I had a great time learning more about the Stratfordian perspective on Shakespeare by talking to Draculaic, my twitter mutual.
Divia (00:01)
Hey, I'm here today with my Twitter mutual, Draculeac, who is mostly remaining anonymous. And we are here to talk about something that I touched on in the podcast with ThinkWork, but to go into it in greater depth, which is why Draculeac thinks that Shakespeare is the guy from Stratford.
And he has some expertise here. He studied this stuff in college, wrote his undergraduate thesis on Lear, and is currently in the process of getting a paper on Shakespeare published. So I've prepared some. Ultimately, I am far from an expert in this topic, though I know more about it than I did when I talked to Thinkwart on a previous podcast. But yeah, I'm really excited to hear what you have to say and ultimately become more informed over the course of this conversation.
Draculaic (00:50)
I appreciate that. Thank you for the introduction. I think I should probably caveat one or two things before we dive in. And I'm happy to let you steer the conversation however you'd like. One is that my interest in this is primarily as in the plays as what we could call literary artifacts. And so my interest is what the plays are and how those affect the audience of Shakespeare primarily.
I'm not personally a historian, but I've read up a little bit about this and I know enough to, think, know, muster an opinion. But I also just want to say that I don't particularly have a dog in the fight about authorship. don't have any particular care about who wrote the plays. I care about the plays themselves. But just in what I've
Divia (01:29)
Yeah.
Draculaic (01:46)
been looking into researching myself. think that, and what I remember from what I've read about this previously, I think that there's, it's probably the strongest case that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. And I'm definitely happy to give you my opinions about why that is.
Divia (01:58)
Mm-hmm. Cool. And I think one of the things I discovered, which anyone who knows about this probably already knows, unless I'm wrong, is that that is the more common position, at least with academics, right?
Draculaic (02:09)
Yeah, people who are sort of academic literary critics or people who are literary historians tend to converge on that argument, and I think probably for good reason.
Divia (02:23)
Okay, so I have various things I expect to wanna ask you about that, but I would love if you would just start out by laying out the basic case for why you think for the Stratfordian position.
Draculaic (02:37)
Yeah, so the rough shape of it is that we know that there was a person who existed named William Shakespeare. He has plenty of peers that wrote about him. We know that he was an actor. We know that he there are people who testify at the time that he was a playwright. The people who referred to him as a playwright are generally pretty reliable people. They're people like Ben Johnson, who wrote the four basically the forward poem to his folio.
which came out after he died. A lot of people I think would have
Divia (03:10)
And wait, sorry, and just to be clear, like he mentioned, he didn't just say Shakespeare, he mentioned like more details about him.
Draculaic (03:18)
yeah, I mean, he talks about specifically, you know, I think attributes of him, like he talks about his wit is there some things that he's talked about in like, you know, written correspondence and features of Shakespeare. but he also like talks about him specifically as a playwright, in that poem. and I think he also, you know, he's generally speaking, he himself was a playwright and a peer of Shakespeare. he
would have undoubtedly known him. And again, is a pretty reliable guy. Doesn't really, there's not a lot in the historical record of things that he's written that are trying not to be true. would be, he'd have to be, it'd be a pretty big lie for him to be doing that. And it would be an extreme.
Divia (04:02)
Okay, wait, let me, and I know I said I was gonna want you to lay it out. Now, I guess I'm nitpicking on this point. So just to be clear though, because the case that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare includes that there was a guy using the pen name Shakespeare, right?
Draculaic (04:07)
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, that's from what I have looked into. That's the primary version of it is that it was some kind of masked identity by various different candidates. know, Christopher Marlowe, who somehow survives his murder or, you know, or sort of dies. of the big ones.
Divia (04:35)
Earl of Oxford is one I read a bunch about. So I guess so how do you know, now I've forgotten the name, but the guy who was talking about him as a playwright at the time, like how do you know that he wasn't just referring to whoever went by that pen name?
Draculaic (04:49)
Yeah, that's a fair question. think...
