. If you look at the signatures of other Elizabethan writers, we develop our own distinctive signatures now. In the Elizabethan period, when you had to handle a quill, they developed very... It was a sort of fashion to have a very pretty, you know, detailed, fluid signature. Now, I have...

crossed swords with people about this and they will come up with one or two examples of people who did publish a book and don't have the best signature in the world. Nevertheless, a really great difference between that and the six signatures that we have, which are all on legal documents. The other thing is, um,

I've seen excuses being made by straightforwardness saying, well, he was elderly. They're all from the last three years of his life. Maybe he had palsy, you know. Elderly, he died at 52 years old or something? Yes. So, you know, maybe he had, well, exactly, but maybe he had palsy.

Parkinson's, maybe he had palsy. People aged earlier than etc. Fine, but now they're grasping for... that's not scientific. Maybe there is a spaghetti monster, but we're not working on maybes here. Well, they have to make excuses. I mean, another scholar said maybe he was losing his eyesight, you know, maybe he'd gone blind. But they have to explain away the evidence. You know, this is a well-known thing with confirmation biases, you'll explain away the evidence.

contradicts your belief. So the signatures, I think, are great. I think another strong piece of evidence is the fact that his daughters were apparently illiterate. One could sign her name in a way that E. Mourns Thompson, who was a paleographer, said, and he didn't have skin in the game, said that it was painfully formed, you know, a painfully formed signature, like it was the only thing that they could write, you know.

That's Susanna. And then Judith clearly is illiterate and signs with a little squiggle. Now, Shakespeare has all these very literate heroines,

He has even his maids and his shepherdesses able to read and write, you know, write letters, write poetry. Why would this man not educate his daughters? The argument against that has often been, well, he came from the yeoman class. You know, he was of the trades. His father was a leather worker and they didn't educate their daughters. Schools certainly weren't open to girls. However, we have plenty of examples of middle class men, men in the, you know,

in fact, particularly writers who educated their daughters, got a private tutor in. He was wealthy enough to get a private tutor in. Shakespeare seems to have very literate women. Why would Shakespeare of Stratford appease the author, not educate his own daughters? It's quite an extraordinary mismatch. There's also the mismatch between things like the attitude towards grain hoarding,

You have in Coriolanus, you know, there is an issue with famine and grain being kept from the populace. But Shakespeare of Stratford was actually prosecuted for hoarding grain in a time of famine. He had 1.234 metric tons of grain and he wasn't a farmer. So why?

What this points towards, you talk about him as a mask. My preferred theory on his role in all this is that he was a broker. He was a middleman because the evidence that we have in documents says

points towards his being a broker in several ways. Grain hoarding when you're not a farmer presumably means that he bought that grain cheap and then was holding onto it to sell in a time of famine at a inflated price because of scarcity. We have evidence of him being a broker in a marriage.

And that one came to court because there was a dispute over the dowry. But he had negotiated the dowry. He had acted as a middleman, a marriage broker, if you like, in that case. And my argument is and there's other evidence to support it. I'm not the first person to make it. It's not like my argument. But what I would say is that he was the broker for.

that company once he was brought on board as an investor, as a businessman. So he then is the person who buys and sells the plays. And that is how his name ends up on the plays. Because in, and we'll have to talk about the poem separately, but in 1593, which is when the name Shakespeare first appears in any literary or theatrical sense. So that's when the first Shakespearean

That's when William Shakespeare appears as an author's name on Venus and Adonis. And then at the end of that year, he's associated with the Players' Company.

for the first time. Okay. It doesn't appear on a play. But not as an actor, right? No, we have no really good evidence that he was an actor. We have this weird sort of later on, we have things like him being in Ben Johnson's cast list. If he was ever in a major part, we would know about it. So even Orthodox scholars say that he must have taken very minor parts.

But I think he was brought in. OK. He's portrayed as an actor in Anonymous. Yes, I know. So much so. This is myth. It's not very well supported. I have covered this in this big compendium that I put together called Shakespeare, The Evidences.

There is some support for him being an actor, but it's extremely small. It's extremely tentative. And we really can't think of that as his... But he's certainly invested in theatres, right? But he is a shareholder. So we know for sure he's a shareholder in the theatre company. He has an eighth share...

in the theatre company, in the Globe. Initially in The Lord Chamberlain's Men and then later in The King's Men. The first payment to him as a shareholder is 1594 for a performance at the end of 1593. So 1593 is a key year. This is basically when Shakespeare as an author is invented, if you like.

But the name appearing on the plays, here's an interesting thing. In 1593, up at that point, up until that point, plays when they were published, plays for the public stage were always published anonymously. And they continue to be published anonymously for some time. But

In 1593, that's the very first time that an author's name appears on a play for the public stage. Now, that was George Peel. His name appeared and he was the first writer, playwright to have his name on that. And it was on the dedication page. But was he of the people, like a working class person like Ben Johnson?

George Peel. I would have to double check, but possibly. But the real question is, when is the first time a noble or someone who was upper class put their name on a play? I can't answer that question. So what I can answer about is I can answer what the fashion was for names on plays. So what's relevant about this is that

Plays started to be sold as literature. And in order for them to be sold as literature, they have to have an author's name on them. And we have this idea even now that something isn't really literature if it's got lots of authors. You know, it comes from a single mind if it's literature or two at most.

And so what starts happening after 1593 is gradually more and more plays start getting published with people's names on. But we know from the records of the Rose that plays that were written by multiple people, Henslow paid maybe five people to write this play and it's in his account book. When it was published, it just has one name on the cover and they put the name on the cover that is, you know, the one that will sell or is the brand. Now, the first... So, OK, so not necessarily the owner.

No. Well, now, but here's the thing. So it could be the author. But the first plays that appear with either the name or the initials. And so W.S. They say that they're amended or corrected or whatever. The very first plays are not what we would now call Shakespeare plays. So they're part of the apocrypha. So you have the Yorkshire tragedy, the London prodigal, these these odd plays.

And the very first one that's published is in 1594, a play called Lacrine or Lacrine is published. And it says that it's, I remember the exact wording, something like newly amended and corrected by W.S. Now, this was at some point, I think, in the second folio brought into the Shakespeare canon. And then the later it was kicked out again with the rest of the apocrypha.

This is the publications, but when did they start having the plays on the scene? That was before they were published, right? Yeah, so they'd be played in the theatre. No one would know who wrote them because it was all about the actors and the playing companies, just like now. I mean, if you name your favourite movie, not many people can say who wrote. Right. And in fact, even if you looked on the credits to find out who wrote your favourite movie, it might not represent who actually wrote it. The Elizabethan Theatre... Right, right. So when did they do the plays in the theatre? So...

Well, we know of some when some plays appeared. We know that the certain Shakespeare plays like Henry VI, we know that was around parts of it were around 1592. One of them is mentioned by Nash, for example. So we but.

And things that were produced at the Rose, we know about those performance dates because of Henslow's diary. But the problem is we don't have a similar document for the Lord Chamberlain's men. No, no. But you establish a very important fact. We know for sure there were plays...

been done before the publications. That's enough. So in 92, there was certainly a play and in 93 came the first publication and that was one of the apocrypha, right? No, it was 94, and yes, and we know that Titus Andronicus was around at that time as well as being performed. So we have, you know, like dates for that. But the point is this,

Imagine the scenario. I'm just trying to sort of get back to the broker thing that if Shakespeare is the one who's bought the place because he's a broker, he's a middleman. He buys cheap and he sells at a profit. That's what he's good at. Now, once he's a shareholder of the theatre, part of his job is to make more profit for himself and the others to share.

So he's bought these plays. He goes to the printer and the printer says to him, let's just imagine the scenario. The printer says, well, we're now selling them as literature. So we need a name for the cover. Whose name is it? You know, who wrote this? And he thinks, oh, God, I can't remember who I bought this from. Well, maybe it was three or four people. And he just says, well, put my name on the cover. Right. Put my name on. And then his name becomes like. Or maybe he knew that they wouldn't want their names on there.

Well, you know, maybe. Well, I don't know. The interesting thing about that play, Le Crin, was that it was published by, it was written originally by the cousin of someone who went on to be master of the revels, George Buck. And when he finds out that it's been published and he knows his cousin wrote it, he goes, he basically makes a comment saying,

that some, you know, some, some persons now publish this and put his name on it and that's got WS on it. All right. So there's a real writer behind or sometimes writers behind it. But when George Buck then later goes to ask, he wants to find out who wrote the play, George Green, right? So the published, the play called Georgia Green, it's published anonymously. He writes his notes on his copy of it on the front page. And he asked George,

two people. One of the people he asked was Shakespeare. So he asks Will Shakespeare and Will Shakespeare tells him something that clearly isn't true and he's obfuscating, right? And then he asks another person who is the broker for the alternative playing company, okay? And he gets the correct answer, right?

So it's very interesting that he went, you know, why would he go to this particular person and say who wrote this? Why would he go to Shakespeare? If he knows that he's the guy who buys and sells plays...

Then he might go to him for that reason. But, you know, Stratfordians have it as, oh, he went to Shakespeare asking him as this knowledgeable theatre entrepreneur, you know, who wrote this. But if you look at the answer that was given by Shakespeare, he lied. You know, he made something up. That's in character for him. It's very much in character for him. It's the same as the testimony he gives in the legal case, the Mountjoy dowry case, where he just, you know, he's constantly obfuscating. You know, he's covering up.

But wouldn't you list this as one of the reasons for doubt that his life is like an incomplete contrast to the morals displayed in the literature? His life is incomplete. Exactly. So that's why I say that Diana Price's, you know, work on...

the documentation is really important. He has the profile of a businessman and in particular, a broker, a middleman, someone who does deals. And a cynical one at that. Yeah. If you look at all of the, if you look at all of the documents together, and if you didn't have his name attached to them, if you said, here is John Smith, what do you think John Smith did for a living? Any neutral person coming to those documents would say, that is a businessman. That is a broker. He's a middleman. He does deals. He buys and sells condoms.

corn, he buys and sells grain, he buys and sells ties. Like his father, I think, right? Yeah, buys and sells wool, buys and sells, you know, this is what he does. We now have very recently, in the last few years, someone came up with some new exciting evidence that they had found his first location where we could tell he was staying in London. And where it was, was basically the guild of wool dealers.

