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Sept. 30, 2023 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:32:31
Alexander Waugh

Alexander Waugh (grandson of Evelyn, son of Auberon) studied music at Manchester University and has since pursued an eclectic career including stints as a record producer, manager and classical music impresario, author of books on subjects including Wittgenstein, God, and his own literary family the Waughs, and as literary and opera critic. He is manager and archivist for largest Evelyn Waugh archive in Europe. He is chairman of the de Vere society, which maintains - with copious evidence, some of which is provided in this podcast - that the works of Shakespeare were in fact written by the 17th Earl of Oxford. You can find out more about his research into de Vere, Shakespeare and contemporaries such as John Dee, Francis Bacon and Ben Johnson at his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@alexanderwaugh7036   - - - - Whether you're looking for satirical synth-pop, or sardonic tales of modern romance, Tinderella's songs have it all. They will make you laugh, cry and hit 'Like' and 'Subscribe' simultaneously.Visit tinderella.info to listen to the sound of tomorrow today. ↓ ↓ ↓ If you need silver and gold bullion - and who wouldn't in these dark times? - then the place to go is The Pure Gold Company. Either they can deliver worldwide to your door - or store it for you in vaults in London and Zurich. You even use it for your pension. Cash out of gold whenever you like: liquidate within 24 hours. https://bit.ly/James-Delingpole-Gold / / / / / / Earn interest on Gold:https://monetary-metals.com/delingpole/ / / / / / / Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpoleSupport James’ Writing at: https://delingpole.substack.comSupport James monthly at: https://locals.com/member/JamesDelingpole?community_id=7720

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Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Deling Pod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really, really am extra excited, I have to say, about this week's special guest.
But before I introduce him, a quick word from one of our sponsors.
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So this is from Ian Dickinson.
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Whether you're looking for satirical synth-pop or sardonic tales of modern romance, Tinderella's songs have it all.
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Now, let me introduce my special guest.
Alexander Waugh.
Alexander, unusually, we're doing this podcast together because, well, you don't like doing it remotely, do you?
Not awfully, and I think my concentration's a bit better if I'm actually in front of someone who can admonish me if I make a balls-up than in front of a screen.
You get the visual signals and you get the… You could be more on it and more natural.
Alexander, there are so many things I want to ask you.
I mean, we've covered a lot of this territory before in conversations at your gaff in Somerset.
And I mean, you're Evelyn Waugh's grandson.
And Evelyn Waugh is one of my favourite writers.
I think he's probably The best novelist of the 20th century?
He's an extraordinary genius.
I'm also, I know we're not going to talk about this particularly today, but I'm also the general editor of 43 volume scholarly edition of his complete works for the Oxford University Press.
So, I am on that subject if you do have questions to ask.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
Well, actually, there is a question which is actually quite left field and quite down the rabbit hole, I want to ask you about that.
But we're going to talk mainly today about When did you start getting interested in the concept of Shakespearean authorship?
I think it really kicked off by reading standard biographies of Shakespeare because you read any single one of them and you realize there's something deeply wrong going on.
And of course, in the background, any semi-intelligent person is aware that there is a problem, that Whether you agree with it or not, whether you looked into it or not, people know that there is what's called the Shakespeare authorship problem.
Was William Shakspeare of Stratford actually the author of these plays that are attributed to him?
And so, being aware that there's a problem, but not thinking I necessarily need to look it up or do much about it, and reading, for instance, Jonathan Bates' book, The Genius of Shakespeare, you just suddenly realize that it's not only rubbish, it's silly, it's deeply silly.
Absolutely brilliant American writer Mark Twain said of Shakespeare, the biographical Shakespeare, that he is nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris.
So in other words, we know nothing about him and it's all just sort of stuck together feebly.
Was he talking about dinosaurs, do you reckon?
Do you think he was talking about the dinosaur conspiracy?
Well, I wonder.
Maybe he was onto that.
Because that's what they are.
I mean, they are about nine bones and 15… Nine bones, which you're not allowed to see, by the way.
They're all locked up in different vaults.
You're only allowed to see the Plaster of Paris versions of them.
Hey, maybe we should not do Shakespeare.
We'll do dinosaurs instead.
James, I'm happy to go wherever you want.
I mean, all I would say was that, I mean, the Shakespeare authorship issue, once I got stuck into it, opened, for me, a lot of doors about rubbish that's going on in the world.
Yeah, and and I think it's it's one of the earlier examples and it's a particularly interesting one on that account and I got I mean, I suppose my mind was always Doubtful of facts that were just plopped in front of me from a very early age and I remember distinctly irritating my maths teacher at school by saying Why is it that a minus times a minus is a plus?
Because it didn't seem to make any sense to me.
I wanted some sort of practical example of that actually being the case.
And what does it mean to minus a figure by another minus figure?
And how on earth do you end up with a plus?
It sounds like a way of defrauding anybody of any amount of money if you have a lot of debt and then multiply it and suddenly you've got a plus sum.
Anyway, my maths teacher was extremely cross, and I remember equally annoying my divinity master at school by saying, what does it mean to say, lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb?
And it seemed, why would God abhor the virgin's womb anyway?
And I was really surprised, because my questions were genuine.
I wanted genuine answers.
But how angry they made the school teachers concerned, because clearly they hadn't really thought much of this through.
So my mind was always directed towards getting underneath the skin of so-called facts that are just plopped in our faces.
And the Shakespeare... I'm not going to regret it, because I absolutely don't.
I've discovered so many fascinating new facts about it, but it has been all-absorbing.
You talk about rabbit holes.
I tend to want to talk about the reverse that that a rabbit hole for me is where everyone is in the darkness that actually I'd like to think that I'm at least waist high out of the rabbit hole and I'm in the light now because the light is where I think we all should be heading on so many subjects.
I think you are quite unusual in that.
One of the questions I'm forever asking is to the awake among us.
What is it that first alerted you to the fact that things are not as they are presented to us?
And normally it's 9-11 is the obvious one.
Some people come up with Kennedy, moon landings, whatever.
Not many, I think, go through the Shakespeare route, but it's all the same, isn't it?
It's all about deception.
It's very curious that it is the same.
And what I discovered is to some of those theories that I studied later, that they use sometimes the same symbolism.
And quite often, one's looking at It didn't start in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Masonic symbols, numbers and things like that, that implies to me that the same group throughout time has been playing us around a bit.
Yeah, yeah.
So it didn't start in the 16th and 17th centuries?
Well, no, but what makes me extremely nervous, and I think you're not so nervous about this, is whether it goes back as far as the Bible and parts of the Bible.
That have been manipulated and that...
That would be a very, very serious deception.
Well, what I like about the Bible and what I like particularly about Jesus's teachings is this endless, endless talk about deception.
How do you spot the enemy?
Well, because they're deceiving you.
That's the thing.
And I think once you've discovered someone's deceiving you, you can write them off or realize that they're baddies.
It's much, much, much harder to say, oh, that person's telling the truth, that one's telling the truth, than to say that person's deceived me.
Well, we've sort of fast-forwarded to something that I wanted to ask you a bit later on about who are the goodies and the baddies and how can we tell.
It seems to me one of the great tells of the baddies is secrecy.
I think secrecy de facto is a bad thing.
100%.
And that's what I've always said.
I've done a lot of study of Freemasonry.
There's a lot out there to study and it's very fascinating.
I've always said I'll never ever become a Freemason even if I were suggested as it because I can't stick secrets.
And the truth can often sting, can often be painful, but once it's out, it's out.
And the truth suppressed can pass down, even unrealized, even if you don't know what the problem is, what the secret is, it can pass down generations and produce people who are in pain and they don't even know why.
And it's because of some ridiculous secret that their grandparents or great-grandparents kept from them that they didn't know.
And that feeling comes right down through the generations.
We must get rid of it.
Well, I think it has a corrupting effect, secrecy.
But also, I think it's bad for the soul.
I don't know whether I've mentioned this to you, but I think I've mentioned it on the occasional podcast, that from a very early age, I found it almost impossible to lie, because I thought, I don't know where I conceived this notion, I thought that other people could see inside my head.
They can.
And they knew when I was lying, so they could see through my deception, and I felt uncomfortable with this.
I generally found it much, much easier to tell the truth, and you get a better night's sleep.
Lying is agony.
Agony.
I can't sleep today over lies I told when I was 8, 9, 10, 12 years old.
You know, it really, really pains me.
And why did I say that?
What was the point?
Nine times out of ten, I said it out of pride because I just wanted to look good in someone else's eyes.
So I just told a lie.
Of course, we tell lies at school when you've done something bad and you're threatened with a punishment and you want to get out of the punishment.
But I agree with you a million percent.
Just keep, keep hammering away at the truth.
And one feels so much better for it, all through the whole body and the system.
It's so much easier.
It's much easier, yes.
You know, what a tangle we weave when first we practice to deceive, which is about the only thing I know of.
Walter Scott.
Let's do Shakespeare.
Pretty much.
I know the saying well, I didn't know.
Yeah.
Well, you think it might have been Shakespeare.
It sounds a bit like it, but apparently it's from Marmion.
All right.
Good.
Anyway, let's do Shakespeare.
