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Aug. 12, 2021 - Jim Fetzer

01:16:51

The Real Deal (12 August 2021) with Nicholas Kollerstrom: Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays?

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	This is Jim Fetzer, your host on The Real Deal, where it's my delight to feature once again Nick Kohlerstrom, historian of science from the UK, who's done completely brilliant work on the London 7-7 subway bombing, where his book Terror on the Tube is I don't know, 6th or 7th edition, where Nick's a leading expert.
	He's done so much wonderful work, including a book on Chronicles of False Flag, going through 13 different cases in Europe, absolutely sensational stuff.
	Today, Nick and I are going to talk about one of the greatest historical controversies in all of literature, Namely, the identification of the author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare.
	Nick, I'm just delighted by all of this.
	Yes, Jim, this is a bit of a new departure for us, but I think it's something related to the idea of conspiracy work, and this will hopefully be a chapter in your forthcoming book on conspiracies, and I think it shows how What the situation looked like a few centuries ago in England when, for different reasons, the authors of Shakespeare didn't want to give their name.
	And of course, we've done shows on the death of Paul McCartney on what appears to have been 9-11, 1966, and his replacement by a fellow I take to be an even better musician, where you have a whole book on it.
	Now, that's an issue of identity, so I think there's overlap here.
	Glad you mentioned that, Jim.
	Yeah, it is very much the mystery of real identity.
	This is a fascinating issue, isn't it?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, it certainly is.
	And for those who want to see a study about issues of identity where prominent political figures like Hillary Clinton have used multiple body doubles, check out Fake News Issues of Identity on BitChute.
	You won't be disappointed.
	Nick, shall we begin with your first slide?
	Yeah, right.
	Let's go for it.
	Here we have William Shakespeare, the curious case of the playwright who did not exist.
	Right.
	Well, this is the enigma.
	I'm not, in this presentation, going to identify the author.
	We can point in general direction.
	But the important issue now, as we come up to the 400th anniversary, is to look at how a certain character who lived at Stratford-on-Avon was not the author of the plays and how on earth did it come about that the greatest playwright of all time didn't want to give his name and how on earth did the name get and the credit get given posthumously to a guy in Stratford
	Who was a businessman, basically a tough businessman, made some money, had something to do with plays, acting.
	How come he got the credit?
	And what about the amazing genius who somehow didn't want to take the credit?
	That's fascinating because this has to be the most admired figure in all of literature, William Shakespeare.
	Yeah, this picture here is a kind of made-up fictional image.
	You can see the head doesn't really rest on the shoulders.
	It's kind of not meant to be a real person, okay?
	So we've got a fictional identity here.
	That's what we'll look at today, right?
	Very good!
	Well, here we have a Mr. Will Shakespeare from Stratford-on-Avon of 1546 to 1616, married in 1582 with two daughters in 1586.
	Elaborate.
	Yeah, I'll be on that slide now.
	Are you on it?
	Say again?
	Oh, right.
	Okay, fine.
	Yeah, so he got married and had these two daughters, and what you're looking at here is the gravestone that was put up after he passed away.
	Here's a monument to him, and you can see he's got his hands on some sort of sack of corn or whatever.
	He was a tradesman, and he was especially known for lending money.
	There weren't any central banks at that time.
	He was a carriage driver who got wealthy through lending money.
	There's very little known about him.
	When he died, nobody took any notice.
	There are no letters to or from him in his lifetime.
	Here you see you have a man who had the name but didn't have the literary capability and most certainly was not the author.
	Yeah.
	Notice how the name is spelt differently.
	There's no shake.
	Shakespeare is usually hyphenated and it's, as it were, a noun, a verbal noun.
	Shaking and spear.
	It's like a pseudonym, right?
	Whereas this is an old English name, traditional English name, Shakspear.
	Pronounced Shakspear, okay?
	The guy at Stratford was a Shakspear.
	This is a close-up of his Of his gravestone.
	That was there for about 150 years.
	That was his memorial, as we'll see.
	It's not the one that's up there now.
	His name was spelt differently.
	His parents couldn't read or write.
	He couldn't read or write.
	His daughters couldn't read or write.
	But he was quite successful financially.
	After he passed away, his will left his second best bed to his wife.
	Right?
	His second best?
	Bed.
	Second best bed to his wife!
	Yeah, that's the famous bit.
	And there was nothing in it at all about any books or writing equipment or a desk or anything, okay?
	There's no hint of anything written in his will.
	Absolutely.
	It's fairly clear that occasionally a signature had to be put down.
	People have searched endlessly for evidence of his life, and there are three signatures on wills.
	And here is what he was, either he or someone else, scrawled.
	And it's not hard to believe this is somebody completely illiterate, right?
	Some scribe would have written this down on his will, not him.
	There's different handwritings here now.
	There's no one handwriting shown here.
	Someone looked within 50 miles of Stratford-on-Avon.
	By the way, there's no mention in Shakespeare plays of Stratford-on-Avon or anywhere near Stratford-on-Avon, okay?
	It doesn't feature at all.
	And someone looked about 50 miles of Stratford-on-Avon a book bookshelves and libraries and homes to see if anyone had got a book that had been owned by this Mr Shakespeare and there wasn't anyone no one there's no evidence of anything any book or anything owned by Shakespeare and obviously the real Shakespeare has to be very literate and widespread experience has to be very learned
	As we'll see.
	So, it's a terrific irony in the way this totally illiterate character is given the credit.
	Okay?
	Fascinating.
	Fascinating.
	Proclamation on the signatures from 1985.
	It's obvious these signatures are not the signature of the same person.
	Almost every letter in each is formed in a different way.
	The marked discrepancies between the signatures lend credence to the views of even the most extreme anti-Stratfordians.
	Could this man write his own name, let alone anything else?
	A letter to the Times by Jane Cox, Principal Assistant Keeper of Records.
	Right, so this is where the signature is kept.
	Public Record Office, they've got these old documents, and so when this lady in charge of the records at Public Records wrote this to the Times in 1985, I suggest that's a bit of a turning point.
	There have been, apparently, thousands of books written on the subject of who was Shakespeare.
	I mean, it's kind of an industry, non-stop industry, because it's such an amazing enigma.
	And I suggest that this is a turning point, when a definitive judgment.
	This guy probably could not write his own name, let alone anything else.
	I suggest that this surely has to settle the matter, even though his name Differed by only two letters from William Shakespeare.