So he was up there doing business, presumably for his father. Now, one way of looking at, you know, people always ask, we can only speculate about how he gets involved in this whole thing. But one way of looking at it is this. There are certainly good arguments for why a hidden author writing Venus and Adonis, wanting not to put his own name on it, might be able to come up

with the name William Shakespeare. Not that it's an uncommon name. There are plenty of people at that time who actually have that name. There was a William Shakespeare who drowned in the river Avon. Oh, really? Yes. Yes. But I know for sure that both de Vere and Bacon had ties to the name Shakespeare. Yeah, there were reasons. Shaker of the Spear. Does Marlowe have something similar too?

No, but it works in terms of classically speaking to what I mean. And classical education was was really the thing then. So you it's the perfect name for a kind of I'm going to be this hidden British poet shaking, shaking my spear. So, yeah, I mean, just someone with a classical education might land upon that.

And we know that the author does have a classical education. They quote, you know, the two lines from Ovid on the front about Fair Muses. Was it? Lead me. No, Fair Phoebus, lead me to the Muses Springs, you know,

which actually was a poem that Marlow had translated, interestingly enough. But the point is this. So say they come up with the name William Shakespeare. They publish this poem. This poem is dangerous and bawdy poem. It's considered quite erotic at the time. It's why it became a bit of a

bestseller. Imagine you have that name. You know when you meet someone and they've got the same name as you or you hear of someone with the same name as you, you're kind of curious. It's going to be hard to nail that guy when the police... Right, so say that Will Shaksper of Stratford is up in London doing some business for his grain, you know, his...

Maybe for grain dealing, maybe for his, you know, his wool dealing father or whatever. And he thinks, you know, there's this thing and that's my name. And who is this person who shares my name? Gets curious, pokes about whoever is hiding their identity. Let's say they don't want someone poking about. So he's, as I say, pure speculation. But let's say he's given.

Because he's a businessman, he does deals. He's given a share in the theatre company for his silence. And he's happy. Exactly. He's happy with that. Of course. He's happy with that. And then when it comes down to it, these plays, which are, let's say, let's say it's a single author that there's other people involved. But let's say there's a central author at this point. The company is given, they're actually set up.

at this point. There's an interesting split of theatre companies, but I won't go into that. It's easy for me to go too deep, I'm afraid, so I'll try and stay. I'll try to stay here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. But, yeah, so the plays that also by this associated author coming through that theatre company, and it's fine for them, they are initially published anonymously. Some are published anonymously the entire time. Like, at no point does the name Shakespeare appear on them.

But others, you know, when they go to publication, that particular printer says, can I have a name? Because we're trying to sell them literature. And Shakespeare says, oh, go on, put my name on it. But he does it kind of willy nilly so that there are other plays that aren't Shakespeare plays. They're not by that author who also end up with that name on because it's just a brand. And printers get to like it because it's a brand that is profitable. And people start looking at it as this will be a good read.

But still, people going to the plays wouldn't necessarily know because you didn't have... Or care, but... Well, no, no, no, because they did not have authors' names on playbills. They had the playing company. The people would go to see the actor, just as we go to see films. And the story. But there is one, to play the devil's advocate then, there is one... Some of these plays are highly political, especially those that attack the Cecil's.

Now, why would a self-interested man like Shakespeare afford to allow his name on those plays? Yeah. Because it would bring him heat. Yeah. Well, of course, if you look at the way he deals with...

heat in other cases or, you know, question from George Buck or the Mountjoy testimony. He would just say, oh, I just put my name on it. I can't actually remember who wrote it. I'm just... Because nobody believed it was him. Yeah. And the thing is that at no point do we have any record of him claiming to be the author. No.

He doesn't claim to be the author. So he's got this plausible deniability. You can just say, oh, I'm sorry, I don't actually know. I bought it off someone I don't actually know. I just sold it to the printer and they said, whose name should I put on it? And I don't really know who wrote it. So I said mine.

And that's why when we get the Essex Rebellion and we have Richard II being played and Queen Elizabeth getting obsessed about it and other people getting thrown into prison and, you know, a representative of the Lord Chamberlain's men being brought forward and grilled on this performance of Richard II, for some reason they don't.

grill the author, right? They don't bring, you know, William Shakespeare of Stratford in for questioning. And yet they do imprison John Hayward, who wrote a prose piece on the same subject, on the same historical subject. I mean, admittedly, he also dedicated it to the Earl of Essex, which is...

You know, it was a bad move. But that's not strategic. But Shakespeare wasn't even protected by being nobility. No, he's not protected. He would have been a sitting duck if they really believed it was him. Yeah, but he only has to, you know, just be himself. And, you know, he can absolutely deny being the author quite easily. I mean, he could have even said, look, I can't even write. Yeah.

look at me trying to sign my name. Plus, I don't think many people thought it was him in his contemporary times. No, I don't think so. And I think we have actually quite a lot of evidence, certainly that writers of the time are signalling to each other that they don't think so. I mean, Marston and Hall are definitely doing that. I think Harvey and Nash... And Ben Jonson definitely knows who it is. Yeah, Ben Jonson definitely knows who it is.

He definitely knows. Ben Johnson is on the inside. He's involved in the setup of the legacy of this, which we're still trying to unravel, so we can all curse Ben Johnson. But he absolutely is on the inside and he does know. But there are other writers who are clearly signalling that they know. And one of the things that I find quite interesting is when in 1599,

the Archbishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury got together to ban certain books

They banned all, they said, all histories, all epigrams and satires. But they also specifically named certain books that were to be brought to be burned and thereafter banned. And several of the books on that list are books that are expressing doubt about the authorship of Shakespeare's works. Oh, wow. When was this? 1599. Oh, that early. Yeah.

So it's like they're trying to shut down a discussion of this. Why would these clergymen be interested in that? Well, I mean, well, because the Archbishop of Canterbury is much more than a clergyman. He's on the Privy Council. He's, you know, he's an extremely powerful person. At this point, I'm trying to think when the younger Cecil came in. So Lord Burley, when was he? He was getting ill and weak at around in the sort of mid-

There was this whole power struggle. Yeah, but his son was just imitating his politics. I don't see much difference. Yeah, his son was coming up through in terms of power. But for a long time, the older Cecil sort of had the queen's ear. But then power really transferred over to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He became the more powerful person when the older Cecil became iller.

And then there was a sort of bit of a power struggle really with Essex as well. So they were all trying to sort of get some more sway and more power with the Queen at this point. But the Archbishop of Canterbury was...

essentially tracking down heretics, trying to get rid of people who were against, you know, straightforward Protestant belief, you know, who were, because at this point, any challenge to the Church of England, it was the Queen's Church. And so therefore, if you were heretical in terms of whether you were a Catholic or you were one of the other not straightforward heretics,

Christian faiths. I think this was connected to the power of the throne. Yeah, you had to be Church of England or nothing, otherwise potentially you were thrown in prison, you were tortured. It certainly happened to quite a few people. And so the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, the Queen seemed to really like what he was doing, although what he was doing was very hard line. He was having people tortured and killed.

because going against the Church of England was essentially treason at this point. This is how the tower got its infamous name. Yeah, and the Queen was insecure, especially as she got older, because there'd been lots of plots against her life, particularly from Catholics. Yeah.

And anyway, she was in a bubble. Yeah, but there was lots of, she was concerned about plots against her and Whitgift saw, you know, essentially his chance to root out any people who were not orthodox and straightforwardly Church of England in their beliefs. And so this burning of books, the Bishop's Ban, was,

was a political move. It wasn't just, it wasn't just about the church. But it's so interesting. I never heard, because, yeah, I knew that people back then didn't believe it was Shakespeare, but now I know why we don't have written evidence for it. We have allusions, of course, but outright, because they actually censored these books. That's huge, man. I didn't know this. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we're lucky that we do have copies of those books. Oh,

Oh, we do. We do have copies of these books. Yeah, we do. But there we have like sometimes we have one copy that existed. You know, someone squirreled it away somewhere and it existed. But the point is they were trying to shut everything down. And these books were only they were only illusions. They were only sort of hinting. I mean, sometimes in such a way that you add it up and you go, there is no other way of interpreting this. You know, they were dangerous. But anyway.

they would generally the whole reason why I think Elizabethan language is so complex and convoluted is because we were living at that time in a sort of police state because it was extremely dangerous time to be a writer. So you had to have plausible deniability. You had to practice double speak so that you could say, oh, I didn't mean that. I meant this. And that's why Ben Johnson is such a nightmare to read, you know, but many Elizabethan writers are,

are deliberately obscuring their language because they know it's being read by the censors. And people like Thomas Nash even mention this and talk about. But do you think it's only political reasons? I mean, there was this, let's call it an esoteric tradition or as a bow so below to have symbolism and metaphor.

as an educated and important way to convey. I mean, look at religious scriptures. Talking in parables has been a thing forever, right? Yeah. So wouldn't that also be a factor? Well, symbolism and metaphor are a really important part of good writing, good creative writing. Especially in that day and age where in the Renaissance when all the hermetic thought was flushing in over Europe, right? Yeah.

That's right. But they are using, they're using, you know, they're making it much more complex than it would otherwise be. Than they need. You know, because they're trying to avoid being thrown into prison and tortured and possibly killed, you know, which I think is a very good reason for complicating your language. So, yeah.