You talk about the Shakespeare problem.
I mean, I spent three years at Oxford.
Well, I mean, there was a year when you studied Shakespeare.
I mean, I read pretty much everything he wrote.
I didn't preoccupy myself too much with who wrote these plays because I was analysing the tropes and the plots and the characters and things like that.
It didn't seem to be necessary to know who wrote Shakespeare.
But now I've Now I'm older and wiser, it seems to me that it does matter, not least because of the The Weltanschauung of Shakespeare, which is quite interesting.
I did a sort of mini essay on this for my substack, which started off as a notion called All Your Favourite Quotations Are Lies or something like that.
And I started looking at Shakespeare and it suddenly struck me.
Here's a man Allegedly a man, writing in an era when it was against the law not to go to church.
So Christianity was embedded in the entire culture.
And yet, with Shakespeare, you've got a pretty godless, anti-Christian world.
Well, I have to give you a very simple answer to that.
There was a law passed saying you weren't allowed to put religious matters into place.
Oh, okay.
So that is precisely why you don't get it.
Ah, okay, fair enough.
So that's exploded my particular… Well, I think you cannot draw from that that whoever wrote Shakespeare was not a religious man.
Okay, fair enough.
I mean, those were days, of course, when there was a very tricky Anglican-Catholic divide.
And so there were those problems that were going on, whoever he was.
But no, he wouldn't be allowed to fill it.
He would have been arrested immediately.
Okay, but another thing I'm sure we can agree on, I'm on slightly steadier ground here, it is political propaganda.
We were talking earlier about Richard II, who was probably a really nice man and a good king, but in Shakespeare he's Richard Crookback.
Well, I think if you're taking the history plays particularly, they're unquestionably religious propaganda and a contemporary called Thomas Nash more or less spills that out in something he writes when he talks about the importance of plays.
There was a time when people went to plays in the middle of the day and basically got drunk and fell about all over the things with prostitutes and the plays were crap.
And it was consciously decided by the government, by the Privy Council, that what they wanted to do is in order to elevate the minds, not necessarily the common people.
In fact, when Nash talks about this, he talks specifically about captains, lawyers, courtiers, and I think he would have also definitely added students at the universities.
To make sure that when they went to the plays, they were actually elevating their minds.
That they were learning to speak courtly, as the phrase is put there.
In other words, not just speak in any old slang, rubbishy way.
Concentrate on language and take pride in one's forebears.
Once again, that's obviously a tilt at the courtiers because it's the lords who appear in those plays.
whose descendants are still around.
And so that was a very, very deliberate plot by the Privy Council to ensure that plays were actually useful.
And I think they got this from Italy, who was also some of those states were running a similar policy.
Right.
So all the things we celebrate in Shakespeare, the richness of the language and how he coined all these new words and phrases, that was a literary project, but also a political sort of socially improving project.
100%.
And by the way, those things you just mentioned, I mean, you've said when you were at university, it didn't really occur to you much, but in retrospect, now you're concentrating.
You need a tiny little bit of historical context to realize that the man who is claimed as the author of those things, whose mother and father couldn't even sign their own names, whose daughter Judith signs her name with this sort of pigtail mark, You couldn't possibly have written these plays, and it's absolutely nothing to do with class.
And of course, you'll get that thrown back at you.
You'll say, oh, you're just a snob.
Of course, he could have done it.
I'm not denying that someone of William Shakespeare of Stratford's class could have written the Shakespeare's plays.
What I'm saying is William Shakespeare of Stratford did not write them, full stop.
That particular man did not write them.
And we have the case of Marlowe, for instance.
Marlowe's father was a cobbler and he wrote plays quite similar to Shakespeare's.
In fact, in my view, in the evidence I've dug out, Marlowe was Shakespeare's servant and he worked in the scriptorium with Shakespeare.
Shakespeare being a pseudonym, of course.
So it's not a class issue.
But with Marlow, for instance, you can see very clearly that he went to school in Canterbury.
He was at Cambridge for eight years.
We know who he met.
We know how he became a scholar.
And we can see a very obvious path.
And by the way, people say, oh, the next thing they say, it was a very, very long time ago.
We just don't have the records anymore.
Well, we do.
I mean, it was a very, very well-documented period, the Elizabethan age.
And we have playwrights who you as an English literature student many years ago will know the names but I suspect there are many people listening to this who will never have heard of any of them.
People like Anthony Mundy, Robert Greene, Thomas Nash who I just mentioned, Henry Chettle.
People haven't even heard of those people.
They weren't great, great playwrights, but they were playwrights at the time.
And we've got documented evidence saying they're playwrights, saying they're poets, proving that they were writing at certain tables, selling their plays for certain… Absolutely nothing for William Shakespeare.
Nothing.
And any learned person at the time, any person who's good at classics… I think you're pretty hot on the classics, aren't you?
Well, enough to know that at Ilium is where the patron goddess Pallas Athena, also known to the Romans as Minerva, by her will shook the spear enabling Achilles to slay Hector.
And to the Romans, Minerva was the patron goddess of playwrights.
In fact, they set up their institution of playwrights on the Aventine Hill at the Temple of Minerva.
So you've got Ilium, Shakespeare, which is an absolute obvious allusion to the patron goddess of playwrights, with this wonderful W at the front of it, which is a double V, which maybe we will or maybe we won't have time to discuss, but... Right, yeah.
So all the classically educated people of that time, the upper classes, basically, would have been in on the joke.
It would have been so obvious.
Because they were very good at allusions and things like that.
100%.
And puns.
They would have definitely known that.
Why were the Elizabethans so obsessed with Puns, numerology, this kind of thing.
Well, they didn't have all the distractions we've got.
And these things are quite fun.
I mean, we nowadays play Scrabble.
They had great fun working out what the number of their name was and how that number related to God, for instance.
And now that would seem rather abstruse to us now, but that was a game that the sort of intellectual learned end of certainly all around the court and the scholars enjoyed playing.
Yes, you're right.
I was thinking, imagine, in fact you don't need to imagine because there are records of this, how much more you could achieve in an era without Twitter, without those little rushes you get every time somebody does an angry tweet or an X as they now.
I was looking, for example, I've been reading this biography of George Herbert, And I was looking at the education that they received at Westminster, and they were so thoroughly grounded in the classics.
Absolutely phenomenal, yeah.
The depth of knowledge makes us look pygmous.
It makes us look total pygmies.
But also the other thing not to forget is that in those days, if you were a courtier, and you're going to find out that I'm leaning extremely heavily towards the Shakespeare was a courtier, the man who used that pseudonym, that you didn't write poems and plays or think much about these things, except in your idle hours, as they called it.
In my idle hours, your duty was to It was to Commonwealth and to government.
And although lots and lots of the clever courtiers were writing verses, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in English, they never stuck their names to them and they did it in their idle hours.
In fact, if you pick up the earliest thing ever published by Shakespeare under the name Shakespeare, there's a little dedication to the Earl of Southampton in it.
And he says that, I hope you will receive this lovely poem that I've written, and the next thing I'm going to be doing is a Graver poem, which I'm going to write in my idle hours.
He uses that very expression that courtiers since Gottfried von Auer in the 13th century in Germany have all been using to say that we write our poetry in our idle hours.
I love the idea that some of the greatest works of literature in history were kind of dashed off in their spare time.
Well, of course, but it ties into Castiglione and this whole idea of sprezzatura, the idea that you're not supposed to, as a courtier, you mustn't show that you've sweated over something.
It's got to come naturally.
It's this sort of natural ability to write, but of course they sweated.
It's the swan calm on the surface and traveling furiously underneath.
Shakespeare's all about that, and if you read Ben Johnson's tribute to Shakespeare in what's known as the First Folio, that's the 1623 publication of 36 poems, a massive book that came out, a very important book.
Without it, we would have lost a lot of Shakespeare plays.
Ben Johnson, who's a poet of the time, writes about Shakespeare and talks about him in exactly the terms of someone who is following the courtly model of Castiglione.
Have we dealt thoroughly enough with it wasn't the man from Stratford?
Because obviously, I want to move on to who it is you think you wrote Shakespeare.
Not to the satisfaction of your listeners, no doubt.
But I mean, I did mention, for instance, the fact that William Shakespeare, Stratford's mother and father were Illiterate.
His children were illiterate.
That doesn't tie in at all well, I'm afraid, with The Tempest, in which Prospero is so proud of educating his daughter.
This William Shaxer of Stratford didn't bother to educate his daughters at all.
You don't have to come from a family like mine, which is a very literary family, to know you can't have a pedigree that goes illiterate, illiterate, illiterate.
Greatest writer in the world, illiterate.
It just doesn't happen.
No, it goes against human nature as well.
I mean, Apart from everything else, and I know this is the case with my children, I wanted to make sure that my children were educated to a level where I could converse with them and share the same references.
You'd never want illiterate children if you were.
No, but you wouldn't be able to flow in that way.
You wouldn't have that massive vocabulary.
You know, back to the very basic quick arguments about why Shakespeare of Stratford has to be entirely wrong.
First of all, the plays are entirely populated with Very, very clever allusions to very learned books.
Many of those books, at the time that the English plays were written, were not even translated into English.