	He cannot have been the author.
	So I'm suggesting that as a new definitive conclusion, which we need to start off with in this day and age, looking at the Dozens of plays attributed to Shakespeare.
	Right.
	He had the name, but he didn't have the talent.
	He didn't even have the capability.
	He was basically illiterate.
	Could not possibly have been the author.
	Yeah, right.
	Yeah.
	So let's call him Shakespeare.
	OK, Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Shakespeare.
	OK, now we've got the mystery of how does the name first appear? 1593.
	This is a poem.
	It's a best-selling poem.
	It's a sort of political text, actually, a sort of reflection of the political stresses of the day.
	I could say that the whole country is under enormous strain because of the abolition of the traditional religion of this country, which had been Catholic for a thousand years.
	That religion was now illegal, and Queen Elizabeth was Protestant, and anyone found, even just with a crucifix or a rosary, would be liable to be put in jail, or any Catholic priest would be tortured or burnt at the stake.
	So it was a very terrible time for Catholics, and this this poem, it was a bestseller, partly because it was an allegory of this kind of oppression and persecution that was going on.
	Okay, now notice on this front cover, It doesn't actually give the name, does it?
	It gives the name of the printer, and if we turn it inside, go to the next page, next one, right here, this is interleaved separately from the front cover, you get the name William Shakespeare.
	But let's notice how it appears.
	This is rather strange.
	This is apparently the first debut of this name, whoever he is, and it's dedicated to one of the top people in the country.
	This is somebody very close to the Queen of England, the Earl of Southampton.
	So this must be some quite upper-class fellow who's writing this, that he can have the nerve to dedicate his first published work, first book published in his name, to this very top earl in England.
	So that is, as it were, how the Enigma first appears.
	So initially the name Shakespeare is given to the author of these plays, Venus and Donis.
	Well, reading what he wrote here, Nick, it seems very Shakespearean, very literary.
	Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will... Sense him.
	Sense him, eh?
	Censoring me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden.
	I mean this is very literary, Nick.
	I would say that was very plausibly the same author that's written by the same hand of the plays.
	Oh, definitely.
	Yeah.
	It's got to be the same.
	And this guy, Ernest Southampton, he gets put in jail, I think, fairly soon for his political views.
	Who you're allowed to support and who you weren't.
	Basically, you just needed to go to church and keep your mouth shut if you wanted to stay out of trouble, and people trying to take a stand for religious liberty or religious freedom or freedom of worship were in dead trouble.
	And so the Earl of Southampton did get in trouble for this, and there's a lot to be said that whoever Shakespeare was was some sort of covert Catholic sympathiser.
	And let's bear in mind this isn't just about Rome or the Pope.
	It's traditional religion for a thousand years.
	It's what all the great cathedrals of England were built for and suddenly this was all banned and all the monasteries were raided and demolished.
	All the gold and silver was stolen.
	So this is a very politically stressful time and This name, this nom de plume, is then given, dedicated to the Earl of Southampton.
	That's how it starts off, okay?
	Fascinating!
	Fascinating!
	Right, now a lot of people feel that the name Shakespeare, pseudonyms were very fashionable in that day and age.
	If the playwrights, watching plays was enormously in fashion and enormously popular, there were various playhouses around the South Bank, Thames and London, Having a play with a pseudonym was not such an unusual thing in those days.
	The company of players wouldn't have thought it was very extraordinary to have a pseudonym.
	This chap Alexander Waugh, grandson of the famous novelist Evelyn Waugh, He has done a lot in recent times to demolish the idea of an author at Stratford, Stratford-on-Avon, and to promote the idea of one particular person who had come to, Edward de Vere, as being the real author, so to speak.
	So this fellow, Alexander Moore, he's saying that the whole tourist industry at Stratford-on-Avon, that's a huge tourist industry, Shakespeare tourism, is all bogus.
	It's totally fake.
	Anne Hathaway's cottage, all the stuff that tourists go to England to see, you know, this is where Shakespeare lives, his bedroom, that is all totally fake.
	So let's just read what he says.
	Do you want to read it, Jim?
	Here?
	All references to Shakespeare in the 1590s are referenced to a pseudonym that appeared on printed poems in 1593 and 1594 and on plays from 1598.
	They are not allusions to a real living writer called Shakespeare.
	Right, okay.
	So there were two famous best-selling poems, ostensibly they were erotic verse, but they had a sort of political message.
	One was Venus and Lucretia, And then later on, the plays had already started appearing, but without a name.
	Okay, this is what we'll come to.
	And a name didn't go on the plays.
	Well, let's have a look here.
	Here is, we look at this one, The Treasure of Richard III, and it says it has been acted These plays are always given as already acted before they're published.
	That's something to think about.
	It's not the case that some guy decides to write a play and then publish it and then it's acted.
	It's the other way around.
	They're first acted out by a troupe of actors Go around the country.
	So this might be a clue as to how the plays originated, okay?
	Then at some stage they're finished off, maybe polished up, or possibly, yeah, but by enough to be published.
	So that's 1597.
	Here, then we get, notice there's a hyphen here.
	If it's shake hyphen spear, this is the year 1598, the tragedy of King Richard II, right?
	Yep.
	So you can see, again, it says, as it has been publicly acted by the right, Lord Chamberlain's men, that's a group of players, but that means they're relatively safe.
	That means they had royal approval, because putting on a play, politically incorrect, could be really dangerous.
	And Ben Johnson, the other most famous playwright at the time, next to Shakespeare, got put in jail for acting in a play that was politically incorrect and Marlow, the great playwright Marlow, he got hit with a charge of atheism and the King's intelligence officer called Cecil might have bumped him off.
	He might have been killed.
	Apparently he was killed.
	Some people think it was a ploy to escape torture but He was apparently killed.
	And this is a playwright.
	This is one of the top playwrights in the country.
	First of all, he gets accused of atheism.
	So you have to be very careful.
	If you want to do a play out of line, you might not want to put your name to it.
	And there was a great appetite for plays, partly because it was the only way to describe what was going on in this country with the enormous stress The monarch had invented a new religion.
	If you can imagine a time when religion was taken very seriously in this country, Henry VIII had announced that the head of the Christian religion in the country was himself.
	The king was the head of it.
	And that was what the Tudors, Queen Elizabeth, took that line, that she was head of the church.