Yeah. Generally, when we use... And to stay anonymous. Yeah, sometimes. Although, as we're going to learn later, unless we subscribe to the conspiracy theory, which I love to hear about regarding Marlowe, he...

vanished from the scene very early so we're going to get to that but when it comes to stacking up reasons it's not Shakespeare I think another important for me at least is that he the author or authors were obsessed about nobility and had deep insight into it which

there's no way we can justify that in Shakespeare's case, right? No, we can't justify that in his case. We can justify it in Marlowe's, however. Yeah, yeah. And the same is true for, you know, being a world experienced and having travelled certain places. Yeah, exactly.

So, yes, I mean, what I would say about the nobility thing is clearly the author has understanding of the royal courts, of how nobles operate and treats them as human beings like everybody else. And it seems to have some inside knowledge, including of foreign courts. You know, this interesting stuff about the French court and its links to Hamlet, for example. There are other measure for measure is another one which has some very interesting points.

content. But yeah, so various things that certain candidates could, you could account for them knowing about it, but not him. But there's, you see, what you get with the Stratfordian side is they say, yes, but then there's all this knowledge of the countryside and of flowers and of, you know, beasts and the common man. Well, that's why I like Marlowe. It's one of the reasons I do like Marlowe as a candidate because Marlowe straddled both worlds. So,

So he came from the same social class as Shakespeare. His father was... Let's start with when he lived. That's important. He was born exactly the same year, 1564, right, as Shakespeare, Shakespeare. And he was born in Canterbury. He, unlike Shakespeare, he had a documented education. He was a poor boy, though. His father was a shoemaker. So he came from the leatherworking classes, yeoman class.

And he won a scholarship to the local school.

Ah, shoemaker, that's a reference in Anonymous when De Vere berates Johnson and he says something about you, you're not a shoemaker, are you? That must be a reference. Yeah, shoemaker. And there are a lot of interesting references to cobblers in the associated, all the texts around the Shakespeare canon. So yeah, cobblers were important, shoemakers were important. But

But, yeah, so and then he got a scholarship to the local school and then he quickly went from that minor school to King's School, which is still an important, well, we say public school. So elsewhere would say private school in the UK. And from there, he got a scholarship to Cambridge University.

And he went through Cambridge. He did both a bachelor's and a master's degree, which is as high up as you could go then. There were no doctorates there.

at which point he qualified to become a gentleman. He could be called generosus, which means, you know, gentleman. He was allowed to carry a sword and he could mix among gentlemen. And we have documented evidence that he mixed with at least two members of the nobility and also courtiers. So he mixed with Sir Walter Raleigh. He states himself as being very well known to the future Earl of Derby, Lord Strange, and the Earl of Northumberland.

So he's mixing in the right circles. And also, it's now generally accepted, even by some very sceptical people in the Orthodox community, that he was an agent. He was an intelligence agent. He was recruited probably at Cambridge. Did he know John Dee?

We don't have any evidence that he knew John Dee. However, we do know that he's connected in the right circles, shall I say. Because I have a list of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven more names I want to ask you about Marlowe's connection. And the reason I want to ask that is that I think the author,

have to have some relations to all these people. We don't have to take it now if you're on a roll. But that, you know, I mean, that's interesting because you see, you've developed a theory and you've decided that the author must have connections to all these people because of the paradigm that you're coming from. No, no, because of circumstantial evidence. Yeah, but then, you know, I would want to grill you on that. Sure.

Why this person? Why that person? Because I don't... Well, let's start with the first, Elisabeth. Okay, if you're coming from the coded side, you're saying he must have a connection to John Dee, but... No, no, not necessarily John Dee, but Elisabeth, I would love to know. Yeah, and...

And and often with these things you think well if that if there isn't a documented connection It doesn't mean there was my my thing is very much building a web of who did he have we? Documented evidence that there's a connection to this person, but that's what that's what I'm asking you for these people you can work through sometimes

because it's about degrees of separation. You know this person, well, there's only one degree of separation to this other person because they knew them. And he's much more connected into Elizabethan society than has generally been understood is all I would say. Plus another thing, he died very young, 29 years old in 93. So he may...

have been completely out of the loop of everything. If you accept that he died, but let's not forget. You know what? Let's take that now. Yeah. Let's go there because people need to know this. Okay. So I want to bring you up on one thing, which is that you refer to it as the conspiracy theory of, and I would object to that because

the phrase conspiracy theory, certainly as it's used here in the UK and in the US, means this is a stupid theory that no one should listen to. Yeah, I mean it in a classical sense, just like the whole Shakespeare authorship is a conspiracy theory, a benevolent one. No, I don't agree.

And I know that Alexander Ward says he doesn't mind it being called that, but I think it's a real issue to call it that because my mission is to get this taken seriously in academia and no one is going to take it seriously if it's a conspiracy theory. That just means all intelligent people should reject it.

Right. What I'm saying is I'm not saying that there wasn't some elements of conspiracy that allowed things to be kept secret or whatever. But that's very different from using the phrase conspiracy theory. We know that it was an age of plots, which is what conspiracy is. We have, you know, so many plots. We have the Babington plot. We have the by plot. We have the Stanley plot. The whole era is full of plots. And Shakespeare writes about plots.

So we know that secret things happened. We know that the government was involved in certain secret things. Yeah, you just look at the poor chap Guy Fawkes. Yeah. That whole thing. False flag. Yeah.

But it's helpful to be careful about our language and watchful of our language, because if you call it conspiracy theory, then you're just asking for it to be dismissed. Point fully taken, and all my listeners get what you mean, so you don't have to elaborate on that. So let's not call it that, but let's hear what it was all about. Okay, so here's the theory. All of our files are free and will remain free if you like to show.

You can show support by donating $1 to help with expenses. Just use the pay link on our webpage. Thanks. The theory is based on the fact that Marlowe had got himself into a very difficult position as a spy, as an agent for the Queen, as an intelligence agent. He had been...

outed, if you like, in the line of duty by a double agent the previous year. So 1592, he was arrested in Flushing in the Low Countries on a charge of counterfeiting coins, which is petty treason. He was sent back to Lord Burley, who is William Cecil, right? Mm-hmm.

under arrest from flushing. This is when he makes the statement about being very well known to certain people, certain noblemen. And nothing happened. So he's not punished. He's not arrested. He's not thrown into prison. We have no, as far as we know, we have no record of any punishment happening as a result of this coining thing, which was petty treason. So his biographer, David Rigg, puts forward, and I think he's right, that

that Marley was actually there on a mission. The reason why he was counterfeiting was because he was trying to infiltrate. There was a plot, the Stanley plot, against the Queen's life happening at that time. So he was working for, we know from government documents, that he was writing plays for Lord Strange.

whose family name was Stanley, Ferdinando Stanley. And the person involved in the plot against the Queen's life was Lord Strange's cousin. And he had a garrison of soldiers outside Flushing who were in need of British coin to feed them. And Marlowe had got some information about coining from someone in a British prison, which again is documented.

and was over there trying to infiltrate when he unfortunately meets with a double agent Richard Baines who then reports him for counterfeiting and he's sent back but he's not punished so we can assume he's still working for the government however from that point on there is a concerted campaign really against him to start bringing him down so things start going wrong in 1592 so he's

publicly accused of being an atheist in the summer. There are various government documents circulating in which it's… Wait a minute, was it worse to be accused of being an atheist or worse to be accused of being a Catholic? What would be worse? Oh, they're both bad. At this point, you can get killed for both of these things, right? Okay, okay.

He had originally been accused when he was at university of being involved with Catholic plotters. He had plans to go over to the Jesuits. And at that point, that is when the Privy Council stepped in and said that he had been doing His Majesty good service and he should not be defamed because he had basically been trying to infiltrate. This is the same thing. But years later, so essentially he gets into trouble because of his government work and

There are testimony is being gathered up against him as a heretic. Now, what he appears to be being accused of when we get this list of blasphemies and heresies that are supposed to have come out of his mouth, that's essentially a capital. You know, he's likely to get tortured and killed for the things that are in what they call the Baines note. So it's been described by one of his biographers as effectively his death warrant.

He is arrested on as a result of moves against him. And oh, yes. Just before that, his ex-roommate, Thomas Kidd, is pulled into prison and tortured and a confession tortured out of him that various documents were Marlowe's. And then he's arrested. So he's sent for at his patron's house on May the 10th.

And this warrant is issued on May the 20th. He reports to the Privy Council and he's released on his own recognizance. It's not quite the same as being on bail, but it means that he commits his word as a gentleman that he would come back every day and report to their lordships, which is the Privy Council. So 10 days later, after his arrest on an extremely serious

dangerous, potentially life-ending charge. And when most normal people would be put in prison, but he's apparently free. Ten days after this, he apparently dies in unusual circumstances, in a knife fight that has been wrongly described as a brawl, in a house that has been wrongly described as a tavern.

which is actually the house of Mrs Bull, who is extremely well connected to the highest levels of government, which is this house is one that Charles Nichols, another biographer of Marlowe's, calls a government safe house. It was a stuffing off point for agents going to and from the continent. Deptford is right on the Thames estuary where it opens out, where it is easy to catch a boat to go to the European continent or in fact anywhere else. Yeah.

So Marlowe apparently, on the 30th of May, on a day in which he should, like all the others, be reporting to the Privy Council under the conditions of his release, he has an all-day meeting

Involved in that all day meeting, we have one man, Robert Polly, who is described by Charles Nicol as section head or chief. He was a very high up, very high up person in the Elizabethan intelligence services department.

He could no longer his cover had been blown in a very high profile case called the Babington plot where he had betrayed Babington. The person the plot's named after he had been a double agent in that. But it seems that he was waiting. They were waiting for him to come back from the continent on that day.