So we're dealing with works in Italian that hadn't been…so whoever wrote Shakespeare must have been able to speak Italian.
They were clearly very, very, very good at Latin and Greek.
If you remember in Henry V, there's a whole great scene written in French, laughing about how an English court here speaks French in a French court, making even down to the little mistakes and the comedy of that.
That's absolutely wonderful.
Now, William Shakespeare of Stratford, As far as we know, he never went anywhere near France.
Even if he'd gone to the grammar school, which there's no evidence that he did, at least not for 150 years after his birth, when he was trumped up by a man called Betterton, William Shakespeare wouldn't have learned French even if he had gone to the grammar school.
So there's all this problem, and then you've got to work out how he read all these very, very learned books.
Which are alluded to within the plays.
Then you've got to realize, how did he get hold of those books?
And of course, what we call the Stratfordianists, the people cleaving to the silly, silly tale.
They say, oh, well, maybe he just borrowed them from a bookshop.
Well, exactly, they weren't lending libraries.
Books were incredibly expensive in those days, and unless you're someone like Lord Burley or you've got some serious patronage behind you, like John Dee did, you're not going to assemble a very large library.
You're not going to have any money to do it.
So, that's all sort of rubbish.
Then we come to the problem of his signatures.
Now, we're told that six signatures exist of William Shakespeare of Stratford, three of them upon the will, one of which is completely indecipherable because it's decayed.
One on something called the Bellot Mountjoy Testament, and two on two different documents spelled totally differently within two days relating to the leasing of some property in London.
And each of those spellings is different.
The one on the Bellot-Manchur case is extremely troubling for a Stratfordianist because what it says is Willam Shack P. Now, in those days, if you're writing your signature on a legal document and you knew how to write your name, you had to write it in full first.
So what that is, is a clerk's attestation of what sits right below it, which is a massive, great, big Blob, almost the size of your nose, which is a mark.
So it implies that William Shakespeare of Stratford is what we call a marksman.
Ditto on the Blackfriars, this is the property in London, leases.
The two leases are both spelt differently.
And the name, which people try to claim is a signature, is written on the seal ribbon that connects the seal to the legal document.
Now that is 100% a sign, but what it is, is it's the attestation of the clerk, saying this is the seal that pertains to William Shakspeare of Stratford.
So we can wipe out three of the signatures straight away, one in a very embarrassing way, and then you've got the three on the will.
Now, the will is a joke.
Now, you've probably heard of the will because of one thing or maybe two things.
The bed.
Exactly.
His second best bed.
He leaves to his wife his second best bed.
The other thing he does is he leaves to two actors, Hemmings and Condal, some money to buy a memorial ring with.
Now both of those, by the way, those are the only two interesting things in the will.
The will otherwise is dead, dead, dead as a doornail and it comes out of a book about how to write a will.
Would the greatest writer in the world need to know how to write a will or get his clerk to do that?
So those two points, the second best bed and the money for Hemmings and Condal, are interlineations.
Someone has written between the lines and added those little bits.
And I think I know who did it.
It was someone called George Virtue in the early 18th century.
But I may be wrong, but I'm absolutely certain that the will was tampered with.
And how I know that is because William Shakespeare of Stratford had some very close friends called Hamnet, not Hamlet, Hamnet, and Judith Sadler.
And in fact, he had twins, Shakespeare of Stratford, and he named them Hamnet and Judith, after his great friends.
Now, Hamnet Sadler signs on that will to generally attest to it.
And in the body of the will, and he signs Hamnet, In the body of the will, it says, I leave, I can't remember what it is now, some little token, to Hamnet, and it's clearly Hamnet, and it has clearly been altered.
Someone has put an L onto the end to make it Hamlet, to try to connect him with the famous writer.
And that's before we go to the monument, the grave, etc, etc.
But also, if you'd written Shakespeare's plays, You'd be worth a fortune, wouldn't you?
I mean, I imagine that they got paid quite well for writing plays?
No, they didn't.
They didn't, actually, funnily enough.
I mean, if you look at Thomas Decker, who was a playwright at the time, Ben Johnson, Chettle, Nash, certainly, all of those people were very destitute, some of them going to prison for lack of money.
And they were paid, you know, a matter of pennies for the work.
That's sad.
Well, it is sad.
It's also very interesting because it doesn't tally with how William Shakespeare of Stratford, about whom we have, let's say, about 70 documents.
None of them suggest that he was a writer.
He, by the way, never said he was a writer.
His family never said he was a writer.
But those 70 documents show his business dealings.
So we know he was involved with business.
And he's supposed to have bought the second biggest house in Stratford, known as New Place.
But it is absolutely certain that he could not have bought that from writing plays.
Right.
So, it was known at the time that William Shakespeare of Stratford was not the author of these plays.
But was he sort of paid money to pretend he was?
Or would people get, you know, oh, you've done another funny... Was he a stand-in?
You've written a play.
I hear.
Another one.
Well, I mean, if that had happened, it's so obvious to me because he did have connections with theatre.
That we know.
Whether he was an actor of much sort, we don't really know at the time.
There's a little hint that he was just after he died, that he was an actor.
We don't know any parts he acted.
We know lots of parts other actors acted.
So, my view is that there's so much evidence that he didn't write this stuff anyway, that had he pretended to write it, it would only have taken one man in the theatre, one of the actors with whom he presumably came across, to say, Will, can you just explain what this line means?
He wouldn't have obtained a notion because he wasn't educated to the level of learning.
I mean, look, you've been to Oxford University and very well educated in English literature.
I'm sure there are lots and lots of lines that befuddle you from Shakespeare.
It's difficult.
It's very, very difficult.
And, you know, there's no question that there's what's amazing about Shakespeare is he can give huge pleasure to young children who don't have great education on one level, but huge, huge pleasure to people who sit down and study it and work out all the allusions.
Yeah.
And the ones who The ones who laugh ostentatiously at the Elizabethan jokes.
Back in the day when I used to go to the RSC, before it became so horribly woke and unbearable.
Also badly acted.
Really badly acted.
Actors have completely forgotten how the pentameter line works and how the rhythm of the thing should speak.
They also shout the whole time.
I saw a production not very long ago of Richard II, people turning their back to the king and yelling and shouting at him.
I mean, no, I'm sorry.
If you're angry, it's all carried in the lines.
The lines are so beautiful.
You can whisper the most furious lines of Shakespeare and that fury comes straight out.
You do not need to shout it.
Who was the voice coach, Cicely, somebody, who was for years at the RSC?
I don't know.
She taught them how to speak the verse.
It really helps.
Yeah, it's gone now.
What I was really asking you in a slightly incompetent way was, at the time, Was there this association with this man from Stratford or did that come later?
I have just completed a three-volume book which looks into every single contemporary reference to Shakespeare and I can tell you that every single one of them seemed to know who Shakespeare was and that he wasn't William of Stratford.
And you may say, oh, come on, you're just being daft.
If you go to the top Stratfordian professor, Sir Stanley Wells, Professor Sir Stanley Wells, and you say, tell me about this allusion to Shakespeare.
Someone's writing about Shakespeare.
Oh, he says it's a bit cryptic.
Oh, what about this?
What about the grave in Stratford?
Well, I can't really understand it.
It's a bit cryptic.
What about this thing from From Weaver.
Oh, cryptic.
I found 10 examples of him talking about contemporary references to Shakespeare as cryptic.
So you say to him, well, cryptic, as we all know, means veiled or secretive.
What was it about William Shakespeare of Stratford, this great playwright, that was prohibited from overt expression by his contemporaries?
What's the problem?
Why do we need to be cryptic?
If we look at the other poets at the time, Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, whoever you want to choose, People aren't writing cryptically about him.
They're saying, here's a very brilliant poet.
But they're all writing cryptically.
And these Stratfordians won't look.
And now Stanley Wells, most of them are English literature critics.
What's their job?
What's an English literature critic do?
He looks at difficult recondite lines and tries to work out why they're cryptic.
But they won't, they won't go there.
So they just run away from them.
So I've written this with a fellow Oxfordian professor in America.
I've written three volumes of about a thousand pages for volume going through every single one of these.
And we can show that 90% of them are telling us at the time, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
So it was obviously slightly prohibited from saying it overtly.
We know that William Shakespeare is dot, dot, dot.
Okay.
So let's cut to the chase now.
I have encountered people, they all seem to congregate on my Telegram channel for some reason, who are convinced that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare.
And he was a contender for a long time, wasn't he?
There was a sort of battle between the Oxfordians, which we're going to come to in a minute, and the Baconians.
Were there any other sort of...?
Yes, Christopher Marlowe is sometimes brought up as a possible one, and then we get into Slightly more silly territory, a man called Neville who was ambassador in Paris.
There's some really batty theory that he was an Italian called John Florio.
No black females?
The female who's mainly brought up is Lady Sidney, the mother of the Herbert brothers to whom the first folio was dedicated.
Whereas in fact, I'm saying it was the The father-in-law of one of those dedicatees.
Now, the point about Bacon, Bacon is an interesting one.
So, to understand it, it's very, very interesting that the whole situation about how the problem started arising and when it arose.