	And for the Catholics, that was very shocking.
	So you had to be very careful what you were allowed to say.
	So this Richard II did have a dig at the Chief Intelligence Officer, called Cecil.
	They thought the main character was probably him, or was looking at the way he behaved.
	So the name William Shakespeare first appears, Right?
	Now, you're saying the plays were performed before they were published.
	Obviously, the script had to have been written in advance, but it did not appear in print until after the plays had been performed.
	It could be, Jim, but let's consider the alternative that the players were not literate.
	Imagine they had very good memories, that they'd be given parts and maybe they helped to evolve the play by each taking their own part and going through it, you know?
	So they might have put on the play and gone through it, and then whoever was the playwright were then writing it up.
	I mean, I think that is one possible way in which these things emerged.
	We'll see that for years these plays were bought and used by people putting on the plays, Without a name being attached to them, certainly not Shakespeare's name.
	So, however you want to imagine it, there's some kind of process whereby they're first publicly acted, and the front piece emphasises this, don't they?
	Fascinating.
	Meanwhile, the first plays in historical quartet agreed to be by Shakespeare, Wars of the Roses
	in the 15th century, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, Henry IV Part III, all in 1591,
	and then Richard II, 1592 to 1594.
	Right, so these are the first plays which everyone agrees were by Shakespeare, even
	though they didn't have his name on it, okay?
	So they started appearing in the 1590s, and so this is something that happened 100 years ago, okay?
	The Wars of the Roses.
	And this was a terrific struggle over what lineage had the right to be king.
	The Lancastrians were from the French Norman invaders.
	OK, they came over.
	Did they have the real right to rule the country or was there a different claim to the throne?
	And that was called the White or York Rose.
	So that was the theme, terrific theme of the first play.
	So what kind of fellow starts off his career with a terrific four part statement of international politics and deeply, deeply, totally connected with the crown of England?
	I think the simple answer is somebody wants to remain anonymous.
	Well, it certainly suggests he was a prominent figure who was very knowledgeable and connected with leading figures in the government.
	So it does, yeah.
	We'll see, I remember again, this guy has to be very close to royalty, and in fact the main candidates for writing Shakespeare have got these ancient traditions in their family.
	The de Vere family, one of the oldest nobles, noble family in this country, goes back about 400 years.
	They actually fought in the Wars of the Roses, so that will be an explanation of why The guy at Stratford is much too young to have an interest in this, you know, to have a mature view on the Wars of the Roses.
	Far, far too young.
	So I would say he needs to be someone who's been born quite a bit earlier and had quite a bit of experience of international politics and of going to France and of experience of how the British royalty works.
	Okay.
	So that is the first indication of whoever or whatever is producing these plays.
	Okay.
	Fascinating.
	Early unattributed plays.
	Some appear too early.
	Hamlet, named in 1589.
	Timon of Athens, 1584.
	Comedy of Errors, 1577.
	Women of Athens, 1584.
	Comedy of Errors, 1577.
	Titus Andronicus, 1570s.
	Others not by him have the name Shakespeare.
	The Life of Sir John Oldcastle, 1600.
	The London Prodigal, 1605.
	Yorkshire Tragedy, 1608.
	In the Repertoire of the King's Men.
	Yeah, what we earlier saw, the players called the Lord Chambersmen, they later turned up as the Kingsmen in the reign of the next King, James.
	James I took over after Elizabeth died in 1603, the first Stuart King, and so they were then the Kingsmen and they were playing these plays.
	So It's as if someone who wanted to remain anonymous could use that name, even though all experts on nowadays agree the guy we think was Shakespeare didn't write these plays, okay?
	As regards these first ones, say Hamlet, what this shows, I think, or could show, is that whoever the author is was quite a bit older and these were coming out Quite a bit earlier, before his name was put onto it, or anyone's name.
	Now you could take the view, if you want, that this is much more, given the terrific rage and enthusiasm for watching plays, and how a whole lot of political issues you're forbidden to think about or talk about, you could see expressed in plays and allegories.
	So These could just be emerging just by people somehow perhaps getting together and putting them on.
	I mean this Hamlet, this early Hamlet, wouldn't be the one we end up with, right?
	It's some early version.
	Nobody quite knows what was in it, right?
	I think it's a rumour that it had the to be or not to be speech in it.
	It's a rumour.
	But these are very early versions.
	I think that's terribly important.
	Early drafts, as it were.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So that's terribly important as regards how the plays came into existence long before any name was put to them.
	Right.
	OK, this is the situation is well summed up by John Michel, British author and philosopher who wrote Shakespeare.
	Do you want to read that out, Jim?
	It was understood among actors that Shakespeare's name on a play meant the real author wanted no questions asked and it was in their interest to oblige him.
	It was convenient to have a stock name to attach to plays, which for whatever reason the real author did not wish to acknowledge as his.
	Right, right.
	This seems to have been the case, that you've got this brilliant playwright, because he was somehow noble or close to royalty, and let's add here that acting and playwrights had a very low reputation in these days.
	It's not like today, that they were not greatly respected characters, and anyone who's sort of noble or Or a connection with the Crown, you definitely would not want to be seen as writing plays.
	I take it this book is quite good about who wrote Shakespeare by John Michel.
	Oh yeah, it's a good all-round introduction, yeah.
	It doesn't come to any conclusion, it's totally agnostic.
	Well, he says the Earl of Oxford is a good candidate.
	Okay, now here you've got a choice.
	Here are three of the most popular candidates for who might have been Shakespeare, right?
	So I think it's useful to look at when they died and give you a reference that Elizabeth, the great Queen Elizabeth, dies after a very long reign in 1603 and you then get a transition to the Stuart monarchy, which ends up being even more religiously intolerant than the Queen Elizabeth was.
	Anyway, Christopher Marlowe is a brilliant playwright, and he apparently dies in 1593.
	If you want to believe it was him, you have to believe that he faked his death, which is quite possible.
	Death looks very unconvincing, and went on writing plays afterwards.
	The problem with Christopher Marlowe, he doesn't have the upper cross connection.
	Shakespeare's plays are full of, for example, falconry.
	Falconry was a sport of kings, you know, you had a falcon and it flew off.
	It was a sport of the aristocrats.
	Sport of the aristocrats, yeah.
	So there's a whole lot of technical language of falconry that is in the plays of Shakespeare.
	He obviously had a lot of experience of it.