And then there's this all day meeting. It's from 10 o'clock in the morning till apparently six o'clock at night. The two other people involved are also involved with the intelligence services. And one of them also doubles as the gentleman servant of Marlowe's patron. Now, at the end of that meeting, apparently Marlowe is stabbed through the eye and dead. Right. However,

About half of the scholars, and I'm talking about traditional Stratfordian Orthodox scholars, about half of them doubt the official inquest document. The official inquest document is full of holes. And easily half of the Shakespeare scholars who look at it, the Marlow scholars, the Stratfordian scholars who look at it say, this doesn't look true. This looks like a cover up. People have tried to reenact the physical fight that is described in it, and it's physically impossible.

The people involved are extremely suspects, if you like. There's an inquest where the body is there, but it's stabbed through the eye and the people, the jury are a jury of yeoman. The witnesses are three gentlemen. The yeoman are not likely to doubt the words of the gentleman who, let's not forget, are all men.

professional liars, right? Not only do three of them work for the intelligence services or did at one point, but two of them on the side are comm men. So we actually know they're extremely good at lying. Now they say, this is our friend, Christopher Marlowe. Why would the jury disbelieve them? Mm-hmm.

It is a perfect time for Marlowe to disappear because he has means, motive and opportunity. Yeah. He has the means of being involved in the Secret Service and having friends in very high places. Yeah. Probably John Dee is one of them. Who would potentially want to save his neck because he's been downed in the line of duty by a double agent. He's been betrayed when he was essentially trying to work in the service of the Queen to protect the life of the Queen. Hmm.

And also because he has languages, he will continue to be useful abroad. So if they ship him off abroad under an assumed name, it's not difficult. We don't have at that point photographs. We don't have passports in the normal fashion. We don't have, you know, you can't trace people through bank cards or fingerprints or DNA or anything like that. And travel is so rare, especially to certain places like Italy, because, you know, we're essentially at war with the Pope.

The Pope has put out a bull, a papal bull, which is essentially a fat war on the Queen's life, saying anyone can kill her and they'll be forgiven. So if you put this person out there in enemy territory in Italy under an assumed name,

then he can usefully through diplomatic channels get information back and perhaps shit plays back as well. The point is that Marlowe's death is a mystery without even outside of the authorship question, without any other consideration. This person had the most dodgy looking death ever.

if you can call it that. And the documents around it are really weird. So the Baines note is given a title and a copy of it is revised and sent. It's marked on it, sent to her highness. It's sent to the queen. And they take certain things out of the original when they send it to the queen. But they also change the wording in a way that's really inexplicable unless you're allowed to consider the possibility that this is a cover-up for escape.

Because what the original document says that he suffered a sudden death and then it's changed to the much more equivocal, a sudden end of his life. And you go, well, why would you change death?

to end of his life because if it's ever discovered that this person is actually alive you could say well i didn't lie it was the end of his life as this person and now he's got this new life as someone else yeah i didn't lie because i didn't say he died

You know, and there are several other little points that are changed in those documents that you think, why is that changed? What is the explanation for that? There are various anomalies around May the 30th, 1593 and what happened at Deptford. The wording of that document is one. Another one is this. Robert Polly, who is this section head or chief as described by Charles Nichols, this top executive.

spy, a manager of spies, if you like. He is on an interesting mission that sometime later in the next month, in June,

He gets paid for his work for 30 days. And unusually in the payment records, it is written that during this period, which covers the period of Marlow's death, the few days before, then the day of Marlow's death, and then the inquest, and then the days after, it says he was in the Queen's service all the aforesaid time.

Almost like this guy is covering his back because if it ever comes out, he wants it to be known he was doing this duty officially. So he has that written into the docket that he was in the Queen's service all the aforesaid time. Now, what he was doing, it says in the official document, is that he was carrying letters, urgent letters for the Queen from the Hague.

Now, when he arrives in Deptford, he is only 12 miles away from

from where the queen is. The whole reason why the queen's coroner is involved in the inquest is because it is in the verge, it happens in the verge. And the phrase in the verge means within 12 miles of the monarch's person. So any murder or anything that happens, any death that happens within 12 miles of where the queen is staying, the queen's coroner conducts the inquest.

So William Danby, the Queen's coroner, conducts the inquest. That's convenient. Very convenient. We know that Polly, because it happens within the verge, is only 12 miles for the Queen. And these letters are supposed to be very important. So why does it take him a whole week to deliver them? That 12 miles, he could do that in a day. Why does he not go straight to the Queen and deliver the letters?

That's a really weird anomaly. And that's not explained by the inquest document being true. And Marley was just murdered in a kind of fight over the bill. And it's not explained by the idea that the inquest document was a cover up for assassination.

So there's three theories, but Orthodox scholars only consider two. Okay. What's those? They only consider that the inquest document's true and he was killed in a fight over a bill, or the inquest document is false and it was a cover-up for an assassination. But the problem is this.

If it was an assassination, why make it so elaborate? It's very easy to assassinate someone, especially then. Why do they not just stab him on a moonless night and kick him into the Thames? Why is it so witnessed? Why does he have these people present? Why is it all documented by the Queen's coroner? It actually doesn't fit very well at all with an assassination. And it doesn't

account for the change of the wording on the Baines note and it doesn't account for the delay in Robert Polly delivering those letters to the Queen. It is said elsewhere in official documents that Robert Polly knows all the secret ways into Scotland and when Kidd is tortured about the whereabouts of Marlowe when he last saw him he says he was going to go to the King of Scots. Who would that be?

That was James VI of Scotland who was shortly to become James I of England. So he was one of the guys I was going to ask you about. So there are other connections between James and Marlow? Yes, extremely strong connections. But James, wasn't he extremely young at that point?

James was not extremely young. He wasn't a baby or anything like that. Marlo, there is very good evidence, which I'm basically in the process of

I've written... I wrote an article about it many years ago and got a prize for it, but it was too long to be published in normal way. So I'm basically turning it into a book. But the evidence for Marlowe being the tutor of Arbella Stewart, James's cousin, is extremely strong. Wow. So...

There is an immediate connection. He wrote Edward II, Marlowe's play Edward II, is a very clear appeal to James. Yeah. And I'm convinced James knew who the author was. Yes. And now we have, you know, as I say, we have the testimony also from Thomas Kidd under torture that Marlowe was intending to go to James when he last spoke to him. Yeah.

That's all very interesting. But you know, Marlow's case is very unique because if he died in '92... '93, yeah. '93, it's still like, yeah, he could be the author and people were taking it and running with it. So that's a given. Now, if he wasn't dead at that point...

A guy like him who already had a name, already was passionate about writing, would not stop writing if he was living in Excel or whatever. And that would be an extra incentive

to hide behind something like Shakespeare. So in both cases, it works. Yes. I mean, it only works for the early plays if Marlowe died, in the sense that we have good reason to think that he's involved in the Henry VI plays and some of the other early plays. Yeah, but you have to, isn't it acknowledged that not all the plays attributed to Shakespeare fits his profile, even though most does and he's the strongest?

No. Well, I mean, people will say that because what they're looking at is this very limited view of the idea that a writer stops developing their writing when they're 29, which is a bit ludicrous, isn't it? I mean, I'm not writing the same things now that I was writing when I was 29. What I was writing when I was 29 was...

extremely different because I've learned so much in writing for so many years. Writers develop and their craft develops. And what you write when you're 29 is not the same as what you write when you're 40 or 50. And if you're trying to compare Tamburlaine with...

you know, Hamlet, they're 20 years apart and they're a whole load of life experience apart as well as writing practice and stylistic development. So it's, it's a naive position to say, oh, the styles are different. You've got to look at the date of the plays. And this is what I talk about with things like feminine endings and enjambment. You can actually measure that one. You know, that's something that you can do with a quantitative analysis. You can see how the style changes, but obviously there's a lot more to style than those things that you can count on.

But another factor is the year 93. Isn't that suspicious? When we look at the development of the Shakespeare project, let's call it that, and him vanishing the scene at that exact year. Exactly. Well, OK, here we go. So one of the things I like about the Marlow case, one of the other things, apart from the fact that Marlow's got a really good record as a writer in the same areas that Shakespeare becomes known for later. But the point is that

Marlowe apparently disappears, let's say disappears or you say dies. The Marlowe that was is gone on May the 30th and 12 days later is the earliest record we have of Venus and Adonis dying.

being on sale with the name William Shakespeare on it. Now, it's registered before Marlowe's misadventure. It's registered in April, but it's registered anonymously. It's registered anonymously. And then he disappears. And then this William Shakespeare pops up within a fortnight of his apparent death. William Shakespeare appears. Yeah.

And that is why in the coded, kind of coded, the sort of elusive conversation between Marston and Hall, where Joseph Hall is talking about nine categories of writing that this labio, this person they refer to as labio, who writes under another's name, they're referring to Venus and Adonis and the rape of Lucrece. And they clearly identify it

But he's one of the points that Joseph Paul makes is he's connecting this or he has his what I think of this as an airing of his suspicions. But he's connecting that writing to Marlowe's writing. And stylistically, there is a lot of similarity at this point. And, you know, things like in the sonnets.

the author of one sonnet talking about, you know, why do I write in the same noted weed? You know, why am I always writing the same? Like people are going to tell, they'll be able to tell who I am. He talks about writing in this noted weed and, you know, weed being clothes. So here we are with metaphors. But he's saying, why write I all the same? He would be afraid of that. He wouldn't. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. He would be afraid to be identified by it.

But then he finds out, you know. So maybe that's why, because they say the Shakespearean literature has the most, even to date,

the richest language in literature. Again, you have to cover stuff up a lot. And it's so interesting, isn't it, with the soul? And it's where you have, you know, that, you know, he talks about when that fell. Oh, God, I wish I had the words off the top of my front. He talks about bail and arrest and he uses and he talks about the wretch's knife, you know, and it's like these fit really well. I've done a...

