Dr. John Doe (author of Foundations of Shakespeare) debunks Marlowe/Oxford/Bacon conspiracies, citing his will and £500 stockholdings as proof of Shakespeare’s authorship while framing his plays—Hamlet, Macbeth—as coded Catholic-Protestant dialogues. Claudius’s purgatory dilemma and Fortinbras’s fascist undertones reveal a critique of dogma, yet G. Wilson Knight flips the script, calling Hamlet a nihilist. The book’s esoteric lens—pagan echoes in King Lear, glovemaker roots—challenges Victorian moralizing, leaving Shakespeare’s true faith as ambiguous as his genius. [Automatically generated summary]
This one here, Foundations of Shakespeare, is a beautiful look.
They really did a good job on this.
And I'll show you, they even did color diagrams and maps and all sorts of things.
It's just about to come out next week.
I'm giving a talk in London about it next week.
I was a lecturer, Shakespeare for many years, written five other books on Shakespeare.
This is basically like my greatest hits.
This is like lectures I gave many times, but I ended up rewriting them so heavily that they're completely transformed.
And I went into some considerable detail and it covers.
Sorry to take up even more time, but it covers eight plays.
So the first half of the book is basically context and history and, you know, how to study Shakespeare and basic questions like what's the Renaissance and what is the actual structure of feudal life and how would that change by Shakespeare's time and social structure and the whole, but in real, quite in real detail.
Then we look at Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, 12th Night, Major Major Hamlet, Daddo King, Macbeth.
So those are the ones I decided.
I thought I'd pick big meaty plays.
So pick up that.
And it's like a kind of, if you've never studied Shakespeare before, if you were bored by it in school, but still have an interest now, that's the book to get.
All right.
Awesome.
I'm definitely going to go read that.
Yes.
I have a bit of an esoteric take on Shakespeare, but.
As long as you don't tell me he was secretly Christopher Mano or something like this.
I feel like the Shakespeare, the question is just unanswerable and doesn't change anything.
Maybe he was Christopher Marlowe.
Maybe he was the, what is the other one?
I forgot.
The Earl of Oxford.
Earl of Oxford.
Francis Bacon.
Let me just put this to bed.
He was none of those things.
The documentary evidence is there.
We've got record.
We've got his will.
We know what he's doing.
His actual will and testament.
Yeah.
But we're also, no works of literature ever of any language have ever been studied more than these, apart from the Bible.
And you could even argue more books have been written about Shakespeare than have been written on the Bible.
Okay.
These have been subjected to more forensic analysis than you could possibly imagine.
There is literally no chance he wasn't who he said he was.
He was a stockholder in the company.
There are references to things that in the plays that you would have only known if you'd grown up as the son of Glover, like esoteric knowledge, curb collection and things like this, which a nobleman wouldn't have known.
He didn't have the famous thing about Shakespeare is that he had a little bit of Latin and even less Greek.
But if he went to university, he would have been fluent in Latin and fluent in Greek.
So there's all sorts, there's all sorts of things that just show not only the documentary evidence and the fact that he was a real guy and the fact that he was famous in his own lifetime and the fact he was rich and bought houses in Stratford and so on, but there's lots of stuff in the plays themselves that show you, yeah, he probably was who he said he was.
But anyway, that's all in there as well somewhere.
No, when I say esoteric, I do think that Shakespeare is engaging in some higher level esoteric messaging.
And I think a lot of it is revolving around Christianity.
I'll write a book on it one day.
People are dragging me in the chat for my slow publishing schedule.
I'm sorry.
It just is what it is.
But I think there is, there are esoteric messages to Shakespeare.
The ones that jump out at me are ones that we talked about not too long ago in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.
But I think they're ultimately about an attempted reconciliation in the case of Hamlet between Catholicism and Protestantism.
And in the case of Romeo and Juliet between the New and Old Testament.
And so I do think he's deep and people like Stephen Greenblatt who have nipped around the edges of this in terms of Protestantism and Catholicism and Hamlet, but even he didn't actually take it all the way home in his book, Hamlet in Purgatory, which is well worth reading.
It's very interesting.
So I do think there's work to be done taking a REM lens.
It's not gem as Mark and I would define it, but it is something and it's interesting.
I think it is a field that can be very productive.
But possibly of interest to you, Richard, is that one of one of my older books is called Shakespeare's Moral Compass of the five books I wrote.
And I went into that expecting actually to find a much more Christian, a much more Christian Shakespeare.
And during my research for that, I found that in the 19th century, there was a very, Victorians were very moralistic.
So there were all these reverends and pastors and so on looking to drag the moral message out of Shakespeare, the Christian, like the Christian Shakespeare.