	And that kind of thing, as well as an innermost feeling of what British royalty was like, of what British royalty and power meant, that isn't in Marlowe's life, right?
	So that is the problem.
	Edward de Vere is, in many ways, everybody's favourite.
	His family, he was the most noble, I think he was the 16th Earl of Oxford, which is confusing.
	It doesn't mean the town of Oxford.
	He was called Oxford, this fellow Oxford.
	Oxford is many times referred to in the Shakespeare plays.
	That quartet we looked at, The Wars of the Roses, right?
	The Earl of Oxford, that's before this fellow, a century before, is given a very glamorous role, a heroic role, and is heroically described.
	Shakespeare was basically In those quartets, he was rewriting English history to suit and to beef up the claim of Elizabeth to be Queen.
	Her claim was rather doubtful, so it was beefing up the claim of Elizabeth and also giving a lot of glamour to the Oxford dynasty.
	That's Edward de Vere, what he belonged to.
	So that is one reason for believing that he's an author here.
	Okay, and then Francis Bacon, uh, well, hang on, sorry, Edward de Vere dies rather early, 1604.
	Now that is the main problem, right?
	The Tempest, one of the last plays, was written around about 1610.
	Again, with Edward de Vere, there's, um, You can believe that he didn't really die.
	I know this sounds funny, but there's not a lot about his funeral.
	Anyone attending his funeral, for one of the great statesmen of England, there's very little that really happens except that his son takes over.
	So you can believe that he faked his death and wrote plays afterwards.
	That is what I call Oxfordians, the people who support Edward de Beer.
	That's what they tend to believe, okay?
	So these are the three characters.
	Francis Bacon is very much... there's a lot of Bacon stuff in the works of Shakespeare.
	He was an immensely learned, knowledgeable fellow, but he's basically a scientific, materialist type guy.
	He's the great visionary and prophet or Spokesperson of what would become the new science later in the century, okay?
	The birth of modern science.
	That is all associated with Francis Bacon.
	People would quote Bacon for how to do it, okay?
	Bacon wrote voluminously, but it was all nonfiction.
	I think it's highly improbable that he would have been the master of the knowledge available to man at the time and also been the author of these plays.
	I find that highly implausible.
	And from what I've read of Bacon, it doesn't seem to me he has a literary style or flair of Shakespeare.
	Certainly not, no.
	You're absolutely right, Jim.
	I totally agree with you.
	Many large volumes of Bacon's work, you know, that's enough for one lifetime.
	Bulky volumes.
	And the wonderful fantasy and poetry and storytelling, delight in storytelling, and delight in banter and repartee that you get in Shakespeare, that's not Bacon at all.
	It's nothing like him.
	And There's terrific knowledge of all sorts of things in Shakespeare, so these people were related, they knew each other.
	De Vere and Bacon were cousins or second cousins or something, so they'd know each other and collaborate, right?
	And Bacon had a lot to do with publishing and producing the Shakespeare plays, as we'll see.
	Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating.
	Now, De Vere, I take it, had the kind of position in the aristocracy where if he was publishing these somewhat controversial plays, he might very well have had good reason not to be identified publicly.
	Yeah, I think so.
	Yeah, that's the crux of the matter.
	Sometimes, say, the Queen was totally livid with the way some play was used.
	I could just mention there was something called the Essex Rebellion in 1601 when the Earl of Essex, he was very very popular and he campaigned for religious freedom and tolerance and he ends up getting his head chopped off.
	So people sympathizing with him were in deep trouble.
	So that's an example of how politically dangerous it was to Or it could be, for a playwright.
	Right.
	Okay, let's come on now to what happened to 1609.
	Just to remind you, 1607-8, his name first appears on a play, right?
	You mean on a sonnet?
	Well, 1609 appears on a sonnet, and notice how the hyphen is there.
	We saw before it's hyphen That further emphasizes that it's a pseudonym, doesn't it?
	That that isn't a real name with a hyphen.
	And so his name is right up there atop 1609.
	And well, nobody sort of, I believe, nobody can make a lot of sense of what they're about.
	So it seemed to be some quite old man.
	He talks about how he's Got one foot in the grave, or he won't last much longer, or he doesn't like seeing himself in the mirror anymore.
	And he's got a crush on this lovely young man, somehow.
	That seems to be what a lot of the sonnets are about.
	Nick, I've lost your image on the camera.
	Oh, sorry.
	Right.
	Thank you.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Now, he's got this... The sonnets where you're saying the sonnets were by an older man to a younger man?
	Well, they have different themes in them, but that appears quite a lot.
	Some old guy who says he hasn't got long to live, and he's got a thorough crush on this young fellow.
	Seems to be, yeah.
	But it's hard to tell, really.
	But we don't really need to go into that.
	Well, I'm just interested in whether that would be another motive for anonymity.
	Might be.
	And there's a question which is hard to answer.
	Is he still alive at this point?
	1609.
	The dedication refers to our ever-living poet in the front, and that phrase is usually used for someone who's died.
	If someone's still alive, you don't refer to them as our ever-living pirate.
	Interesting, yes.
	So, there's slight differences of perspective here.
	Also, the one clue he gives out about who he is is, in Sonnet 125, he says, were it ought to me, I bore the canopy.
	Now, that specifically refers to Queen Elizabeth's Some sort of procession, not a wedding, but when she's going somewhere, a procession, a canopy is, I think, held over her to protect her.
	It specifically refers to something in the procession with the Queen of England.
	Did the author himself bore the canopy?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And that refers, that could be Edward de Vere, These top guys were what's called Order of the Garter.
	That was a top night thing you had.
	So Edward de Vere, and there's one other fellow, Earl of Derby, who is a candidate for that.
	So I would say that narrows it down to a couple of people, if you think this guy's the author of Shakespeare.
	Okay.
	Fascinating.
	Right, now we come here to the most staggering Publishing event of all time, or almost, when 36 plays were published.
	36.
	And six of them had never been heard of before, right?
	And this was in the year 1623.
	Now that's years after... The question is, is everybody dead by then, right?
	Francis Bacon is still alive.
	And I would say that two people arranged The publishing of this is called The First Folio.
	It's got all the plays in 36.
	One was Francis Bacon, who was He had until recently been Lord Chancellor of England.
	He was sort of disgraced, but until 1621 he was Lord Chancellor.
	And then there was Ben Johnson, a playwright.