It was one of the first academic articles I had published, actually, was in Rethinking History, which is a sort of postmodern historical journal, peer-reviewed journal. And it was a Marlovian reading of the sonnets. It was saying, look through this framework and look how the sonnets suddenly become much more understandable if you read them through a Marlovian framework. And it is really interesting the way, you know, the certain aspects of writing

that are open to you if you take a Marlowian eye to the sonnets. So, you know, obviously I've seen many different interpretations of the sonnets, but I still, for me, the Marlow ones are my favourites. I think that it uncovers more of the difficulties of the sonnets if you see them through that lens. Mm-hmm.

Does his life or his open writings, does the morals and ethics and attitudes that makes up his character, is that more reflected in Shakespeare than for Will Shakespeare? Yeah.

Because that's important. Well, definitely. Definitely. Definitely.

It's a revenge tragedy and it's about being silenced. The same motif that is in Rape of Lucrece, which is also published that year, is about being silenced and violently silenced. Wouldn't he be bitter?

I don't suppose nobody comes out as extremely bitter. Don't you think Titus Andronicus is very. Yeah, but my point is, no, nobody would voluntarily have to give up their life, especially not if they're successful. So that could explain why he went, why he was sympathetic to James and went against some of the powers that be.

Yeah, I mean, I think there was, you know, there'd be a lot of emotion, wouldn't there? If you had to give up your whole life, your friends, contact with your family, you have to give up any claim on the work that you're producing as well. Someone else is getting the credit for that. I mean, that was the whole basis for the novel that I wrote. This is really how I got into it because I thought what a supreme torture that would be. So I wrote from his perspective, yeah.

of basically being the writer of these incredible works and not being able to claim it and the pain of that. By the way, we have a lot of book readers among our listeners. So at the end, if I forget, please remind me that we plug some of your books on this, OK? OK. Whether it's research or fiction. But that's interesting. So that was your angle into it. Yes, absolutely. Because...

Yeah, I couldn't imagine the pain of being in his position. And, well, I could imagine that. I think that was the point. It was, you know, every writer has sort of things about not being recognised. And isn't it terrible that my genius is not being recognised? I thought, well, imagine if you really are one of the greatest geniuses to ever write in the English language, but you don't get to take the credit for it. That was the premise for the book, the Marlowe papers. But it's, yeah, I...

That's where we come in, isn't it? And you notice that the...

there are lots of Marlowe, Marlowe reference, like direct Marlowe references, like as you like it. And I'm named after the heroine of, as you like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's so, I mean, there's so many interesting motifs in that for a Marlowe. But it is the play that directly quotes him and refers to him dead shepherd. Now I find I saw of might, whoever loved, who loved not at first sight, who is, which is quoting Marlowe. And then it talks about, um,

"Strikes one dead as a reckoning" Again, I'm terrible at just quoting stuff off the top of my head, but I'm used to writing essays and just checking my sources. But it refers to the reckoning in a small room, which wasn't widely... the actual circumstances of his death, the inquest document wasn't uncovered until the 1920s.

It's interesting that the author of the play seems to know more about what happened to Marlowe than the documents widely available at the time. And the other sort of public accounts of Marlowe's death, which circulated in the late 1590s, early 1600s, are mostly very inaccurate.

But as you like it, which interestingly had its publication stayed. So it was registered in 1599, the year of the Bishop's Ban, and then it wasn't allowed to be published. Yeah.

But that has a reference to Marlowe and it has, you know, it quotes Marlowe and it basically refers to his death in terms that were not publicly widely known at that point, the circumstances. Yeah, you mean, yeah, if he didn't die, you mean? No, well, it's, yeah, I'm talking about the death, whether it was a stage death or another death. But it's,

It's a reckoning. It's a reckoning in the room. And the interesting thing about reckoning is in the inquest document, it uses the word the reckoning, which means like the check, the bill, right? You add it up. It's the reckoning. But of course, it has this other meaning of reckoning.

as we would say, like your chickens coming home to roost. You know, this is the results of things that have been happening. And Shakespeare uses the same word that is used in the inquest document of the reckoning. Interesting. Plus, like you already said, I think he was connected. He translated. What was it? It was Ovid's Amores, I think, from those two lines. Yeah. I mean, and that is another publication which was published

was banned. Of course. Marlowe had published alongside some... Oh, interestingly, so when he published his... Well, I don't say he published it, but when his translation of Amores was published alongside John Davis's epigrams in the station as...

it says that there are certain sonnets, as he just poems using that word loosely, by J.D. and W.S., not J.D. and C.M. It says W.S. in the stationer's register. When it comes to if he was the author or the main author, do you have, because all the others have like an explanation for why the exact pen name, Will I Am, the Shaker of the Spear, is there any explanation

connections like that tomorrow? It's not important. It doesn't have to be, but it would be fun to hear if there was. Oh, well, I'm not, I haven't, to be honest, I'm boned up on the name thing recently, so I can't tell you, but it's about the Theno springing out of the head of Zeus and all that nonsense, isn't it? It's just a classical reference. I don't think it's

But don't underestimate the code thing, because upon researching this, I see there's even more love codes. For example, in the inscription on the monument. Well, the inscription on the monument clearly is cryptic. There's no question that the monument in Stratford Church is cryptic and full of...

It's deliberately inviting the reader to read and decode it. And obviously there are several different decodes to that. And there is a Marlowe one for sure.

which Peter Ferry came up with, which I really do rather like. I think it has some validity to it. Yes, I mean, that's clearly inviting decoding. I think the sonnet's dedication, obviously, is ripe for a decode. But I think when people want to do things like find anagrams from the first lines of the plays or actually find codes within the sonnets,

that's a step too far for me because, I mean, anagrams are extremely weak as evidence. No, no, that's, you're talking 1800s codes. The latest are extremely refined stuff. It's like the stuff John Dee was into, like steganography. Yeah, I mean, that stuff is interesting, but it's also something I really stay away from because it's not relevant to my area at all. No, no, I know, I know. But I,

I'm just inquiring how aware you are, because I would love to do, I'm going to do, I've already done a Bacon connection and I'm going to do a De Vere connection. And I just discovered there's a case also for Marlowe. So, but I'll take that with them. Another kind of suspicious thing is the portrait, the classical portrait of Shakespeare. If you line up all the candidates, right?

And I do believe we don't need more candidates. I think we have the, among the usual suspects, I'm sure we have the right person. But if you line them up, the one who actually physically looks the closest to the classical Shakespeare portrait is Marlow.

don't you think? Yes, I do. Yeah. I mean, it looks like the same man 20 years older. Someone I know used to work in a high school in the States. He was a Marlovian and he just had the two portraits of the Corpus Christi portrait of Marlow and the Shandas portrait of Shakespeare side by side on a notice board and with no comment. And people would say, is that the same guy? That looks like the same guy. I mean, they clearly do look like the same person 20 years later. Absolutely.

But you acknowledged that Johnson must have known who it was. So obviously, he is one of my questions. What was the relationship, if there was any, and we know it, between Marlow and Johnson?

We have sort of a one degree of separation thing in that I have not got any documentary evidence of direct connection. But Ben Johnson clearly knows Marlowe's friends. So he wrote a play with Nash and Chapman, both of whom and Chapman shares Thomas Walsingham as a patron.

And is under the Marlovian theory is absolutely the best bet for the rival poet, because he was a person who the sonnet 86 something, you know, was it your spirit by spirits taught to write? Now, Chapman claimed he'd been visited by the spirit of Homer when he was translating the Iliad. And there are other reasons for making, you know, that he fits really well there because they did share a,

Poet and patron and the author of the sonnet says both your poets. It was clearly addressing the patron that there's two poets who share a patron. So George Chapman is connected to Marlowe and to Marlowe's patron and Thomas Nash, much more so Thomas Nash, who co-writes with Johnson. And they're both get into trouble for writing a play, which is fantastic.

banned and destroyed, which we don't have sadly called the Isle of Dogs. Yeah, so he knows Thomas Nash and Thomas Nash declares Marlowe publicly as a friend, you know, in a published document. We know he knew Nash.

Yeah, and the Isle of Dogs, so interesting that this play was banned. No one knows what is in it. And the Stratfordians like to say, well, the Isle of Dogs is where the Queen kept her hounds. And maybe she was talking about courtiers being like the Queen's dogs. What interests me about the Isle of Dogs, it's a physical location directly opposite Deptford. Interesting.

It's directly opposite the place where Marlowe's supposed to have died, but in fact might have left the country. That's suspicious.

And yeah, and then they go, oh, not only to the, you know, what is in this play that the authorities get so upset and ban it and successfully destroy it so we don't know what was in it. And they throw the appropriate people into prison. Ben Johnson, when he's in prison, he is, one of the things that happens to him is that Robert Pauley, the very man who was involved in Marlowe's

Day in Deptford this is top spy guy ends up being put into Ben Johnson's cell to grill him and Ben Johnson ends up writing an epigram about that so we know there's a very strong connection with Johnson and Nash as well as Chapman yeah

that's interesting okay um i have to ask you do we know if there's any connection between bacon and marlo of course i'm convinced bacon is involved in the publishing of the

In fact, there's huge evidence that he was involved in the publishing of the first folio. Yeah. That doesn't mean he's the author, of course. Yeah. I mean, you know, say Marlow leaves the country in 1593. We don't know if that's what happens. As far as I know, there's no documented evidence of him being connected to Bacon before that. However, I am very interested in the fact that

Bacon's brother, Francis Bacon's brother, Anthony Bacon, was on the continent. He was a spy, wasn't he? He was a spy. And somebody writes to Anthony Bacon in June, only a couple of weeks, basically, after Marlowe's apparent death.

Death, perhaps disappearance. Someone who's involved in the skullduggery and one of the other documents connected to Marlowe in the government files writes to Anthony Bacon talking about this heretical book, this heretical book that Marlowe is supposed to have written and saying, I know a man, I can bring a man to you who can tell you where the author of that book is. And why? Why? After, you know, if Marlowe died, then surely this is all finished. Right.