That would have to be like a pretty sly maneuver. And I think that
I just, I don't know. I think that it doesn't really comport with the way that Johnson sort of tends to represent himself and to represent, you know, represent Shakespeare in again in that poem and in sort of the private correspondence. I'd have to look into that more. It's a fair question, but I don't, just, the idea that it would be an inside joke is sort of, I think, what you're implying. And I just don't think that fits.
character some of the writing that he's done.
Divia (05:36)
Okay, like that he was talking about him as though he knew him personally, basically. And that to use his pen name while talking about he knew him personally, it just doesn't really fit when you think about it that way.
Draculaic (05:40)
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. And there's, other people besides Johnson that write about Shakespeare. it's also, mean, Shakespeare, when he was coming up before he was sort of an established playwright had haters. And there's this guy, think Robert Greene who writes this pamphlet called Greene's Grotes Worth of Wit. And it's sort of one of the most famous things that was written sort of contemporaneously about Shakespeare. And he talks about him as this upstart crow beautified with our feathers, you know, our other playwright's feathers that he's this pretender.
Divia (05:59)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (06:18)
Why would you be writing that about a person, somebody who was, you know, pseudonymous? This is somebody who's really trying to, I think, go after Shakespeare. There's like, I think pretty strong case that, you know, that if it was well known amongst the writing class at the time, or, you know, the playwrights that he was a pseudonym that he probably wouldn't have been, you know, he wouldn't have written that. It would have looked really completely ridiculous to do that.
Divia (06:27)
Mm-hmm.
Like you think you would have used the real name of whoever it was or you wouldn't have written it all or something different.
Draculaic (06:49)
Yeah, I think you probably wouldn't have written at all in that case. think that it's, you know, the purpose of it was to damage Shakespeare's reputation. That was the purpose of that pamphlet. And he's like, I think he even like uses like paraphrases of Shakespeare's text in order to denigrate him. And the entire purpose, it was a hit job, because he was, he saw him as a rival. And
Divia (07:15)
Yeah.
But like, what if, I mean, I don't know, there are pretty popular Twitter accounts that are pseudonymous and in some cases like really pretty anonymous too. It seems like people could write hit pieces about those Twitter accounts using their handle instead of trying to find out. I mean, I think it's more common among people who are trying to write hit pieces that they do try to dox people and find out their government name or whatever. But I think I've seen it.
Draculaic (07:19)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Divia (07:47)
Funny the other way too.
Draculaic (07:51)
The other way meaning...
Divia (07:52)
Meaning that people will write something very negative about a Twitter user, but use their Twitter name, even if it's obviously not their real name.
Draculaic (08:00)
Sure, but in that case, guess the question would be, I mean, you'd have to ask the question how prevalent was that at the time and who would be doing that and why would they be doing that? There's, yeah, and like, you know, for playwrights, think, know, Shakespeare, as far as I'm aware, is sort of the only person that people say this about. And I have a sort of a long thing about that, which is that
Divia (08:10)
how prevalent it was to use pseudonyms basically.
Draculaic (08:26)
I think one of the things to dig into and to talk about is sort of the historical context of Shakespeare's writing. And it's a miracle that we have the plays at all, this sort of point one. And it's also the case, and I think you undoubtedly, if you've looked into this and probably run across this, that the plays were basically, it's funny that you bring up Twitter because Twitter was going to be an example that I used because the plays themselves were ephemera. They weren't meant to be
Divia (08:33)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (08:56)
things that were. Yeah.
Divia (08:57)
I did hear this. Yeah, what I just learned about that, but please correct me if I'm wrong, is that they did this partly so that, because there weren't the sort of copyright protections where they could prevent other people from performing them if they were written down and they took them. So they didn't write them down. Is that basically right?
Draculaic (09:14)
well, yeah, also like, you know, mass printing was, more of a luxury back in the day. And the idea that you would want to have printed copies of the plays and that they would reflect literary value was just not something that was considered at the time. It's as if people would be printing out, you know, scripts for the Batman, you know, and shipping those like around, you know, I mean, I'm sure people do that now because you can, but like,
Divia (09:20)
Right.
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (09:43)
It would have been expensive to do that at the time. And it's not something that would have been thought to be something that would have been of high literary value and worth the expensive.
Divia (09:52)
Like no one was consuming them that way. No one was reading. I mean, they couldn't have, because they weren't written down at the time.