	He was the one fellow who claimed to know Shakespeare, which is pretty amazing.
	He wrote this introduction to sell the book and he claimed to know him.
	Well, look at all these fascinating ties to De Vere.
	Only three men received dedication of Shakespeare work.
	Each man had been engaged to or was married to one of Oxford's daughters, Earl of Southampton, engaged to Elizabeth De Vere.
	She married William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby.
	William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, engaged to Bridget De Vere.
	Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, married Susan De Vere.
	Wow, that's a lot of circumstantial evidence!
	Yeah, this tells you a lot about who wrote Shakespeare.
	Now, I see the dedication to these two people called Earl of Pembroke and Earl of Montgomery.
	These are the two guys, William Herbert and Philip Herbert.
	They got very senior positions, Lord Chamberlain and Gentlemen, they're both Knights of the Garter, so these are two absolute top guys, and they're in charge of censorship, that is, what is allowed to be published and what isn't, okay?
	And one of them is married to a daughter of De Vere, and another guy, also married to another daughter, is William Stanley, and as we'll see, he's got a very good claim to be an author of He plays a Shakespeare.
	And then the Earl of Southampton, who we looked at earlier for the poem, he got engaged.
	He didn't want to get married, but that was... Tell me more about William Stanley, Nick.
	Well, I think we come on to him.
	He had real royal blood.
	OK, shall we go on?
	Oh, OK, well, we haven't quite got to him yet.
	Right, now what Ben Johnson did... Notice we're coming up to the 400th anniversary of this event, right?
	1623.
	We're 2023.
	We will be at the 400 year anniversary of the greatest literary hoax of all time.
	Now Ben Johnson, as it were, he orchestrated the hoax.
	You probably didn't think it'd be quite so successful.
	The clever hints... Would you want to read this out?
	Yeah, sure.
	The clever hints in the first folio about Shakespeare being Shakespeare involved a deception orchestrated by Ben Johnson, A.J.
	Poynton, the man who was never Shakespeare.
	Yeah.
	Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were to see thee in our waters yet appear, and make those flights upon the banks of Thames, that so did take Eliza and our James.
	Ben Johnson.
	Right, thank you.
	OK.
	Shakespeare is Shakespeare.
	He made out that they were the same.
	So he gave hints.
	He didn't say anything legally that would commit himself.
	But this book argues very well.
	The man who was known as Shakespeare argues very well that the Shakespeare was not the fellow and shows how Ben Jonson tried to intimate this.
	This line of poetry you just read out is the way he tried to intimate it.
	People are trying to think that Sweet Swan of Avon must refer to Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon, okay?
	Yes, yes, yes.
	Now, make those flights... oh sorry, just go back a minute, just go back.
	Sure.
	Just a minute.
	Make those flights from the banks of Thames The Shakespeare plays were performed at Henley, that's where the Royal Palace was, on the Thames.
	Both Elizabeth, and then later King James, enjoyed the plays performed at Henley, at the Royal Palace.
	And all around Henley and the Thames, that is referred to quite a bit in the plays of Shakespeare, so you clearly knew all around there.
	And by the way, Shakespeare plays also allude a lot to where Francis Bacon lived, That is up in, sorry, where was it?
	Just north of London, where Baker lived, is referred to quite a lot.
	Okay, next, let's move on.
	So, when Ben Johnson wrote this very clever literary ruse, the preface to the 36 plays, For example, he didn't give the coat of arms of Mr. Shakespeare at Stratford.
	He didn't say that he would legally commit himself to saying Shakespeare was the author, but he intimated it.
	Some people think he intimated the other author, but the way it's universally been taken is that he said, and also remember Shakespeare at Stratford was dead by then, 1623, right?
	So the main characters were dead, and this is the people who owned the plays.
	Those are the two people who we saw it was dedicated to.
	People who owned the plays were preparing them under the direction of Francis Bacon to get them all published.
	What happened sometime after that, or around about the same time as that, was very shocking.
	Somebody went up to Stratford on Avon.
	You remember we saw that bust?
	that was put up of Mr. Shakespeare.
	They altered it.
	They altered it.
	They put this underneath the main bust.
	Again, this is done quite carefully to intimate that... They put this plaque underneath the bust?
	Yeah, to intimate that he was the author of it.
	So, in other words, once it had been published and they'd intimated that he'd written it, they had to go the whole way and they fiddled his gravestone So you see here, half-blown language, Socrates and Olympus and stuff.
	Read this monument, Shakespeare and so on.
	Since all he has writ leaves living arts but page to serve his wit.
	So it's definitely implying that this guy was a playwright, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	And it's put the year 1616, which is when Shakespeare died.
	So this is a very shocking act of deception that was perpetrated.
	We don't know who.
	And soon after this, the Civil War broke out in England, which brought terrific chaos and confusion.
	So the people of Stratford didn't realise what was going on.
	For another century or so.
	It didn't generally dawn on them that the amazing playwright was supposed to have lived in their town.
	Right.
	Okay, next.
	Right.
	You can see here the dedication.
	And what they also did, much later, this is another century later, they redid the bust.
	Now, this is the bust that everyone sees today.
	And it's got a quill pen, it's only a quill pen.
	So he's supposed to be the playwright, living at Stratford.
	And let's emphasize that this is not the bust that was put up originally.
	There's totally definite evidence for the original bust from early documents.
	Do we have the image of the original bust?
	Oh yeah, I started off showing it, if you remember, right at the beginning.
	Oh yes, okay.
	Yeah, a guy holding a sack of wool, you know, with his hands on a sack of wool.
	Okay, so I'm saying that that is a mask, that image.
	It's not a real person at all.
	And here's a kind of fantasy image of Shakespeare, and I'm saying that there was actually no such character.
	Here's a fantasy image of the most, the world's greatest playwright, as if he was the guy from Stratford.
	And of course, when you say there was no Shakespeare, you're not denying there were authors of the plays, which I take it you believe had primarily one author.
	Well, let's come on to that.
	OK, well, let me give you an answer to that.
	Number of words.
	There's a very large vocabulary in Shakespeare plays, much larger than you would normally expect for one author.
	Yes.
	So, on that basis, some people think there would have been some sort of very talented group of people putting it together.
	Anyway, the main thing I'm arguing today... Sir?
	Look at the image on the left, looks a lot like Deverik.
	Well, possibly.
	Does it?
	Oh, right, okay.