Why is someone writing to Anthony Bacon, someone connected with the skullduggery that brought Marlowe down? Why are they writing to Anthony Bacon? Subsequently, I'm very interested in the fact that the Bacon brothers have this scriptorium and, you know, there are young men waiting to copy things out. You know, there's a letter written.

I think it's from Anthony Bacon saying, you know, like, send me some more things to copy out. So if you imagine that, as we know, Bacon got involved in sort of certain levels of government, if perhaps, although Anthony's now come back to this country, if his spy network still exists and he is still a person able to bring back things through from, say, I mean, he was in France, but from the continent generally, yeah.

It's just, you know, it's an interesting possibility, I would say. Obviously, that's all speculation. Yeah, yeah. But we have to be like detectives about it. Yeah, but the letter to Anthony Bacon, to me, is really suspicious. Why are they doing this coded reference to Marlowe after, you know, if Marlowe's dead, that's it. Case closed. End of story. Yep.

But no, this letter exists. And so I'm curious. I think Anthony Bacon, for me, I mean, I agree with you. I think there's good evidence that Francis Bacon's involved in the publication of the folio. And I think...

Anthony Bacon is a useful figure in this as well. And I think he I can connect to Marlowe. And obviously, that's, again, one degree of separation. The brothers were fairly close. Yeah. And, you know, do you know about this document they found where Bacon is practicing signing as William Shakespeare? Are you talking about the Northumberland manuscript? That's what I'm talking about. I think you've made a bit of a leap in saying it's Bacon is practicing.

Well, I mean... That's one interpretation of it and it really isn't the only one. Okay, so they don't agree it's Bacon? No. No, someone is practicing the name William Shakespeare. And Francis Bacon. Yes, agreed. But Neville's name is also on there. You know, it's an interesting number of things on the Northumbrian manuscript. And what's hilarious about that is that Stratfordians don't even know it exists. No, they don't. I mean, most Stratfordians, if you tell them about it, they go, what?

And it's surely it's really important. It's one of the very early mentions of certain Shakespeare plays. And it's got his name on it multiple times. Why would you not be interested in this document? Absolutely. But, you know, that doesn't prove any authorship. The best way to prove an authorship is to do the literary analysis, of course.

Yeah, absolutely. But it proves a plot. And I do wonder why both Johnson and Bacon, I mean, someone has to be involved. But if Marlowe is even alive, I mean, if he's dead, it doesn't matter who it was. It's gold and they're having it for some reason and they want to use it for their own aims. Some may be political, others may be just commercial. But if he's still alive, if he's still alive, why would those two guys be involved?

Why would they be? Well, we don't know when Bacon's involvement is there. As I say, it might just be because Antony has got fingers on the continent and can bring things back. It seems to me from the work of Francis Bacon that what he's really interested in is, you know, it's a humanist agenda. He has got this humanist agenda. He wants to improve humankind through, you know, making them better thinkers and understanding, you know,

human emotions and life better. And Shakespeare does that really, really well. So it's part, I think, of his humanist project. Because in a society where most of the, you know, the large number, most of the population are illiterate, you're not going to reach them through books.

But you can reach them through theatre and you bring in this entertaining element and there's always some clowns, there's a bit of borediness, you know, so it's not just all, they don't just want it to be some purely intellectual thing. And Shakespeare has all of that. It has all the elements that the illiterate people can enjoy as well. But at the same time, it's kind of uplifting them, you know, it's teaching them about life and about how to behave and certain sort of moral things. Absolutely. It fits his agenda spiritually, politically. Exactly.

So that's why Bacon's involved, because that's his project for humankind and very much for British. You know what I mean? He's a patriot in the best possible way. You know what I mean? It's like uplifting the English nation through educating the masses and making them less awful. His motives are very clear. I was thinking more connection-wise, but you already said it. It's through his brother, Peter.

Yeah, through his brother. And, you know, if you think Marlowe was working for the government, Bacon is working for the government, too. You know, if part of that, the Elizabethan government is to, you know, and eventually Jacobean is to uplift, illuminate, help humankind involved to some degree is part of that project.

It's part of that project. And for Johnson, maybe it's just that he was connected with these people and he was like... Well, you know, he actually was in quite a position of power. He ends up in a sort of poet laureate's position. He's very well connected in the court. You know, he knows... Also, he had political power? Well, you know...

Well, you know, in a way that some very well-connected writers do, if you know what I mean. Okay, okay. Influence. Yeah, he has influence. And the point is that if someone knows as much as...

And it seems that he did know a lot, you know, actually have the insight and possibly looking at things like the Isle of Dogs from a Marlopian perspective. He really knew. Right. And not everybody would have known. But then he's able to express things very carefully in an encoded way. And he's very good at sort of double meanings and stuff. He's the perfect person to lay the groundwork.

Clues down, if you like, if you want to leave clues, but make them quite difficult to solve. There was a really fascinating paper at the recent Oxfordian conference. And I don't want to. I mean, that person needs to basically publish it and get credit for it. So I'm not going to talk about the ideas, but it did. It was about Bacon and what happened with his desk fire. And. Well,

Oh, wow. Yeah, I mean... You're saying A but not B. Wait a minute, this was not a Baconian? It was... An Oxfordian, at the Oxfordian conference. An Oxfordian? Hmm, I'm suspicious. No, it's really good. I mean, it's basically, what I would say is it's just a non-Stratfordian perspective. It's a non-Stratfordian perspective. It wasn't saying, and therefore Oxford. Okay, okay, okay. It was a non-Stratfordian perspective on the issue with the folio. And what it appears to show, I think,

fairly persuasively, is that there were other writers who were rather miffed that Johnson was put in this position of really power and being on the inside when they had various suspicions, but they were not brought in, if you like. And I mean, he's just a fascinating two-faced character, isn't he? Yeah, absolutely. Let's quickly go through. I see, oh, time is flying. So

King James recovered, Dee recovered, Johnson recovered, Bacon recovered. I have three more. And Elizabeth, let's go there. What, if anything, was the connections there? Well, if he's working to protect her life, he may not have had direct access because that would be very unusual. But he's working for people on the British Council.

You're right, we don't need a personal connection with her. No, he's working for the members of the Privy Council. We have documented evidence that they wrote in his defence in 1587 and it's very clear that when he's sent back in 1592 and not arrested, he's sent to Lord Burleigh, nothing bad happens. And he's also connected to nobility who again, they would have audience with the Queen.

So he also if I can make the case of him being Arbella Stewart's tutor, which I think I can make a very good case for having gathered some extra evidence. Arbella was presented at court and spent quite a lot of time at court. So he has, you know, several cases.

you know, first degree connections to Elizabeth. And the house that he apparently met his end in, Damien on a Bull's House, she was cousin to Blanche Parry. And Blanche Parry was the Queen's most trusted servant. She was her nursemaid. So she'd stood in for her mother when Anne Boleyn was killed. You know, Blanche Parry raised Elizabeth like a mother and then became keeper of the Queen's jewels, which is the most trusted position in

And, you know, this person's cousin is the person who has the house where Marlowe is supposed to have met his end. It's actually really well connected to the court. What about Cecil?

Well, yeah. So Cecil is also referred to. He refers to Eleanor Bull, I think, in his will. She refers to him as cousin. He was the person that took over the Secret Service once Francis Walsingham died. So Marlowe would have been reporting to him. He was already running the service. But Cecil was against the place.

He was what? He was against the place, wasn't he? What evidence do you have for him being against the place? Oh, no evidence. But he's portrayed like that, for example, in Anonymous.

Yeah, well, that's a work of fiction and it's very ahistorical. I have to say Anonymous. I started watching Anonymous and it made me so angry. I had to go out and buy a bottle of wine and then drink a very large glass and then start again so I could laugh at it because it was the most, I mean, it was a really missed opportunity, I think, because if you want to do a fictional version of a film,

an authorship theory, you should stick as closely to documented facts as you can. And it didn't. It just played fast and loose. Or if you take liberty of... It's going to be a movie after all, so they need to... Massive liberties, though. No, no, no. But I'm saying if they take liberty, which they have to do to make it a story, at least not let it go against known facts. Exactly. Which they did. Yeah. But I know that both De Vere and Bacon had a low opinion of his son.

Yes, you can have a low opinion of a man's son without having a low opinion of the man. You know, people are not their children. Yeah, so lots of people didn't like Robert Cecil. I'm not saying people liked William Cecil, but he had their respect. Okay. Yeah. And of course, we can't know what Marlow thought of Robert, right? No. Because he was out of the scene by then. Absolutely. But we know that he would have reported...

to Lord Burley. And in fact, we know from a document that he was sent back to him. So we have a document that says he's been sent back to Lord Burley. So we know. But I thought it was Burley who was behind trying to smack down on the Shakespeare plays. At least the ones that favoured Essex or were used for his. That just stands to reason, right? It's a power battle here.

Yeah, but he's not smacking down on the plays. There was obviously, when the Essex Rebellion happened, Richard II, when it was published, did not have the deposition scene in it. But when it was played, it clearly did. And the Queen found out. And it was being used by supporters of Essex. Right. But...

So that was why the representative of Lord Shade Manor's men was brought up to testify, etc. And Bacon was involved in the prosecution, wasn't he? But there was a general issue with let's not have some kind of deposition. Obviously, William Suttle is going to be against people trying to take over the throne. Because, in fact, he was trying to

behind the scenes broker some kind of arrangement. I mean, he was always very much on the side of James. But the funny thing is that Essex was actually on the side. Essex was very much for James taking over rather than himself. But it all became a bit.

messy because it got very personal with him and the queen and he was very upset about having his his um he had some money from some kind of wine thing and that got taken away and he was put on house arrest and the whole thing was not so much insurrection as he was trying to plead his case with the queen but he got it all very very wrong and it looked like arms erection and so that was the end of him but you know there's

I would be interested to see any, you know, soundly argued thing that William Cecil was against the Shakespeare plays, because I've not seen any evidence for that. And I don't think that's right. Okay. But even if Marlow is the author or the main author, I still think we can afford entertaining suggestions like, well, circumstantial evidence, maybe that, for example, that Bacon and James were cousins or that...