Draculaic (09:58)
What did happen at the time was that you would have people that would, there was some interest amongst the population in having some memorial copies of the plays. the ways that those were largely constructed were the quartos. And what those usually were, you know, they're called quartos because they were folded twice, which meant that you saved on paper, which meant that it was really cheap to print them. And what ended up happening is that generally speaking, we think of these as sort of,
bad versions of the text. can get to the sort of here and there. You can get chunks of the lines correct because largely what it is, is there plays that are being constructed out of the sort of the memories of the various actors that they had sort of conscripted to write the quartos. There were like bootleg versions of the plays that were going around as a result of this. And so people would be interested in reading them, but there wasn't an effort until after Shakespeare died.
to produce a high quality version of this. And that was the folios. And those are mostly constructed by people who took the time and the effort to go through after Shakespeare died to gather up basically the books that had been used internally by the players to memorize their lines, to be distributed, to gather those together and assemble.
Divia (11:22)
You
Draculaic (11:23)
a text out of that. And so those are generally speaking thought to be, you know, they're not not perfect, they're thought to be sort of more reputable and more more correct. So the idea that I think the main idea is that although there were obviously sort of bootlegs at the time, and there was sort of this posthumous version of the place that came together, these weren't things that were like designed for literary publication, the way that, you know,
poems at the court or masks were designed to be for publication because those were seen to be sort of the higher art. And it's kind of funny. think I certainly have my personal opinion about why this is, those, you know, it's interesting that we don't retrospectively think of them as being the, I mean, we think of them as being important literary documents, but we don't think of them as being like central to the identity of Western literature the way that we think of Shakespeare's.
Divia (11:57)
Mm-hmm.
You mean the poems.
Draculaic (12:22)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's also like this weird artifact of history that the there was this sort of reputational upswing in shape for Shakespeare anyway. I mean, people thought of him as being a very good playwright as a playwright back back in the day. But like, again, plays weren't all considered to be all that important. And it was really only like, you hundreds of years after he died that there was this
Divia (12:41)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (12:51)
effort to reclaim him. And it was, there were some people before the romantics, but the romantics were some of the people that really appreciated Shakespeare and are part of the reason for his reputation sort of hitting the heights that it did. And so there wasn't like really a contemporary need to, you know, there wasn't a contemporary.
valuation of the place, I think, is part of what I'm trying to say. were thought of as being entertainments. were thought of being sort of non-essential at the time. It was only sort of in retrospect that we've ascribed the value to them. And one of the things that I think is interesting about that is that a lot of the theories that Shakespeare did in the right Shakespeare as a result of this don't happen. They don't arrive until like the 1800s.
Divia (13:45)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (13:46)
And it's not like there were people that were at the time or even 100 or 200 years later that were saying, or I guess 200 years later is roughly 1800s, but it's not like there were people close to Shakespeare's time that were saying that the plays were not written by Shakespeare. It was only something that happened sort of much, much later.
Divia (14:07)
We don't have any record of people at the time doubting the authorship or speculating about it or anything like that.
Draculaic (14:12)
Exactly.
Divia (14:16)
Okay. Yeah. So I have various things I want to ask about, I'm going to try again to see if you can lay out any more of your main case before I go there.
Draculaic (14:16)
yeah.
Sure, yeah. Another big part of it, I think, is the fact that most of the people who are making the case against Shakespeare, there's no smoking guns. There's a lot of bits and pieces of maybe there's a cryptic thing that was hidden into the play. And I've had people try to convince me that, look at this one or two lines. And my feeling about this, and this is certainly something that I could go into because it's a personal interest of mine.
that when Shakespeare wants to put a pattern into his plays, it's not subtle. It's extensive. It's the entire play. It's something that is very foregrounded. And I'm definitely happy to talk about examples of that if you're interested.
Divia (15:11)
Yeah, let's just do at least one example or a few.
Draculaic (15:15)
Sure. This, by the way, I think is also an argument for the idea that Shakespeare was a continuous person with a continuous style, because you see certain patterns, certain interests all across his entire sort of body of work. A big one is doubling, doubles. And some of this, think, is just like as a motif, idea of
Divia (15:38)
What does that mean?