	But on the other hand, it's very disembodied, isn't it?
	It hasn't got a neck.
	Yeah, right, right, right.
	And the shoulders don't look right.
	So these are two kind of phantom images made up that are due to the fiction that Ben Johnson launched.
	You've got this image that I think contemporaries would have known.
	A picture like this wasn't a real person, and nobody's quite allowed to talk about who the real fellow was.
	They respect the anonymity, put it that way.
	Now, this on the right is much later, isn't it?
	It's 18th century, and it's a total outrageous sort of contrick.
	Well, it may not be.
	You may say that people who put this up really believed he was the author, and so they wanted a fitting memorial.
	But it's not a real person.
	Okay, now let's come back to Francis Bacon, and it's this document that gives him a majorly strong claim.
	Now, I don't know if you can read this.
	This is a manuscript found.
	I don't know if you can read it.
	At the top, Up the top, there's Francis Bacon's name.
	Can you see that?
	Yes, I can.
	Right, and then underneath that, the various essays he's written, various of his essays.
	Tribute, or giving what is due, praise the worthiest virtue, and so on.
	And then there's, his name is quite a lot, Francis Bacon, and then he talks about the Queen, the Earl of Arundel, my Lord of Essex.
	These are the sort of things that might have been going through his mind as he wrote these things down.
	Like a list of things he had to do.
	Speech for my Lord of Sussex, and so on.
	And I see the name Shakespeare occur here many times.
	Yeah, at the bottom, loads of writing out William Shakespeare, just trying various times to write out the name.
	In the middle, you see actual titles of plays.
	Richard II and Richard III.
	Okay?
	So this is an amazing document linking Bacon's name with the plays of Shakespeare.
	On the left here, I've enlarged it, just in case you can't read it.
	Yes.
	Okay, so at the bottom here, you can see Richard II, Richard III, and Francis, and then Shakespeare.
	Yes.
	So, as you can imagine, the people who believe Bacon wrote Shakespeare, this is all they need, isn't it?
	You know, it's very impressive.
	Yes.
	Okay, now, On the back of that, this is called the Northumberland manuscript.
	It's found in a house right next to where he lived in London, where Bacon lived.
	And on the back of this document, which is a bit torn at the edges, this was a folder, part of a folder.
	So plays of Shakespeare or his own essays would have been kept in this folder.
	And on the back of the folder, it just says, put into type.
	Put into type.
	In other words, print it.
	So I would say that Bacon's responsibility here was that everything in this folder had to be put into type to get ready to publish.
	Okay.
	So I would say this shows the terrific close connection Bacon had with what was called Shakespeare.
	He was the Lord, I think it was High Chancellor of England, in an absolute top position.
	Some people believe he was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth.
	He had a top position and he would have overseen the protection of these plays and their eventual publication.
	I'm very impressed by the handwriting, which displays high intelligence and complete control.
	I'm very impressed by this handwriting, Nick.
	Fascinating.
	Right, yes, yes.
	Well, Bacon was a very careful and brilliant lawyer, you know, a political advisor.
	So if the authors of Shakespeare needed to know anything about law, he could have helped them out.
	We have tons of writing by Bacon.
	Do we have tons of writing samples from Stanley or De Vere?
	I mean, could we compare them?
	I'm not sure.
	I think there is some.
	People believe there are some things in Shakespeare's writing.
	I'm not too sure about that.
	I think, yeah, there is stuff by Stanley and by DeBeer.
	There is handwriting, yeah.
	So this guy is very much a terrific analytical mind, encyclopedic knowledge, you know, terrific knowledge of law.
	I mean, he's a wise fellow.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	He would have had an extraordinary vocabulary as well.
	Yeah, he would have done, yeah.
	And so he was totally involved in this, but I might suggest he was not involved primarily as an author.
	That'd be my suggestion.
	Okay?
	Yes.
	Here's De Vere.
	Yeah, here's De Vere.
	Now, De Vere at least looks as if he might be the playwright.
	He looks like what a playwright should look like, or what you might imagine Shakespeare would be like.
	He's got advantage that here is somebody talking about him as an English dramatist, the best for comedy amongst us.
	Yes, talking about him as a playwright.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So so he's definitely definitely is there as a playwright and regards as one of the best writers of the age.
	And he's very close to royalty, which is enough of an explanation for him Not only not give his name, but for example, nobody ever pays Shakespeare in all the business of buying plays.
	Nobody ever says, oh, we pay Shakespeare for this or that, you know, that doesn't happen.
	So the plays come out and the author, whoever it is, is rather detached from them.
	So this guy, he's the most popular candidate these days for As the author, but I'll say the problem is he dies rather early, so I think that if you want him to be the author, then you've got to have someone else like Stanley writing the Tempest.
	The plays at the end, the last plays at the end, some people think they're written, got a different style of authorship, the late plays, they're more like fairy tale, legendary myth, Well, that might have been to obfuscate the actual author of the plays.
	Well, it could be, yeah.
	He can't be writing Shakespeare's plays after he's dead, but someone else could write plays in the name of Shakespeare to make it appear as though whoever authored the plays continued to live.
	That would be very plausible, so that it would seem to me Stanley could very well then be cast in that role.
	Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably what happened, yeah.
	Right.
	Okay, next.
	Right, here is Earl of Derby, William Stanley, and he's got the right initials, which is a really good start, right?
	WS.
	So, he's got a Jesuit reported, 1599, right at the end of the century.
	He'd found the Earl of Derby, so he'd quote, busied only in penning commodities for the common players.
	Well, plays for the common people?
	Yeah, so in other words, a testimony that he's writing plays.
	So this is sort of when he's young and good-looking in these pictures.
	On the right he almost looks like a female.
	Well, he does look like a dreamy poet who could write wonderful, you know, fantasy and stories.
	He does look pretty damn Like what you might imagine Shakespeare to be.
	Now there's one specific allusion in a play called Love's Labour's Lost.
	There's a whole lot of specific details about a French court called the Court of Navarre and Stanley was over there.
	He did visit that court.
	He was really there.
	So that's very good evidence.
	He was there at the right time, and all the knowledge of how that French court worked, and the language and so on, that is very strong evidence that he actually wrote that play, Love's Labour's Lost.
	Okay, now he was royal blood from Henry VII, I think, and he was in a very dodgy position.