De Vere had an affair and maybe was the father of... Yeah. You know, all these classical things doesn't threaten the Marlow thing. What's your view on this? Well, I'm not a big fan of speculation and... I mean, everything has to start with a hypothesis. Yeah, but I do like to have some evidence. I'm not... I think you've got to argue from evidence and...

I'm not hugely persuaded by certain things that I've seen along these lines. And I guess probably what I'll say at this stage is I'll just stay out because I think it's not relevant to what I'm trying to do with the authorship question, which is to get it taken seriously. I think when you start cooking up a necessary expectation

extra complications. I think we need to get the main thing established rather than spinning off into various little side theories that are going to make it look much less plausible to academia. So we could agree maybe that there's not clear-cut evidence. I mean, that would be difficult in this day and age, go back all that. But you see no circumstantial evidence, let's say, for

de Vere's relationship with the Queen and his fathership of... No, not really. Okay. That looks like wishful thinking to me. Okay, okay. But I have, of course, to ask you, is there any known connection between de Vere and Marlowe? Well, we do know that de Vere's house, as was, that he had to give up. Interestingly, there was...

Thomas Watson ends up tutoring the girl of the family that lives there. And one of the very earliest versions of a Shakespeare sonnet is in a commonplace book that was owned by her, the daughter, the teenage daughter of that family, the Cornwallis family. And it's an interesting, again, we have to just...

interesting how it ends up there in that it's not in her handwriting it looks like it might be her tutor's handwriting who would be thomas watson who was we know a friend of marlo's so um thomas watson has access to this as yet unpublished it won't be published for quite some time early shakespeare sonnet it's quite different when it gets published um in the published form but um and it ends up

with Cornwallis' daughter. And that is in the house that Oxford previously owned. So I know the Oxfordians say she ends up with it because Oxford left it behind in the house. Possible. But also it could have been brought in by Thomas Watson if it was actually written by Marlowe.

So there are connections. I know that Oxfordians like to say, I've seen them claim that Marlowe worked for Oxford and was one of his coterie of writers. But I have not found evidence for this coterie of writers, this scriptorium. That's interesting because there were competing groups like that. And I already had Dr. Germanis on, if you know him, he's big on writing.

Mary Sidney. And we know she had like a court of writers. Could Marlowe have been connected to that faction then? If not... Marlowe is connected to Mary Sidney. You'll be pleased to know. Oh, let's hear, let's hear. This is big. And this is part of the book that I'm writing because it all connects back into this. There's a... We know... The one thing we do have is we have a dedication to her for...

from it's signed cm and it's on um it's basically after watson dies and uh

he posthumously publishes his friend's work and he writes the dedication to Mary Sidney and he signs it at CM. So, okay, but that's just the dedication and obviously... No, I mean, that's not out of nowhere. No, it's not out of nowhere. But you can say, well, you don't know because people did sometimes dedicate things speculatively to noble people in the hope that they would get some money from it. However, I have uncovered...

much deeper connections to the Pembroke Circle. But I will save that for when my book comes out. OK, so you have you have a forthcoming book. Well, it's when I say forthcoming, I'm still writing it, but I have got quite a lot of it under my belt. So we'll have to see

That will be probably a year or two down the line before that comes out. OK, OK. So we could transition to your books now unless you feel there is some other important information we should cover when we're first covering the Marlovian case that we haven't mentioned yet.

Oh, we've probably covered more than enough because I do go pretty deep. I mean, I would just say in sort of summary that the points that I think are really good for the Marlowe case is that the death is independently suspicious.

Also, William Shakespeare was born almost immediately after his death, within a fortnight. Marlowe is the only one of the candidates with a proven track record of writing like Shakespeare. He essentially more or less invented the English history play. He was the first person to make blank verse drama work. He more or less invented the soliloquy in the form that Shakespeare takes it on.

He had the best reason to hide his identity, in my view, because if he didn't, he would be tortured and killed. And I think that's really good motivation. And he has the ability, because of his Secret Service work, to hide and send his plays back from exile. He has a university education, which I think is also extremely important, you know, for the plays show evidence of a university education.

He has the social breadth because he was raised in one social class and rose to the other social class. So he mixes both with nobility and with commoners. And the Marlowe story also fits with Shakespeare's obsessive themes of exile, which have been noticed by people like Stephen Greenblatt, even though he's obviously a Stratfordian. But he's talking about he's really into exile. There's a great book by Jane Kingsley Smith called Shakespeare's Drama of Exile about how exile is really important to the plays.

And also things that come up again, faking death. So there were 33 characters in 18 Shakespeare plays that are wrongly thought to be dead and then come back to life. And he again and again, Shakespeare returns to slander, false accusation, loss of name and reputation, which are obviously things that would concern Marlowe if Marlowe were the author of this canon. But the idea is that he then lived in Italy.

That would certainly be a place where I would expect the author to know well because of the Italian evidence, the on-the-ground evidence that we have and the fact that 14 plays are set in Italy. It seems to me very likely.

You know, the person knows Italian, they know Sicilian slang, you know, they know that when you stand on this bridge in Florence, you can see these two landmarks. We've had this argued from Oxfordians already. So I think it's a very good reason. And it's also a good place to place things.

Marlowe. Say Marlowe didn't die and you want to put him in exile. It's a good place politically to put him. It's far enough away and no one generally is travelling to and from Italy because of the Pope, because it is enemy territory. But it's a good place to put someone who can keep an eye on things, send stuff back.

But no one's likely to go over there and see him and recognise him. I mean, it's, you know, foreign travels much rarer and people wouldn't after a while know what he looked like anyway. Hardly anyone would actually know what he looked like. Only someone in certain circles in London would actually know what he looked like anyway. But it's a good place to hide him away where he'll be of use to the government. But we haven't found any person yet.

No, there have been. That could have been identified. Yeah, there have been a few people put forward. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. There have been a few people put forward and I have investigated them. One of them for a long time was a really real front runner. And I was quite excited. A lot of people were quite excited about it. But then it did get that got unraveled and we let that one go. And another one who is connected to the embassy in Venice that, you

you know, I have seen a case for, I've looked into it and I found it wanting. So, so far, so not good. But then on the other hand, you know, if you're going to successfully fake your death, you kind of need not to be found. Yeah. It would be a lousy spy if we easily could find him in so little place. Absolutely. I mean, we do hear about, there are plenty of cases then and now where people will certainly, we know about faked deaths, but we only know about the ones that are discovered. So we only find the people who are very bad at it. Yeah.

You know, sometimes who out themselves because they can't bear it anymore. But but there are plenty of cases of people faking their deaths. So and if the alternative was actual death, I think most of us would consider it. You know, it's like, well, you can fake your death and live in exile or you can actually die. Most of us would choose fake death in exile. Yeah, of course. Of course.

And I don't suppose there's any, like in Bacon's case, we know that he lived in the neighborhood of Shakespeare. I don't suppose there's any connection between Shakespeare and Marlow. No, and I don't think, I don't think that. We don't need it. I totally agree. Yeah, you don't need it. No, I mean, the guy comes in after the fact, essentially. Yeah, yeah. He comes in after the fact and then he gets his share and then he puts his name on things and becomes a brand.

and keeps quiet and that's his job and he's very good at it. Yeah. Yeah. So they picked him for, they didn't pick the wrong guy, that's for sure. No, no, I picked him for discretion, 10 out of 10, you know. Did you have any opinion of, you said something about Ben Johnson being involved in the cover-up and you said something about why they would do it, but obviously it is to help Marlow, right?

I mean, it may be more like to help friends in high places because, I mean, how helpful is it? Who is being helped? Why is the secret to continue forever and ever? If you see what I mean. There is an interesting point because I think it's most likely that Marlow is actually dead at that point. So if he hasn't died in 1593, that he's dead before the failure comes out.

Really? Yeah, extremely likely. He died that early? So you think that when the plays, when they stopped producing new plays, he was gone by then? I think it's very likely. Although, if you look at The Tempest, it's interesting, isn't it? Because The Tempest has often been seen as this play where at the end...

Prospero is saying, you know, he's giving up his magic. And you can see that as a metaphor for writing. He's saying, I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm done with it. I will drown my books. Now, it's an interesting bookend with Marlowe's career because one of his most successful early plays is Dr. Faustus. And Faustus and Prospero mean the same thing. They both mean fortunate. Yeah.

And and both of them are involved in magic. So Faustus gets involved in magic and it ruins his life. You know, his soul is torn off to hell. And Prospero is trying to use magic to make his life in exile better.

And at the end, Prospero does this extraordinary speech where he's asking for forgiveness for his sins. And you think, what sins? He was wronged against. But it sounds much more like the author asking for forgiveness. And this has been read this way by Stratfordians too. And the author saying, I'm giving up writing. I'm done. I can't do it anymore.

So maybe it's not that the author is dead at this point, but that he gave up writing. In other words, the author is dead, but not the man. Yeah. Okay. That's one way of saying it. Yeah. But I think that when the folio comes out, why is it published when it's published? And why is it done in such a way? It's clearly written to make people

the secret stay. Do you know what I mean? It's saying like, look into it. But for most... But then again, there's a bunch of... Why infuse the first folio with so many hints? Well... By the way, interesting that it starts with the tempest. Yeah, no, I agree. It is infused with so many hints. And...