Now, as I've just said to you, I've looked at all the contemporary things, which takes one up to about 1642 or the late 17th century, and everybody seemed to know that it was a pseudonym.
I think that got slightly lost into Regnum when all the theatres were closed down between 1642 and 1660.
Plays weren't allowed.
And I think the last thing you did, drawing that into Regnum, was go up to Oliver Cromwell and say, oh, please, can we have our plays back?
Look, we've got this wonderful book of these wonderful things written by this aristocrat nobleman who was greatly loved by Queen Elizabeth.
That wouldn't do.
So there was 18 years of just not putting any plays on and not perhaps thinking very much about who Shakespeare was.
The age of biography, book-length biography, well, that didn't happen until the 19th century.
So in the 18th century, what you got was editions of Shakespeare, you know, there's the Pope edition, the Theobald, and there was a multi-volume.
And they quite often had something in the front, but it wasn't biography.
So if you take the first one, which was 1709, it's got about 5,000 words, absolutely practically nothing on the life at all.
And what is there is uncorroborated or now we totally know it to be wrong.
So, it's not really until you get into the 19th century where people start saying, we must have a book-length biography.
Now, I'm sure you know all about Samuel Johnson.
Samuel Johnson wrote The Lives of the Poets, and he loved Shakespeare.
He wrote the dictionary in which he took He cited Shakespeare 1300 times in his dictionary, but he couldn't come to write anything about Shakespeare.
I imagine he realized it was bogus or it didn't work.
There wasn't enough material.
So, you simply couldn't do it.
Now, this is an interesting thing.
The first book-length biography of Shakespeare was published, when would you guess?
Early 19th century?
Well, yeah, it's 1847 and by a man called Charles Knight and it's all fantasy and Victorian rubbish.
No footnotes, it's completely unscholarly and a lot of sort of silly little stories come bumbling out of that which is a waste of time playing through to realize how untrue they are.
The first book length, a book to say, hang on, this is all wrong.
It's wrong.
Shakespeare must be a pseudonym.
Guess when that was written.
Or when it was written, I think.
1880?
1851.
So it's literally within five years of the first book length saying Shakespeare Stratford did it, came the book saying this is wrong.
And this battle has gone on ever since.
And it's become, sadly, more entrenched since English literature departments started up in universities.
A lot of people don't know this, but it wasn't considered possible to study English literature at the university until about, I think, the 1890s.
It wasn't considered a serious academic subject.
And once the English literature lot got onto it, the pride, the glory, the esteem of being a great Shakespeare scholar trumped almost anything else.
And these people were not going to be gainsaid about who Shakespeare was because it made them look stupid.
In the 19th century, I should also mention a man called John Payne Collier, who was supposedly one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars alive.
But he got so frustrated about the lack of information to be found about Shakespeare, when you can find it about everybody else, that he started forging it.
And all, you know, so many of the great- Like dinosaurs!
Yeah, it was just forged.
It was just simply forged.
And there's been a lot of work to uncover.
He was actually exposed in his own lifetime as a major forger.
But he was forging annotations into first folios, and he had access to every single library.
He was putting whole sentences, he was taking, you know, whole bits of old parchment and writing stuff.
And And it's created no end of muddle and problem.
But that's the desperation which to this day people seem to still be going to avoid the bitter truth for them and the good clean truth for me, because all truth sets you free, that Shakespeare was a pseudonym.
And it's as simple as that.
And it's been right in front of our faces all this time.
And so I've seen some of your videos on your YouTube channel and you gave me a private tour through The geometry on what was it?
The Shakespeare Monument.
There are two monuments of extreme interest.
One of them is in Westminster Abbey, which was placed there in 1740.
And the other one, of course, is in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon.
And that's a great mystery.
Anyone who's visited Stratford-upon-Avon will know this.
You have a A pathetic little cheap stone, about three foot by three foot, which doesn't give the name Shakespeare on it, it just says, don't you dare to lift up this stone, you'll be cursed if you try.
Well, we all know why, because there's nothing underneath it.
And then on the side wall by it is a more impressive monument, quite hideous now through over decoration.
to William Shakespeare and I made, well I will always say it's the hugely most significant discovery of my lifetime, taking the view that nobody would lie in a church.
Having done so much research that I knew perfectly well that William Shakespeare of Stratford didn't write this, so it meant looking at these monuments and working out what they were really telling us as opposed to what they appear to be telling us.
Now, the one in Stratford-upon-Avon is completely fascinating.
I mean, people might have a picture of it in their mind's eye.
It shows what one man in the early 19th century described as a complacent pork butcher.
It's got a bust of an idiot sitting there with a scroll with nothing written on it at all and a feather, a real feather, that hasn't been carved in his hand.
The problem with that little part of the monument is if you look at the earliest depictions of it, and we have one as early as 1634, one 1656, he's not holding a piece of paper at all.
He's not holding a pen.
He is holding a wool pack.
Now we have evidence that he owned wool and his father was a wool dealer and he's in the wool business.
So what happened?
At what point did someone put a little pen in and change it enough to get a blank piece of paper?
And why was that piece of paper blank?
If he's the greatest writer in the world, couldn't they have just written something, a little quotation from Shakespeare?
No, it's blank.
And then you get underneath it the most extraordinary epitaph.
And this is the epitaph, which Stanley Wells is a bit cryptic.
They love each other, I can tell.
It's got two lines in Latin, and then it's got six lines in English.
The lines in English start, Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast?
Read if thou canst, whom envious death hath placed in this monument, Shakespeare.
Now, first of all, that's not English.
Sad, sad, sad.
Sad to have such a bad sentence on the monument to the greatest writer ever.
So, I got it into my head that this was telling us something.
It had to be telling us something, because we know that Shakespeare of Stratford didn't write it.
And I had it by my bed, and I just stared at it five minutes every night.
Now, I'm still not getting it, still not getting it.
And the key that unlocked it for me was the word within, because it wasn't a word, it was two words.
Read if thou canst whom envious death hath placed with space in this monument, Shakespeare.
Now, within is one word.
So you ask the Stratfordians, oh, it's just a mistake.
They just did it a mistake.
No, I'm sorry.
It's an expensive thing.
They did not make a mistake.
The ruddy lowly who carved it would have been sent straight back to do it again if it was a mistake.
And I read music at university and I had this mad professor who used to say, don't listen to the notes, just listen to the silences.
So I stared at this silence for a bit and I suddenly got it.
In This Monument is where it's asking you to figure out whom envious death hath placed with Shakespeare.
So take In This Monument out, because that's where you're meant to read it.
Read if thou canst whom envious death hath placed with Shakespeare.
In other words, work it out.
Read if you can't.
Figure it out.
Who is Shakespeare buried with?
That's what it's asking.
That's the riddle.
Where do I figure it out?
In This Monument.
So we read the monument and try and work out who he's buried with.
Now, above you have two lines of Latin, and it says, I won't bother you with the Latin, I'll give you straight into the translation.
It says, Earth covers, so we know straight away we're going to get the answer to the riddle here.
Earth covers Pilius, which is the Greek king Nestor, with his judgment, Socrates with his genius, and Virgil with his art.
Now the Stratformers say, oh yeah, yeah, Virgil, okay, that's great.
So it says Virgil, and he's obviously writing about a poet down here, but that's not what's being asked.
We ask, who's he buried with?
Now, we don't know where Nestor was buried, Pileus.
We have no idea.
There's a huge squabble about where Virgil was buried, and we don't know where Socrates was buried.
So what are these people doing here?
Socrates has nothing whatsoever to do with Shakespeare.
He didn't even write anything.
He wasn't a writer.
The Judicious Nestor, it says.
Shakespeare mocked him in one of his plays, in Troilus and Cresta.
Why is he on there?
And Virgil.
Oh, we understand, Virgil.
Oh yeah, of course, they're both poets.
But no, there's a big problem here.
If you went back in the times of Shakespeare and said, who's our Virgil?
Who's our English Virgil?
Every single one of them, to a man, would have said, it's Spencer.
Edmund Spencer was known as our English Virgil.
I can find you 15, 16 references to him as our English Virgil.
So now that's getting interesting because Spencer is buried in Westminster Abbey.
So who's the next door one?
It says the genius of Socrates.
Well, you wouldn't necessarily guess this, but Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer, who's buried next to Spencer in what we now call Poet's Corner, was said to have the genius of Socrates by numerous people.
There was a man called Deschamps in the 13th century who said, you have the genius of Socrates.
This tomb is saying he has the genius of Socrates.
Now, who's next to Chaucer?
It's the poet and playwright Francis Beaumont, who was known as Judicious Beaumont.
So what we've got in Latin is references to Judicious Leicester, i.e.
Judicious Bowman, the genius of Socrates, as what contemporaries said that Chaucer had, and the genius of Virgil, which is what Shakespeare had.
Those three are buried in exactly that row in Poet's Corner.
Now very quickly, we'll move on, just go back to the riddle.
Read if thou canst, whom envious death hath placed within this monument of Shakespeare.
Got it?
Yeah.
It's a riddle.
Work out, if you can, who he's buried with.
It's those three.
So he's in Westminster Abbey.
Now, let's just come back to the point about who wrote these plays, because that of itself doesn't tell you that he's not William Shakespeare of Stratford.