	A lot of people felt he'd got a better claim to the throne than Queen Elizabeth, Because Queen Elizabeth was from a wife of Henry VIII that the Catholic Church didn't recognize, you see.
	So Elizabeth couldn't possibly recognize Catholicism in her country because the more it was recognized, they would say her reign was illegitimate.
	So William Stanley had to keep pretty quiet about all that.
	In fact, at some point he was thinking, Queen Elizabeth might fancy her.
	Everyone was wondering who Queen Elizabeth would marry, which everyone hoped she would do, and he was quite a good candidate for it.
	And that is an obvious reason why he couldn't put any name to his plays.
	So him and De Vere would kind of know each other.
	Well, obviously, he married De Vere's daughter, yeah.
	There you go.
	Fascinating!
	I love what you've dug up here.
	All right, yeah.
	Okay, now there's a local angle.
	This is where I live in East London, North East London, so I'm afraid it won't be too much to your American watchers, but Hackney in East London, there's a churchyard and De Vere is supposed to be buried there, But there's no sign of his grave, so there's sort of a mystique, which is quite appropriate.
	And people think, oh well, of course he didn't really die, he wasn't really buried there.
	And then Waltham Forest.
	I live in the district of Waltham Forest, and that was owned by the De Vere's.
	There's one slightly humorous theory that after he died in 1604, he had his three daughters who he was dependent on, if he was still alive, Which he found rather stressful.
	And that is around the time when King Lear appears with the King and his three daughters.
	So that's just a possible story.
	Fascinating.
	Fascinating.
	Right.
	OK, now, if I may go right back to the early beginning.
	How did these plays appear?
	Sorry, I should have put this earlier.
	This is the guy in charge of the Rose Theatre.
	It was on the banks of the Thames, and this is supposedly where Shakespeare worked and where the Shakespeare plays began, the Rose Theatre.
	So that's very famous.
	And this fellow, Henslow, kept a diary of all the plays, 1591 to 1609.
	Now this is the whole period when Shakespeare plays appeared, right?
	And so he mentions all the well-known dramatists of the day, But not William Shakespeare.
	So, this is typical.
	So, Shakespeare was clearly not an actual person.
	That's how much he paid for each play.
	So, there's nothing about, I paid Shakespeare, right?
	Because everyone would understand that wasn't a real person, okay?
	Now, here are titles which it's suggested look like they're actually Shakespeare plays, either that or an early version of them.
	These are in his diary, right?
	Titus and Andronicus, 1593.
	King Lear, 1593.
	The Taming of the Shrew, 1594.
	Hamlet, 1594.
	Troilus and Cretida, 1599.
	And then Caesar's Fall, that might be Julius Caesar, 1602.
	So those are, I think it's fair to say, the very earliest references of what all the world now recognizes as the plays of Shakespeare, okay?
	Fascinating.
	Fascinating.
	Yeah, he's got about 10 plays in his diary that we nowadays think of Shakespeare plays, and this, I might suggest, endorses the picture that the plays somehow came out of a group experience, of the players going through these terrific dramas.
	The players themselves might have had a hand in forming the plays, each player having a separate role, okay?
	Your camera's off again, Nick, your camera's off.
	Thank you.
	Right, now, Everyone's favourite play, Hamlet.
	Let's look at this intriguing detail.
	The first publication of Hamlet by Shakespeare was in the year 1603.
	The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
	So it comes out, it's in a quarto, that's just the size of the paper.
	And the title page says, as it has been diverse times acted by his highest servants in the city of London, Also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere.
	Okay, so you notice that whenever, I think Maurice, whenever a Shakespeare play comes out with his name on it, it's emphasizing that it's already been acted in various different plays and the people who did the acting.
	As if he wants to give them credit for what happened.
	So I'm just suggesting the overall impression of the players going through the dynamic of the story and experiencing it themselves, and that helps to knock this story into place.
	Obviously, there's got to be one genius at the end, the master touch, who puts it all together.
	On the title page it always seems to emphasize that there are actors who felt that it's already been acted out before he claims credit for it.
	Right, 1604.
	Now this is the final edition we know now.
	The second edition, exact details of the castle in Denmark, Elsinore Castle.
	Okay, now improved details.
	Also, the well-known figure of Polonius in Hamlet.
	It appears.
	Before that, in 1603, he had a different name, Corumbis.
	Okay, and this isn't just made up.
	This is a Swedish name, Polonis, so it's a Latinised form of that.
	So, there's the details of the castle in Denmark.
	There was a visit by James's ambassador called Rutland.
	He went to Elsinore in 1603 and he came back.
	So, whoever you think wrote Shakespeare has to have Got these details from Ruckland, this ambassador.
	In fact, he probably asked him beforehand as a chance to check up anything in the play that needs improving.
	So, various details about exactly the platform on which the ghost appears, you know.
	These things were checked up and so the author of Shakespeare has to talk to, chat with the ambassador of the king who's just come back from Elsinore Castle, okay?
	And then Polonius, you know, he gives all this advice to Hamlet about how to conduct his life and what to do, you know, and then Hamlet says, oh these tedious old fools.
	So that's That comes from this Swedish castle.
	So I think that's a fascinating glimpse of the actual finalizing of this play, okay?
	Now this is round about the end of De Vere's life, right?
	This is when he dies.
	And so a lot of people... and also he died with a very bad reputation.
	Most accounts or biographies on him, they talk about how he screwed up this and messed up that and You know, I failed to do this.
	And so on.
	So the dying words of Hamlet on the stage as he's dying, he says, Oh, God, Horatio, what a wounded name.
	Things standing thus unknown shall live behind me.
	He can boot up things at the end of his life.
	Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating.
	Well, this is a bit amazing.
	So a lot of people feel that is Edward de Vere.
	Talking about putting himself into the play as Hamlet.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	So I think that's that's rather credible.
	OK, now, whoever you think wrote Shakespeare has to have been to Italy and know it pretty damn well.
	Loads of plays here that are all about life in Italy and Italian habits, Italian language, Italian masses and a whole lot of details.
	That are all correct, you know.
	So that very much leaves the two characters, Edward de Vere and William Stanley, who had been to Italy quite a bit, spent time there.
	Some people think that also applies to Francis Bacon, I'm not sure.
	Right, okay, now this is just a rather good quote.
	A general review by an author who's hopefully going to publish a book.
	She's got a web page.
	Would you like to read it out, Jim, or is that too much?