And it is there for, you know, and it specifically does say, doesn't it, that it's there for sort of certain people to see. And if Marlow was a spy, which he was, then the cloak and dagger aspect, they would enjoy it, actually. They would play with it. There would have to be double communications involved.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I feel like you would feel I want this to be discovered at some point. I would like, you know, I would like to have credit for this. I would like to come back from the dead. Why are there so many resurrection fantasies? Ludicrous resurrection fantasies, some of them really hard to stage, like the one in the Winter's Tale, really hard to stage that because it's so ludicrous, this statue coming to life. But that

is, you know, I can see why the author would want to be resurrected, you know, certainly towards the end of life, certainly if they could say, well, the danger's passed, why keep the secret? But then there are people, there are powerful people who were probably involved in such a thing who would want that to stay a secret. You know, it implicates lots of people. It also breaks a great deal of trust, perhaps in government as well. You know, you don't want the people to think the government are lying to us.

But I was thinking that because he was still alive, they would try to cover it. Yeah, maybe. But if he wasn't, then it's because other people are alive who were implicated in the disappearance and the whole deception, if you like, the deception of the mass deception. And don't want the masses to know that they've been deceived.

Absolutely. So, you know, yeah. Yeah, I have one final issue I just remembered when you said something here that I have to ask you before we can wrap this up. And that's, I'm going to interview a chap who has analysed esoteric aspects of Shakespeare, which are plentiful. We have to then see if there's any known, because I've asked this of the Baconians, of the Oxfordians, all of them can claim some kind of

esoteric insight on behalf of their favourite. What about Marlow? Do we know if he had... I mean, Dr. Faustus. Yeah, right. It's obvious, but what do we know about his esoteric... And we know that he was involved in what they now call the School of Night with Raleigh, with Harriet, with various other people who were exploring these ideas. You know, one of the people that he is documented as being connected to is the Earl of Northumberland, who's known as the Wizard Earl. Mm.

who kept basically a chemistry lab trying alchemy. So he's obviously involved in that side of things. Yeah. Okay.

That's obvious. That's great to know. Well, then I can't say that you have discouraged me from buying into the Malovian case. And I look very forward to when your book comes out, whenever that will be. You already have a fiction. What have you written about this or related to this subject so far?

Yeah, so outside of the novel, which is the Marley Papers, what I've done is a lot of academic papers, which you can find on my website, which is rosbarber.com. I've actually got a sort of big downloadable file of all the academic papers I've had published, some of which...

most of which pertain to aspects of the authorship question. Some are Marlowe related and some are just more general, pulling apart aspects of the Stratford case. For example, the idea, the old defence of the traditional author that he used Warwickshire dialect, I've pretty much put that one to bed now. I think no one can use that anymore. So,

So I had two academic papers published on that. I've written something, it's an ongoing large e-book on the LeanPub platform called Shakespeare the Evidence, where I... It's basically a book in bullet points, which pulls together all the evidence and arguments. I've not finished because I can keep releasing new versions of it, but I haven't had time to work on it recently.

But it has rather a lot. It's about 600 and something pages at the moment. And it's all the evidence and arguments marshaled on both sides of the debate and basically drills into them and finds the weakest and strongest arguments. So I wrote a little I edited and co-wrote a book published by a mainstream publisher called Corto, which is called 30 Second Shakespeare or Know It All Shakespeare.

in the States. And that is pretty much a coffee table book, but it's done from a very neutral perspective, unlike most books about Shakespeare for a wide audience, in that I did not allow anyone to suggest that, you know, Shakespeare wrote this because he was brought up in Warwickshire. So that's on my roster. And what else have I done? What about the novel Devotion? Is that related? No, that's not. That's just a novel. Okay.

Yeah, so there was something else as well. Oh, yeah. So there's the MOOC, my massive open online course on the authorship question that actually came from the unpublished manuscript of a book that I was trying to get to a mainstream publisher and they didn't like it. So I didn't like it because it's...

It was obviously too heretical. So I turned it into a massive open online course, which was sponsored by the University of London. And you can undertake that with Coursera. It's completely free. There's a huge amount of material in that. And it's all sort of video learning with transcripts.

It's been translated into several languages and 15,000 plus people so far have registered. So that's it. That's a piece of writing, if you like, that I've done. There's something else as well. I'm trying to remember. Oh, yeah. So I also have a sub stack called Adventures in the Authorship Question, which you can subscribe to for free. There's not much on there at the moment because it's a fairly new venture, but I should be doing more as I go along.

Yeah, even I have a joint Substack because they take podcasts now. Right.

But yeah, we must support that site. I love it. But yeah, no, we have to push. You know, I think one of the reasons they are changing attitude is that the boat is leaking everywhere. And from popular pressure is shows like mine. The more people we spread this information to, you know, the more it's going to yield. Youngsters coming in will come in with a fresh attitude, not the old dogmatic attitude.

I also love the fact that you're on the board of this non-Stratfordian group. What was it called again? I always forget. The Shakespearean Authorship Trust. We've seen some progress. Last year in October, we were invited by the New York Public Library, which is pretty damn mainstream. We were invited to do a webinar for them on the authorship question.

That would not have happened 10 years ago. And it's as you say, it's because the person who's programming the content for the New York Public Library is in his 30s. And younger people are just more open to this than, you know, the older generations. And they're grown up exposed to the idea. Exposed to it on the internet. You know, it has really worked well that way. The sort of democratisation of knowledge through the internet has really helped Authorship Doubt grow and it will continue to grow. And I will see...

more shifts in the next decade. Yeah, and I'm going to contribute to it. And, you know, the reason I have on different the case for people, and also the reason it's great that you have groups like neutral groups, non-stratified groups, is the same reason, because we all can agree that

You know, it's easier to know who didn't. It's easier to know that he didn't write it, Mr. Spathorn. Exactly. But then the extra step, who did it? Like you said yourself in the beginning, that takes a little more. And there, you know, as long as I don't know,

Of course, I'm going to flaunt the most serious alternatives. And then people can make their own mind up until we get the smoking gun, which I actually think could happen. We shall see. I will ask you as a last question. Do you think there is a bunch of hidden manuscripts somewhere? Well,

What I do know is that for at least a couple of hundred years since, you know, we got into more serious Shakespeare scholarship, I suppose, they have been barking up the wrong tree and the places they've been looking have not been the right places. And the non-strat... Like in Stratford? Yeah.

Yeah, like in Stratford. And the non-Stratfordian side have not had the backing, the funding, because it's not taken seriously as a question. What we need, that's why it's so important to have it taken seriously in academia, because then we could get funding, we could get people sent into different archives where we might want to look. Because no one, no Stratfordian is going to want to look at our

archives in Italy. I was just going to say that, Ross. We have to go to Italy. Yeah, right. But so that's what we need that. And we need said that we need a funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK and whatever other funding bodies they have in other countries. Right. We need funding. We need appropriately qualified scholars who've

got. And we need Italian to be onto it. I mean, I'm sure there's some document lying in some second-hand antiquary, and they don't even know it's old English. They are clueless about what this is. There are, exactly. So there are Italian scholars who are on this. And it would not be signed William Shakespeare, right? If anything...

Okay, maybe Marlowe, but if this was like he smuggled it onto England, he probably wouldn't even put his own name on it. I shouldn't think so. That would be signing your own death warrant again. Why do that? No, but exactly this. So I think there are undiscovered documents. Where are they? That's the interesting thing. If we can get the funding to get people into the right archives and really start looking, if this was accepted...

as a proper question, a research question in academia, then the work could be done and things can be found. I know where they are. They are where all the census stuff are. They're in the Vatican library. Yeah, right. They've got it, haven't they? There is also the whole Freemasonry thing. You know, the Masons know stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. Now, Marlow was a little early for being an initiate, but... Yes, yes.

But we know the Folio is very much a Masonic project, right? Yeah. Without going too far into that. Bacon and all that. Anyway, it was an absolute pleasure having you on, Rose. Yeah, it was a pleasure speaking to you, Al. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Okay, that's it. And by the way, oh, we forgot. Well, your new book, when it's out, if you want some free advertisement, contact me and we'll cover that, okay? Okay, brilliant. Will do. Yes, it'll take a little while. Still writing it, but yes, I've got quite a lot of it behind me. Good. We need some space between our guests revisiting us, so that's just great. Of course. No, I look really forward to it. It's good that, you know...

The Oxfordians are taking all the air in the room, so we need more. Other voices. Okay, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Val. I really appreciate it. All right. Have a great day now. And you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. And there you have it. Now, this episode is already long as it is, so I won't go on for too long with my post commentary.

But I want to share with you some excerpts from Shakespeare. One passage of his work that Marlovian proponents interpret as autobiographical is found in As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 2, where Jacques speaks of a metaphorical death and transformation.

This famous speech resonates with the idea of life as a series of roles, including potentially faking one's own death and adopting a new identity, a theme that aligns with Marlowe's fake death in 1903 and subsequent exile.

Another intriguing passage comes from Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 3, where Friar Lawrence advises Romeo on his banishment. Quote, Malovians see parallels between Romeo's exile and Marlowe's rumoured flight from England.

The idea of fleeing to avoid punishment, as well as the potential for reinvention, reflects aspects of Marlow's purported narrative. Further in The Winter's Tale, Act 4, Scene 3, Otto Lyckus, a rogue character, says, For the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it. A prize, a prize.

Otto Lyckes is a figure of disguise and reinvention, themes that echo the idea of Marlow reinventing himself. Another fitting example comes from All's Well That Ends Well, Act 4, Scene 3, where Parolas is accused of duplicity and reinvention. Quote, "...simply the thing I am shall make me live."

This resonates with the theme of creating a new identity, continuing life after leaving behind a previous self. Now, whether or not Kit Marlowe was the sole and only author, I would be shocked if he was not involved in the creative production of the works. Whether by having one of his spy buddies, let's say Anthony Bacon, provide manuscripts to someone in England, let's say Francis Bacon,

or if he indeed did die, by having his unpublished and/or unfinished manuscripts circulate into the hands of whoever reworked and published them under the auspices of the Shakespeare Project. And that's the bell. Thanks for listening, for your likes, shares, donations and support. I've been your host Al,

Sincerely signing off in the words of Edmund Spencer For there is nothing lost that may be found if sought. Be seeing you Who is number one?