But it does beg the question, Why on earth wouldn't you put a monument up in Stratford-upon-Avon saying this is a cenotaph to our great great native poet and playwright William Shakespeare who lived down the road at Henley Street and now lies buried in Westminster Abbey?
What is the point of making that a secret that only the clever and the learned can work out?
Yeah, that's the beginning of a major problem and then, and I won't even go through the evidence with you because it'll take too long, but I'll just say what I found which made me almost burst with excitement is I worked out exactly where in Westminster Abbey, and now I'm going to give away the name, My preferred candidate, Edward de Vere, who's the Earl of Oxford, I've discovered exactly where he's buried.
And guess where he's buried?
Well, you know, because I've given it away.
I've given it away.
He's buried… In Poets' Corner.
In Poets' Corner, but more than that, he's buried… I found the exact spot where he's buried, and he's buried directly beneath where they placed the monument to William Shakespeare in 1740.
Now, if that doesn't already start putting Proto-Masonic So, Edward de Vere died in 1604.
William of Stratford died in 1616.
in your mind what does, because it means that someone, so Edward de Vere died in 1604, William of Stratford died in 1616.
Now someone waited all the way till 1740, Well, sorry.
First of all, Edward de Vere was reinterred, I think, in 1619 into Westminster Abbey.
We've got contemporary evidence of that.
And finally, someone waited all the way till 1740, a little group of knowledgeable people, to place the Shakespeare monument directly upon his grave.
There are going to be some people who are going to be watching this and who are going to be finding this so abstruse because they have the minds of 21st century people who haven't had all this time to spend because they haven't been distracted by... It seems almost impossible, doesn't it?
That people could think so abstrusely.
But they did back then.
Yes.
Can I just recommend to your listeners or viewers that a lot of the stuff I'm talking about, I'm now putting extra pressure on them because I'm asking them to visualize some of the things I'm talking about.
So I do run this YouTube channel, as you've mentioned, which I'm very proud to say has now gone over a million views and it's proving very, very popular.
But in those videos, I make it a bit Slower and it's all vigil and it's all shown and if I believe, I suspect, that every single person listening to this now believes that they themselves have an open mind and are intelligent.
If they do that, go to that channel and you'll see my very calm and clear explanations of exactly how this works and they will come to the conclusion, inevitably, that it's irrefutable.
Yes, I totally agree with you.
I'm 110% convinced that Edward de Vere and his Scriptorium wrote the works of Shakespeare.
What's the one way you show the way that the lines draw together on the dots?
Quite a lot of that is to do with where he's buried.
If you're interested in that particular subject and encryption, which I know some people have a horror of it, but I think it's so exciting and correct that it's really worth watching, I can recommend a video I put online called The Incalculable Genius of John Dee.
Now, John Dee was, for those who don't know, he was the Queen's conjurer.
He was an extremely clever mathematician.
He was a slightly dodgy person in many ways.
He did seances and spoke to angels and demons.
What was absolutely one of the most extraordinary things about him is he actually took down the conversations with angels and demons and hid them.
And they were discovered about 70, 80 years after his death, hidden in a secret compartment of a piece of furniture.
And they're now all published and there to look at.
And you find lots of people might claim to talk to angels and things, but actually to have the dialogues is absolutely incredible.
So John Dee, and I present a lot of evidence for this, was the one who made these incredible encryptions that I'm talking about now.
Oh, it was him who did that.
Okay.
Yeah, that's why.
So it's called The Incalculable Genius of John Dee, and that gives you an introduction into that encrypted part of it about where Edward DeVere's buried and how you can be very certain of that point.
But I've also put lots and lots of supporting evidence outside of those encryptions to show that people knew exactly that that was the case.
Yes.
We're not going to do that here, because it requires visuals and it requires a lot more time than we've got.
So let's go to the other Evidence?
I mean, okay, we talk about Edward de Vere and his scriptorium.
I mean, Edward de Vere was known as one of the preeminent poets of his day, wasn't he?
Well, we've got three sources saying he was the finest and that he was also a leader among poets.
One way, if you want to annoy a Stratfordianist, you say, I've got one very small problem with your theory that William of Stratford wrote it.
And they say, what's that?
You say, well, he didn't know Edward de Vere.
And they say, well, why should he?
Because every single other playwright knew him.
They were all around his table.
You know, why didn't he know William of Stratford?
So, yes, Edward de Vere is named as the top of a list of playwrights by someone called Francis Mears in 1589, a very, very influential book called The Art of English Poesy.
It says that he stands absolutely above all the others among the writers of court and amongst the It explains him as the leader of a group of makers who are both Her Majesty's servants and members of the court.
So I think we can't discount people like Walter Raleigh, who was definitely a poet as well, from occasionally chipping in here and there.
And now back to your point about Francis Bacon.
Francis Bacon was Effectively, Edward de Vere's first cousin.
In fact, he was Edward de Vere's wife's first cousin, but they talked to each other.
Vere called him my cousin Bacon.
So, they came out of the same circles.
They talked the same sort of language.
Bacon was an incredible scholar.
I have no doubt, well, I shouldn't say no doubt, but there's some quite interesting evidence that Bacon might have been involved with Johnson Okay.
in the construction of this first folio book, which I was talking about in 1623.
So Bacon's sort of hovering around there, but there is simply not enough good evidence to say that he was Shakespeare.
In fact, he himself said, I am no poet.
We don't have particular examples of his poetry.
We don't have the endless nudge, nudge, wink, wink, that we have with Edward de Vere saying he's Shakespeare.
You have to look extremely hard to find anything even remotely resembling that quality of evidence.
OK, so if Edward de Vere was so good and supposed that, well, Let's accept that he wrote Shakespeare's plays.
Why didn't he just do it on his own?
Why did he need a scriptorium?
I think that he did end up more or less doing it on his own.
What happened in 1591 was he went bankrupt, finally.
I mean, he spent so much money on theatrical performances at court and all these sorts of things that he completely ran out of money and it was considered a huge loss of face for someone of his position in life.
The Queen, One of the most parsimonious people known to man suddenly decided to give him a thousand pounds a year, which is an enormous amount of money in that time.
This was in 1586, exactly the same year that the Exchequer Withdrew £1,000 a year from the Revels office, which before that was producing the plays at court.
So it looks very, very much that Edward de Vere and his scriptorium, and of course he was patron of lots of theatrical companies, including his own ones and boys' companies, all this sort of stuff, that he basically took on, to some extent, the role of the Revels.
So he was putting on the plays and getting going for the court for £1,000 a year.
And To get this thousand pounds a year, he signed a document with the Queen, which was a very secretive document which we have, which exists, which says you're not under any circumstances to present chits and explain what you're spending it on.
And that's exactly the same wording that is in a document by Francis Walsingham, the great spymaster, and his relationship with the money coming from the Exchequer.
He wasn't allowed to give chits.
It's secret money.
So as I think I explained to you that he was running this propaganda department.
The black budget.
Right, so there's a number of reasons that he doesn't come first and foremost as the playwright and why he needs a pseudonym.
One is because he's operating as a propaganda unit for the government.
Two, because he's a nobleman and noblemen in those days did not sink themselves so low as to put out little play courses and say, buy Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, can I please have 15 bob for it?
And three, because the Shakespeare plays are hugely autobiographical.
And Edward de Vere led what some people might call a rather squalid life.
I've touched upon his bankruptcy.
There were sex scandals.
There were fighting scandals in the streets.
And he was a wild guy.
If you think Byron was a wild aristocratic poet, I tell you, Edward de Vere, even more so.
But he was putting out his life through his works.
His favorite poet was Ovid, and Ovid confessed his life through his works, and that's precisely what Edward de Vere was doing.
Hamlet, everyone has always said, is highly autobiographical.
Any part of Hamlet you can take and say, well, that actually happened in Edward de Vere's life.
I mean, what happens What happens in King Lear?
I mean, we have a king who gives away his ancient patron saint to his three daughters.
What did Edward de Vere do?
He gave away his patron saint to his three daughters.
And the great problems that caused with him wanting to revisit them.
A play that a lot of people haven't really looked at very much is Timon of Athens.
That's a play about a man who goes completely bankrupt and has to sell his estate.
And he's so generous.
He's such a great patron of everyone.
Those ruddy people, once he's run out of money, they turn on him really nastily.
That's exactly, precisely what happened to Edward V. And on and on and on.
I mean, I always like the example of A Winter's Tale.
A Winter's Tale In French would be… Can you do French?
Yeah, yeah.
Le Cont d'Hiver.
Le Cont d'Hiver.
The Tale of Hiver, in other words.
Oh!
And what's it about?
It's about a man, a King Leontes, who hotly denies the paternity of his wife's child and says, it's not mine, it's not mine.
And someone called Paulina comes, if you remember, in the play and says, I've got this really clever plan.
I'll tell you what.
We'll bring the baby to show Leontes and he'll look at it.
Oh, that's sweet.
And he'll poke it around a little bit.
And only after we'll tell him that's actually his baby and then he'll like it.
OK, what happened to Edward de Vere, do you suppose?
I don't need to repeat it, but all of that, all of that.
He denied the paternity of his child.