	Sure, sure, sure.
	Without patrons like the Earl of Sussex, Lord Hanson, the Lord Admiral, the Earl of Pembroke, and probably at a crucial point in late 1590s, the Earl of Essex, Oxford and Bacon could never have mounted the English literary renaissance because these high-level supporters were constrained to keep as low a profile as they could.
	Historians give all the credit to the entrepreneurs who were utterly dependent on them for support and protection.
	The London Commercial Theatre, England's greatest contribution to the European Renaissance, was a rebirth of the ancient pagan merrymaking that the Reformation had driven underground, or rather into the halls, priories, and chanteries, that emptied by Henry VIII and his illusion of the monasteries, that in the late 1570s, with Oxford help and that of his powerful patrons, Metamorphosed into the theatres of the English Renaissance.
	Thank you, Jim.
	Yeah.
	OK.
	Is that the lot?
	I think that's the lot, is it?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	OK.
	Just go back.
	Yeah.
	Oh, sure.
	Here we are.
	Right.
	Well, I think that's quite a good evaluation.
	I feel that we're getting near to Where this amazing creative power came from, of this anonymous genius, and for me, there has to be some brilliant group of people, who maybe, not in London, somewhere in the northwest country maybe, some people think near the Welsh border, or even in Manchester, that met together
	With these plays that have been knocking around for years and perfecting them, improving them.
	Maybe somebody sat down and wrote a whole play, I presume that did happen, but at other times there were plays that were being used within the theatres of England and they were perfected by these people who enjoyed Playing around with the English language.
	And there's a lot of new words invented.
	There's over a thousand new words in Shakespeare.
	So that's not just one person, you know, doing it.
	It has to be a group of people knocking around and enjoying the brilliance of what they were doing.
	And so this is, this is, there may have been, you know, a master, a master As we've said, one or two geniuses who finally put it all together.
	But let's envisage various different playwrights and geniuses having fun putting this together.
	In particular, say, scenes of banter and interaction you get in the Shakespeare play between the characters.
	That isn't something that one person in a room can just brew up, you know.
	That comes from experiencing what's in the the way the players function. And De Vere's, I may not have
	said this, De Vere's father and himself were both totally involved with putting on plays and
	players, so was Stanley, and it was from that experience that these plays could be
	gradually perfected.
	Do we know much about De Vere or Stanley's articulation, their verbal skills generally,
	because Shakespeare had the highest degree mastery of language.
	Yeah, well, the poems you have in De Vere are generally kind of depressing.
	Some people say, oh, this isn't good enough, it's not really good enough.
	You don't have anything from either of those two that look like being Shakespeare.
	You don't have that.
	So, Yeah, there's a lot missing.
	There's a vast amount missing from history in trying to put this story together.
	So are you suggesting DeVere and Stanley could have been acting in collaboration?
	Oh, definitely.
	Yeah, they would get together.
	Well, obviously one married the other's daughter.
	So there was some sort of group putting things together to do with the two people To whom the plays were dedicated, or perhaps some people think that the mother of those two was involved in putting together a group of playwrights.
	So I would suggest, say Marlow, he's got about 8,000 different words in his plays, okay?
	So the Bible's got a bit more, so 12,000.
	And in plays by Shakespeare, you've got about 20,000.
	So I think that strongly argues, first of all, that you've got more than one author.
	And secondly, that you've got people who somehow enjoyed playing around with the English language and making out new words from taking French and Latin stuff and put it into English words.
	Yeah.
	Nick, this has been utterly fascinating.
	Fascinating.
	I've so enjoyed this.
	Would you like to add a few further thoughts to sum it up?
	Well yeah, the thing is Jim, we're coming up, I appeal to all conspiracy theorists listening, we're coming up for the 400th anniversary of this monster hoax and I think the idea of how deception is used is of interest to all of us and stodgy English universities probably won't take any notice at all of this.
	I think it's much more likely to find some American Literary departments that will go with it.
	You know, I think this is a really exciting subject and this is a time in history, I'd forge it to definitely eliminate the Stratford guy as having contributed in any way to the plays.
	That did not happen and I think we could begin to look at the process of creativity, which is a very exciting theme, Once we've done that, and it may well be that American university departments are more prepared to look at this than the English ones.
	Well, fascinating, Nick, and we're coming up on the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first folio.
	Absolutely fascinating.
	I expect this is going to get a lot of attention in the future from scholars of literature.
	I mean, we're talking about the greatest playwright in all of history.
	Yeah.
	I mean, Shakespeare's contributions are impossible to exaggerate.
	They were so profound, not only on England and the English language even, but on world literature without any doubt.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	It's such an awesome thing.
	People get overawed by it, and because they're overawed, they just plump for a totally ridiculous conclusion.
	The man who bore the name did not write the plays?
	Well, he didn't quite bear the name.
	He was Shakespeare, or Shakespeare.
	He bore a traditional English name.
	just really stop, you know. The man who bore the name did not write the plays.
	Well, he didn't quite bear the name. He was Shakespeare, or Shakespeare. He bore a traditional
	English name, which was, I mean, there's a whole lot of missing history about what role he did have.
	have.
	He seems to have been a quite unsavoury character.
	The things we know about him, the lawsuits and criminal charges, are quite unpleasant.
	At no point I haven't been to that, but a few odds and ends are known about his life and there's nothing whatever remotely resembling any literary genius in it.
	Nick, I can't thank you enough.
	Our interviews on The Real Deal are among the most fascinating I've ever conducted.
	I can't thank you enough.
	This is Jim Fetzer, your host on The Real Deal, thanking my esteemed colleague, who's quite a genius in my estimation, Nick Hollerstrom, for another illustration of the brilliance of his work.
	Thank you.
	And Jim, do we gather that this chapter will appear in your book about conspiracies?
	Do you want to say anything about that?
	It's gonna be there.
	It'll be there, Nick, for sure.
	Yeah?
	Yeah.
	We got the book in the works.
	We don't have all the essays yet, but it most certainly will be there, Nick.
	I'm so pleased.
	Great.
	Great.
	Look forward to it, Jim.
	That's brilliant.
	Yeah.
	Thanks again, Nick.
	Wonderful.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	I'll see you there, Jim.
	Thank you, my friend, and everyone who joined us today for The Real Deal.
	Thank you all for watching.
	I'm sure you found this as fascinating as did I. Thanks for being here.

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