And what I found.
Yeah, I would ask myself.
So one of the really fascinating things I found is that these 19th century priests were going to Shakespeare and saying, Saying, hold on a second, there's something odd here.
This guy ain't a normal Christian.
In the moments where characters should reach for salvation and look up, they don't.
In the moments where, like a normal Christian writer, would drag something back, it's not there.
And also, in the process of researching that book, I came across another book called by a writer called Danby that was called something like Shakespeare's Moral, Shakespeare's Natural Virtue, or something like that, where he basically advances an argument that Shakespeare may have been a crypto-pagan, inso much as there's a huge amount of pre-Christian pagan stuff in the plays, festivals, and so on.
And also, that, like I was saying, the overt Christian moralizing you find in many of his contemporaries just is not there.
So, that's another angle to look at.
That there's something I think there is something there.
And I think you can make an argument that he's pushing towards nihilism.
And Macbeth just jumps out at you.
My reading of Hamlet is that he's Hamlet is a Protestant.
He's actually, and Shakespeare tells you this.
He gives you a clue.
He's the man from Wittenberg.
And also, which is a tremendously impactful city in the history of Protestantism, and Shakespeare would know that.
There's also an interesting reference to a diet of worms after he kills Polonius.
You'll nose him as you go up the stairs or something like that.
And so it's very interesting.
You have these like references connecting Hamlet with Protestantism.
I think Claudius is also trying to be a Protestant in the sense that it is about internalization and intent.
What is it?
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
So what he's saying is that you can't just go through the rituals.
You can't just do the good deeds and get to heaven.
You have to sincerely believe it.
And he can't give up the kingdom because it would be disaster for himself and Denmark.
And so he has to hold on to his biggest, greatest sin.
And then obviously Hamlet Sr., Hamlet's father, the fact that he is in purgatory, this is what Stephen Greenblatt talked about.
And he mentions things in that book.
Isn't it interesting that Hamlet seems Protestant-y or something, but he doesn't take it all the way.
And I think there is in that a kind of establishment of a tragedy between these things.
And Mark actually brought me this when we were talking about it, but Hamlet, the name, so it does reference back to Mom Left or some of these older plays or dramas, et cetera.
But Hamlet is an interesting name.
There's Hamnet, which is the son of Shakespeare who died too young.
But Hamlet means a small little village without a church.
And perhaps that's coincidental, but perhaps it's not.
And I think Shakespeare, as a true intellectual, is able to look at all of these things and see the tragedy in it all.
He's wondering about whether England might be a Hamlet.
It might be a village without a church, without a priest.
Hamlet expresses like, in some ways, the greatest potential of the Protestant Reformation of intellectual activity, internalization, the interior, not seeming to be something, but being something.
But maybe at the end of the day, it's better to be ruled by Hamlet Sr., who kicked ass, or Fordenbras, who just comes in and just tell the soldier, shoot, just a man of action.
So there's almost like a Protestant, he's like playing with these ideas and showing the tragedy of Protestantism, Catholicism, atheism, a town without a church, and even fascism, you could say, in Fordenbras, of maybe this is the only way to reconcile this at the end of the day, and that each of these systems has its own tragedy.
That sort of how I read these things, but I do think there is messaging.
I'll leave in a second, but one of my favorite and interesting readings of Hamlet, which I do talk about somewhere in here, is by a writer or a Christian critic, actually G. Wilson Knight.
I don't know if you ever came across him in your studies.
Oh, yeah.
G. Wilson wright, G. Wilson Knight wrote all sorts of things, but his reading of Hamlet is absolutely off the wall because he completely turns the play on its head.
He says, look, why do you think Claudius is a villain?
He's not a villain.
Claudius was actually a good king.
And the villain of the piece is Hamlet.
The thing that's rotten in the state of Denmark is Hamlet.
He's a villain.
He's a nihilist.
He's a look.
And he makes this whole argument.
He says, look, as a result of Hamlet's actions, 13, 14 different people are dead.
Okay.
He's lost the kingdom to a foreign conqueror.
Okay.
He looks backwards instead of looking forwards.
Whereas Claudius, he's good.
He's a progressive king.
He looks forward.
He's got a positive attitude.
Okay.
Forget about the, we don't even know if he killed.
We only know that he killed old Hamlet because the ghost says, but how do you know that the ghost is really a good ghost?
He could be a demon.
He could be sent by the devil.
And it literally that I've always found that a mind-blowing reading of Hamlet because it completely turns the play on its head.
But anyway, you've got to look at that in your own time.
Oh, yeah, 100%.
Thank you for being here.
I will 100% buy your book.
And we should actually do a Shakespeare thing if you're willing.