He fell out very badly with his wife.
What do you think Othello's about, for heaven's sake?
Where was Edward de Vere when he discovered that his wife had been unfaithful?
He felt she had been unfaithful and got pregnant and had a baby that wasn't his.
He was in Venice at the time.
Why are all those plays set in Venice?
You know, the whole thing is completely autobiographical.
And that gives another reason that after Vere's death in 1604, that his nephews and nieces and children who were still quite high up in court circles did not wish for the connection of Shakespeare and Edward de Vere to spill out.
And did he have a friend who was chased by a bear?
I don't know about that.
Well, he may have seen something like that.
But what he did have, of course, is a cousin, Horatio, who he trusts very much.
And if you remember in Hamlet, at the very end of Hamlet, he entrusts Horatio to bear his story as Hamlet is dying, to take the family story forward.
And that's why he's called Horatio, I'm pretty sure.
So, okay, so we've got the financial records, the documents showing that Queen Elizabeth, using her black budget, was fine.
By the way, you say it was worth a lot, a thousand pounds?
Well, all I can say is there were practically no one else who got so much money out of I would guess it's a million and a half about a year.
Right.
And the excuse is, oh, well, I can't have one of my courtiers going bust.
But I mean, other courtiers came craving.
And the other interesting thing about Vere is Vere kept saying, well, look, you know, I could go and run a tin mine in Cornwall.
I could go and do this.
The Queen had this great patronage to give out these concessions.
But she wouldn't give it to him ever.
Nothing.
Wouldn't give him a position in government.
She's a bit like Queenie in Blackadder.
Because I believe she wanted him sitting there writing those plays, which highly amused her, which she utterly loved.
And she saw the value of them to the country and to the Commonwealth.
Oh, she's a bit like Queenie in Blackadder.
She likes being entertained.
She loves being entertained.
I've just written a nine-part dramatic script of Fia's life and I've had great fun writing the Queen's part.
She so loves the plays and finds them so funny and is jolly pleased to see how they irritate the courtiers around her.
So, of course, a very, very obvious case is Polonius in Hamlet.
who's, if you remember, a rather long-winded, boring sort of fellow, who in every respect is Lord Burley, her chief statesman, who was Edward de Vere's father-in-law, so he could get away with teasing her.
William Stratford of Shakespeare had written any of that, and he would have had his head shot one and a half seconds flat.
Okay, so we've got the financial records, we've got the numerology and the codes and stuff, which you've dealt with in your videos.
Then we've got the biographical evidence.
I think we've sort of pretty much covered the basics.
I want to move on to ask you some other questions.
Yes, you can.
One last point I'd like to bring on from Polonius, because I have people occasionally come up to me saying, what does it matter who wrote Shakespeare so long as he got the plays?
And I'll tell you, every single one of them, to a man who asks me that question, if you look at them carefully as they're asking it, they're Fists are all tense, and their shoulders are tense.
So they mind very much indeed who wrote Shakespeare, pretending what doesn't matter.
But back to this idea of lampooning contemporary courtiers, you suddenly realize, take that example of Polonius, the absolute meta-genius that is going on in those plays.
Because, you know, take the example of the play within the play.
Remember the mousetrap and what goes on within Hamlet?
And they put on this play in order to capture the conscience of the king, who's Claudius, who's Leicester.
So, Claudius is based on Lester, who stole a lot of Edward de Vere's money and tried to make Edward de Vere treat him as his father after his father died.
Now, you remember in Hamlet, the father dies, and nasty Claudius says, grow up, stop being so babish and weeping about your father.
You can count me as your father.
Well, this is exactly what Lester did to Edward de Vere, okay?
Right, so, and according to Hamlet, this Claudius murdered the father.
Yeah.
Murdered King Hamlet.
Old King Hamlet.
Leicester gained enormously and was one of the trustees on the will of Edward de Vere's father.
So it all ties in.
Again, I'm telling you, it's very, very, very autobiographical.
Now, just back to this meta thing, which is so fascinating.
Just imagine you're watching Hamlet and you are the Earl of Leicester.
You're watching the play within the play, where they're pricking the conscience of Claudius, and you're watching as Lester, who realises you're being lampooned as Claudius.
So you've got a third level going on of sophistication.
And if you just say, I don't care who wrote the plays, you're going to lose all of that, and there's plenty of it.
Do you think that Lester did murder?
I think it's a distinct possibility.
He pushed one of his wives down the stairs, or got someone else to do it, and broke her neck.
Amy Robeson, she was called.
He's known to have used poison on people.
He's supposed to have killed Walter Devereux in Ireland, and there's a whole book called Leicester's Commonwealth accusing him of such things as that.
And as I say, he was a friend of Edward de Vere's father.
He was there literally in the days just before Edward de Vere's father died, unexpectedly, suddenly, out of nothing, and enormously benefited.
And the Queen let him take over because Edward de Vere was only 12 years old when his father died.
So he didn't reach his majority until 21, and Leicester had complete control of all de Vere's estate in that time.
So now you begin to understand why Shakespeare, if he's Edward de Vere, really wanted to write that play, hadn't he?
Yeah.
And it's not his story.
It's ancient.
But the bits, all those details I'm talking about, are Shakespeare's only.
They don't come from the original old Danish tale or whatever.
And you've certainly answered the question, which I know you get asked a lot, which is, well, if Edward de Vere was so good, why would he want to keep his identity secret?
He was a pious man and a holy man and he was self-effacing and he had three reasons why not to.
And look, just read your Shakespeare sonnet.
You know, my name be buried where my body is.
No long to shame, nor me or you.
He says in those sonnets that I'm involved in such a lot of scandal that my name is gone.
My works are what they're going to live on.
He says it himself.
So how people are dim enough to get an early quarto of the Shakespeare sonnets, which says Shakespeare's sonnets with a hyphen, a very telling hyphen between Shakespeare's sonnets on every page, and say he's hiding his name.
Hang on, his name's there.
Doesn't make any sense.
Now I'm going to move on to something which has been cropping up a lot recently in my reading about Gnosticism and that all the court in those days were probably Gnostics to some degree or other, well they know what.
I've got a feeling.
Okay, let's be careful about the use of words.
Gnostic is something fairly specific which an enormous amount of people misunderstand.
Christian Gnostics Were, to my mind, good, honest, honorable people who got a few things wrong.
And they got things wrong, I think, starting from the ancient problem and premise of all the evil that's in the world.
So how could God, who we love, and Christ, who we love, be part of one tripartite body that allows all this evil and all this horror?
And so they tried to separate that out and they They went with the view that Sophia, or Wisdom, sometimes identified with the Holy Spirit, but not always, had been slightly chucked down, not like Satan right down to Earth, but just been cast down a little bit by God.
And so, she is in the eighth realm.
So, we have Earth, then we have the seven planets, each with their realm, and then we have the stars into which Sophia, Wisdom, was sitting according to this Gnostic thought.
And And she had a baby called the Demiurge.
And the Demiurge went down, and he was the one who fundamentally created this evil world that we're in.
The evil world actually is not totally denied by the Bible.
We're told in the Bible that the Prince of Darkness basically runs it.
Yeah.
So that's the sort of beginning of Gnosticism.
And of course, what immediately happens is when you get the powerful churches, the Church of Rome in particular, they want to sit down and have everything their way and be the rulers of everything and clamp down very heavily on the Gnostics because they have a slightly different story to tell.
So then what naturally happens is the Gnostics start talking to one another or writing in slightly secretive ways and using these things like codes and slightly hidden ways of writing.
And you can easily argue that out of that comes some of the sort of Freemasonic stuff we see today.
But all I'm trying to urge you and other listeners, don't be rigid and just say Gnostics are evil.
I think they had good intentions and good people and they were forced into secrecy.
That's really interesting tape because I watched that, listened to that podcast by somebody who's done a series on Francis Bacon and he argues that The bacon leads to scientism and all the things that the… Rosicrucianism.
Rosicrucianism.
But ultimately it leads to the Committee of 300, the WEF, the ridiculous environmental policies.
Yes.
But why?
Why does it lead there?
It leads there because Bacon who was an honest, well, okay, maybe I'll withdraw that word.
But I think he was certainly a very earnest and true scientist and scholar and philosopher in that particular respect.
He may have done something corrupt when he was an MP, which he was charged with.
But he took the view, and we touched on this near the beginning, that, no we didn't, we talked about it before we got on air.
He took the view that God created, and this was a common view, that God created the world using letters and numbers and that therefore our way to get close to God is to pursue knowledge.
And that could be knowledge of anything, knowledge of this microphone, knowledge of our fingernails.
Anything in this world, we need to pursue the knowledge of it.
And by doing that and understanding it through letters and numbers, i.e.
through the written word and through its correlation to numbers, we will get ultimately closer to God.
So his drive was pious, yeah?
This led, after the closing of the theatres and after the Commonwealth era, into the founding of the Royal Society, which was a chock-a-block with Freemasons.
If we go forward 100 years from there, we find the The Freemasonic movement is infiltrated by an extremely bad group called the Illuminati in about 1776.
And on both occasions, I would say that the Freemasons were infiltrating in order to get power.
They're now getting interested in personal power more than… and I'm talking about the top echelons of this.
I think it's so mean if you meet a Freemason.
I would never be a Freemason.
As I said, I'm not interested in secrets.
But if you meet a Freemason and say, oh, you're a baddie, stand back.
I think the vast majority of Freemasons know absolutely nothing about what's going on at the top end.
The top end is deeply imbued with satanic evil and power mania, as is the top end of the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church.
And of course, once the Illuminati got in, and then they used the networks of Freemasons in order to get onto Presidents of the United States and everything, now we suddenly find ourselves in the place we're in now, which is a very, very corrupted world that can be basically run from a very few people's desks.
Okay.
I would accept your line about the Illuminati infiltrating and suborning maybe Freemasonry, The strains of evil that emerged with Adam Weishaupt.
This existed long before the 18th century.
We're going back to the Babylonian mystery religions.
So there must have been factions.
Who were the representatives of evil within the Elizabethan court?
You're not saying that the founders of the Royal Society were all goodies?
No, absolutely.
I'm not saying that for one second.
But I think there were those among them who were goodies.
I mean, let's, we can start throwing a few names around.
Yeah, I'd like to know.
Who were the goodies?
Isaac Newton.
I mean, he was baddie, wasn't he?
I don't know.
Apparently, I don't know.
I don't know.
I think it's a mathematical was bollocks.
Incomprehensible.
Yeah, incomprehensible.
And it was like, it's a bit like climate change now.
You don't understand because you're not a climate scientist.
And so many people have been waded into thinking this way, that I'm not qualified to comment.
100%.
And governments producing, it's a line to governments producing endless acts that are 580 pages long that nobody's going to read through and nobody's too complicated and too boring.
And you see it actually with the German philosophers and Hegel and people like that.
Schopenhauer, Führer, they're all writing in incomprehensible ways.
And The point about them, according to Schopenhauer, was that they were doing it deliberately to sound clever.
But God knows what they're doing.
They're trying to wield power in some crazy way.
I don't know whether you've come across Miriam Finch, Miri AF.
I did a podcast with her.
She's got this phrase, if you know the name, they're in the game.
I've increasingly become of the view that all the great figures in history, they get there for a reason.
And it's not because they're serving our interests.
Certainly, you can apply this to celebrity culture now, Hollywood.
They've made a pact, an overt, a literal pact with the devil in many cases.
I can't imagine this rule is just a 20th century plus phenomenon.
I'm sure it goes back much further than that.
It's hard to say isn't it because the way it works is through control and the way control is through political power where we can literally string someone up and money and we're in a very very extraordinary position in the world today where you can see how money and political power is all sort of coming together in a vortex which gives fewer and fewer people extraordinary amounts of control.
I mean you only have to take The existence of Amazon, for instance, if that carries on, you've got one shop in the world and we've seen all the pressures that are put on the little shops in the high streets everywhere.
They're all closing down.
It's all going totally, totally wrong for them.
Not by accident.
This is happening on purpose because what it means is if you're in government, to control the world's supply of almost anything.
If you only got one shot, it's very, very, very, very easy.
You bring in Jeff Bezos and say, right, I'm going to slam you into prison and destroy you.
If you don't do this, that, that.
It's the one ring.
Total control and total control over what we're buying.
And that's just one example, but that's a major example.
But so, you know, you say this has gone on and on forever.
You're totally right that evil has gone on forever and disgusting habits regarding Massacre of children and all sorts of things have gone on forever.
But you can probably tell, and we all have our Achilles heel, and my Achilles heel is getting Shakespeare, who I honor and I think was just about as great as any human being can be, and who is, when you know who he is, very closely connected to God and very pious.
I don't want to smear him with the sort of tar brush That we do now need to smear what's going on in Hollywood and that sort of atrocious behavior that's happening there.
It just seems a world away.
And as I said about Bacon, and it's the same with Shakespeare, there was a genuine thirst for knowledge on the understanding that it would get them closer to God.
And if you look at Shakespeare, what he's doing, he's not hogging knowledge for himself, he's sharing it with the world.
And this is a very, very noble thing.
He's burning himself out, disappearing, losing all of his name, as he says, while he gives everything to the world, like the pelican who bites into its own breast to give to the little chicklings.
I'm really glad that you've corrected some of my, or given an alternative view to my hardcore perspective, because I think sometimes one can be a bit extreme in one's judgments.
For example, people have said, Possibly on my channel or something.
Well of course anyone descended from Evelyn Wall is going to be in on the game.
So of course he'd be throwing out these shapes.
Yes, but Evelyn Moore wasn't in the game, was he?
He was an outsider.
Well, I was wondering about this.
I was reading, on holiday, I was reading The Pursuit of Love, and I was thinking about the Mitford sisters, and obviously Nancy, who wrote The Pursuit of Love, so she was friends with, you know, big mates with Evelyn, and they corresponded.
And then you've got Unity, was it, who was the friend of Hitler?
Or was that Decca?
No, Decca was the communist.
Yes, Unity.
Yes, yes, you're right.
Yeah, Decca was the communist, and then there was Debo who married the Duke of Devonshire.
Well, anyone who marries into that level of aristocracy is going to be connected with the black nobility.
All right, but look, it's a bit of a leap from Debo Devonshire to Evelyn Ward.
They knew each other, certainly.
No, no, no, no.
You're being defensive because it's your granddad.
I wasn't suggesting that he knew, but what I'm suggesting is that he was adjacent to people who must... the Mitford sisters must have been aware on some level, because the whole narrative... Aware of what?
Well, taking a step back, one of the many things I've learned, you know, that evolutionary theory is just bollocks.
We didn't go to the moon.
Dinosaurs aren't real.
Everything we know about World War Two, pretty much, apart from the names of the battles and the dates, was a lie.
The origins of the Second World War were absolute rubbish.
Unity Mitford, hanging out with Hitler, must have been privy to a level of information that most Most ordinary folk wouldn't be.
She was, and she was a cousin of Churchill's too, I think.
So I can see why people are sort of the awake, are suspicious of any of the names, because they are privy to a level of information that most ordinary people never get.
So they must know to a degree what's really going on, how the world works.
Well, to a degree, I agree with you, but to another degree, you have to look at the individual cases.
And you suggested just now, very politely, I didn't take any umbrage, that I was defending Evelyn Waugh out of family pietas because he was my grandfather.
I'm also a great expert on him.
I'm the editor of a 43-volume scholarly edition of his works.
And I understand him very well and he was a rebel.
He never voted.
He said, I refuse to vote on the rather strange trumped up grounds that he thought it wasn't his duty to advise Her Majesty on how to form her government.
My father was Orbrimore, a satirical journalist who spent his life just throwing brickbats at politicians and never, never in a million years would he have been honoured or given a CBE or anything like that.
Yes, Evelyn Waugh was well-connected.
The interesting thing about Evelyn Waugh is he craved always from childhood to adulthood to belong, to be part of something.
He wanted to be part of his family.
He was rejected by his family, or at least by his father.
His older brother was much more wonderful to his father.
He wanted to be part of sports teams at school, but he wasn't very good at that.
He wanted to join the army when he was too old in the Second World War, desperately.
And every single time, and the Catholic Church is another example, every single time he joined something, because he wanted and needed that sense of joining, every single time he became disappointed, disillusioned, and depressed about it.
All of those things I've mentioned, he was depressed about.
So he was a misfit.
And misfits, I'm sorry, don't get to be part of this sort of cabal with a deep knowledge of what's going on.
Particularly ones who are dangerous.
And he was dangerous in the sense you simply couldn't predict what was going to come out of his mouth.
And he could meet the grandest person in the world and say, why am I sitting next to this awful boar?
shouting it across the table to his hostess.
So he was fearless and never part of the sort of swim of people all sucking up and telling lies.
The other thing I'll say about him, and I'll give you one quotation from him, and I could try and imitate the voice he said it in, he said it on radio, "I don't understand lies." So that's what we started out with.
Oddly enough, you did for me what I was struggling to do myself.
I think you thought I was suggesting that he was one of them.
Actually, what I was trying to say, but you said it much better than I could have done, is that it's a mistake to assume that everyone with a name is in on it.
I'm not going to name them, but I know some people Who are well-connected in the world, you know, on a kind of Mitford level or fashionista level, let's say, or connected with Hollywood, I'm thinking, who you would think, because of where they are in the pyramid, would
Be aware of what's going on and kind of with it because all my mates are doing it.
But I know that there is resistance at every level.
Not everyone is in on the game.
You're talking about the Hollywood game which is, if we've got it right, particularly disagreeable.
And that not only are the actors themselves trapped, if they don't perform certain things.
And we hear all these appalling rumors about deaths of certain people's mothers and sons and things.
So again, it's that their families are in jeopardy.
They have to play the game.
And it's just hell.
It's literally hell.
And you can say, well, bad luck, you guys, because you haven't read the story of Faust and you've went and sold your souls.
But a lot of these people are very young, very talented.
Everybody knows how difficult it is to become a famous actor or whatever it is.
And if suddenly someone stands in front of you and says, well, I can make you really famous instantly, they get into it.
And there may be people who are listening to this who don't know what the hell we're talking about.
But I think once you dig a bit, you can find it.
And it is horrific.
I was wondering actually, I just always wonder what would have happened had I been approached at that age when you want to get on above all else.
You've just got this, it's just packed, it's just a bit of blood is all we need.
But you're going to get some really, really cool shit.
And you're trusting.
You're going to get all that and you're very trusting.
You don't really realise how evil people can be.
Until it comes in front of your face, and then you're already in a trap.
And what I understand is some of these things that they're forced to go through, they're sort of incremental.
It's one thing worse, another worse thing.
You know, show us you're really part of this team.
Do this now, do this.
And it becomes more and more horrible.
And of course, the more sinful they behave, well, criminal they behave, the more they clan together to keep the secret.
It's just hell.
Although, I wonder, Alexander, because of the thing that we discovered.
I did a tiny bit of research, which is very against my principles, but I watched some of your John Dee episode, and you were talking about numerology and how obsessed the Elizabethans were with the symbolism of their names.
John Dee, and so I used the alphabet coding that you, it doesn't include the complete alphabet, it has to use only the Roman alphabet, isn't that right?
Latin Roman alphabet, yeah.
To work out the numerology or the The number of your name is how they would describe it.
The number of my name.
And James Delingpole is 139.
And I said to you.
Interesting.
I said, does it mean anything Alexander?
And what did you say?
Well, I've actually, since we've been talking, dividing my brain and thinking about 139 a little bit harder.
And actually, it could be even more interesting than that, because 1391 symbolically is the same symbol as I. Yeah?
1, 3, 9, 1.
Sorry, 1, the number 1.
And 3 is a very obvious number concerning the Trinity.
And 9 in Latin is IX, which is Iota Chi in Greek, Iesus Christus is the initials of Jesus Christ.
And what's interesting about that to me is I happen to know that you are quite Christian, very Christian.
And that what John Dee said right back in the 16th century is everyone should try to meditate upon the number of their name and ally it to the Holy Trinity.
And so what seems to come out from your number is Christ, as a Christian, and the three of the Trinity.
So I would say, I, you're connecting yourself to it, I, James Dirling, square brackets, Christ and the Trinity.
So I would say you've probably completed the task that John Dee set back in 1570.
Keep going.
You can change the light thing.
And so, and now if John Dee were to be among us now, and we could say, what do we make of that? - Yeah.
He would say, that is a message from God.
God created the world in numbers.
Numbers are significant.
James Delingpole has got that number for a significant divine reason and God is messaging to you that reason.
Yeah, using my parents as his I mean, his agents or whatever, because when they gave me the name James, they didn't know they were choosing… But do we know what's happening?
No, we don't!
Take creative artists.
I mean, to what extent are they being channeled?
You know, you ask any creative artist, how did you do this?
How did you do this amazing painting?
How did you write this incredible book?
I mean, unless they're bluffers and boors and liars, they'll all say, I'm the faintest notion.
I sat down at my desk, I did it, and it came.
Now, the message we're getting endlessly through the Shakespeare, some of the stuff I've decoded, is these sonnets are by God and De Vere.
And that doesn't mean that God sat there and picked up a pen and literally wrote it, but that Vere wrote those poems by the grace of God that was within him.
And you'll find this in Corinthians, where St.
Paul talks about the labor that he did.
He did the labor, but it was by the grace of God that he did it.
And again, this comes back.
Do you know the phrase, I am that I am?
Yeah.
You'll find that not many people use that about themselves, certainly old people who understand it because it's considered blasphemous because it's suggested that I am is the name of God and I am that I am.
Remember in Exodus, Moses says to God, he has a vision of God.
He says, I've got to go and speak to the others.
Who should I say I spoke to?
And God replies, I am that I am.
And St.
Paul brings this up as well.
And those who had the audacity to say, I am that I am, look at Shakespeare's Sonnet 121, are suggesting, they're talking about the divine within themselves and their connection to God and how God, through God and through the grace within him, they create these amazing works.
I don't want you to miss the church.
What time is it?
I just want to ask you one more thing, because we could talk for hours.
We can, and we can talk in the church unless it's very diverting.
No, but I don't want to waste stuff.
I read, I don't know if it's on your recommendation, but I left it on the beach unfortunately.
I didn't finish it.
The Secret History of the World.
Yes.
Which is very, very interesting.
It's clearly written from the perspective of someone who holds the kind of... By a man called... Something Black.
He's the head of a publishing company.
That's a weird name.
I have read that book and I found it very interesting.
Well, interesting.
But it's obviously written from an anti-Christian perspective in as much as the implication is that Christianity is just one religion among many.
I think you're right about that, yes.
I'm curious.
I mean, I really am curious.
There's an element among Christians that I cannot relate to, which I call them the trust the plan Christians, who are very anti-intellectual, don't want to think too much about the religion or ask awkward questions like, why does a poor not the Virgin's womb?
Because that line to me is also, I say the Te Deum every day.
And every time I come upon that line, I think, well why?
Why would he approve of Archimedes?
There is a technical reason apparently.
But anyway, I think for some of us, maybe curiosity did kill the cat.
But nevertheless, I think that there ought to be room for intellectualism and curiosity within Christianity.
Well, you started by talking about the secrets of the world.
And so I read it some time ago.
And one of my lasting memories, which I did think was extremely interesting, is he says in that book that all these sort of Hercules and mythology people and unicorns, whatever, they were actually true.
And we could actually see them in those days.
But what's happened is as man has evolved, they've closed down, closed away from the spiritual world that actually is always around us.
We can't see it.
And one of the rather fascinating examples he gave, I thought, was about a newborn baby which has this fontanelle, this sort of hole, if you like, in the skull that eventually closes up.
And he shows in that book, I think, some very, very ancient statues of figures with sort of slightly strange eyes poking out the tops of their heads or whatever.
And he connects this to the pineal gland, which a lot of people say is the gland in the body that actually does send and receive messages to the spiritual world.
And his argument, as I understood it, or at least his explanation, is as human beings have evolved, their bone structures got thicker and thicker, and now this is all closed off.
And God knows what else, Wi-Fi and so, so we really are mucking about with the remnants of our pineal gland.
And the reason for this is we are slowly evolving ourselves into gods, that we don't really need to see these gods.
Now look, these are just all arguments, but I mean, I just, I did find it rather fascinating.
I'm not going to say I completely went with it.
That was all interesting.
I'll tell you my problem with it.
And I was waiting for the moment, I was saying, okay, I'm open to everything you say.
But there's something you're not mentioning.
You're not mentioning that the people who kind of espouse your kind of thinking, this sort of hermetic knowledge, this sort of occult, secretive language...
They're in the business of torturing and murdering children for adrenochrome, which God is constantly complaining about the children of Israel.
They're putting their children in the fire.
This goes back a long time.
And these people hate Christians more than anything, and they're trying to persecute them.
Why are you not mentioning this stuff?
I mean, it's all very well talking about this very, very intellectual stuff.
He says he's not a Freemason in that book as well, which I don't believe, because I've been lied to by Freemasons who say that.
Hey, look, can I just quickly recommend a book I'm reading at the moment?
It's absolutely extraordinary.
And I've forgotten the title, but it's by Tom Brie.
It's just out.
Someone called Tom Brie.
And it's about cathedral.
He particularly looks at Wales Cathedral.
And it's about cathedral architecture.
And he explains Gnosticism very, very well.
And about how these symbols are put in there.
Remarkable symbols, and if you can understand the architecture, you understand, you get very close to God and how it's all veered.
I think you would be really lucky.
I'll send it to you.
Okay.
We've got to go to the church before it closes.
And I want to, again, because I'm so happy.
Thank you, Ian Dickinson, for advertising your wonderful product on my show.
I wish people, well, please do more of this, everyone.
And please, please, please go to Ian's website, which is tinderella, as in Cinderella, but with a T for Tommy instead, tinderella.info forward slash.
And what he says is, whether you're looking for satirical synth pop, we all like synth pop, don't we?
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They will make you laugh, cry and hit like and subscribe simultaneously.
Visit tinderella.info to listen to the sound of tomorrow today.
Thank you Ian for your advert.
Please everyone go to tinderella.info.
Alexander, where can people find your stuff?
You go to YouTube and you press Alexander Waugh and the channel is called Alexander Waugh.
I've divided, I think there are 60 videos on there now, I've divided them into three essential bits.
There are two things I would like your listeners to pay attention.
There are two packages of ones.
And one is called Who Knew?
And that sounds so boring.
Nobody's going to click on it.
It's not a click bait.
Who Knew?
And the titles of my videos are so boring in that box because they're people you'd never have heard of.
John Warren Knew.
Someone else knew.
You might have heard of Ben Johnson.
Ben Johnson Knew.
Click on those and each of those shows a contemporary of William Shakespeare who knew that it was a pseudonym and knew who it was.
And I go through the reasons for it.
The other box that I'd like you to look at is called Where Was Shakespeare Really Buried?
And I've done a lot of work on that and we discussed a bit of it now.
Excellent.
Well, thank you for coming all this way to do this.
I've been dying to do this for ages.
A delight.
If you enjoyed it, everyone, please go to Alexander's site.
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Bye.
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