Draculaic (15:43)
things being doubled. And I think some of this comes from the fact that theater itself is predicated on doubling. There's an actor and then there's the...
Divia (15:44)
Okay.
you mean like somebody pretending to be somebody else type of doubling, not things being twice as much as they previously were.
Draculaic (15:57)
No, like, pretty much all permutations of the idea of doubling. Any way that you can think about doubling as a phenomenon, I think, shows up in Shakespeare. And it shows up in his very early plays, then shows up in his very his last plays as well. And I think it sort of hits a fever pitch around the time that he writes, around 1600, when he writes Hamlet and Twelfth Night, and a poem, a long poem called The Phoenix and the Turtle, all of which deal with
doubling as sort of a motif. like, Hamlet, think is sort of one of the best test beds to talk about this, because like it's all over Hamlet. It's like in every possible dimension of the play, the idea of doubling shows up. And like a really trivial example is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are a double, but then those same actors that play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern probably also play two ambassadors that are indistinguishable from each other.
there's, they also play two other characters called, Volta Monocornelius. there's a whole other thing. I know that you guys got into, Will Kemp, and you know, his role. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a whole theory, around Lear that there was a doubling of parts between, that Kemp played both Cordelia and also played the fool.
Divia (17:12)
He was the funny guy, right? Yeah.
Draculaic (17:28)
and that's the whole complicated thing that I can go into, but there's like one of the climactic moments. In fact, like the climactic moment of Lear, is a moment where Lear is presiding over Cordelia's dead body and says, and my poor fool is hanged. And there's this like moment, like, what if that actor played both roles? that, that would have had extra resonance at the time. there's, I have a personal theory. go ahead.
Divia (17:52)
Okay. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. You finished that. question.
Draculaic (17:57)
If that pattern obtains, by the way, Kemp had played both Cordelia and The Fool, you have a situation where the character, actor's playing both a heroine and sort of a clown character. You can play with this in Hamlet too, that what if the same character, same actor that played Ophelia also plays the first gravedigger. And so then when Hamlet...
Divia (18:15)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (18:27)
goes to the first gravedigger and says, whose grave is this? He says, mine. Which would have had a resonance, yeah, which would have had that resonance too. But like, I'm just scratching on the surface. It's like, it's not just in like, go ahead.
Divia (18:32)
I see. Yeah, interesting.
Okay, wait, wait. So here's my question about this. It seemed like one of the first you were saying that something that people like the anti-stratfordians try to say is that there are sort of clues in the plays or elsewhere that maybe it's a pseudonym. That's one thing people say. But you don't buy it because you think when Shakespeare has some sort of thing he wants to communicate, he does it in more like an over-the-top pervasive way.
Draculaic (18:57)
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that when he wants to work patterning into his text, roughly my case is that that's not subtle and it's not like one or two lines. I think that's kind of thin gruel. And you don't really have to do a huge amount of work to interpret it. It's like, it's so.
Divia (19:28)
And presumably you also think though that all of the stuff about doubling is not particularly evidence that he was not who he said he was. You think that does not support that.
Draculaic (19:37)
That's, I like that. But I think that.
I think that one of the things that he does is he's oftentimes very clear when he creates, he loves parallel structure in his plays. And he loves having characters come out and say things that the audience is also, you know, that reflects what the audience is going through. And so one of the things that the characters say that Horatio says in the opening scene of Hamlet is, you know, in what particular thought I know not what.
how to work, essentially. can't make sense of what's going on. that a close reading of that scene is that it's very difficult to understand the information that's coming into you in that scene. And in that last scene in Lear, there's part of the effect and the reason that that play is so powerful. And I can definitely talk about that.
Divia (20:22)
which reflects the audience perspective probably.
Draculaic (20:44)
but part of the reason it's so powerful is because of the way that that last scene in particular is structured. and one of the things that it does is it wraps up all the subplots and the sort of the main plot is that the, the wicked son Edmund has taken Lear and taken Cordelia and is going to execute them. and part of what happens in that scene is that everything gets wrapped up and then somebody says, well, what about Lear? And then somebody else says, great thing of us forgot.
which is also a thing where the audience has forgotten about Lear because of all this other action that's happening on the play. And so, and there's, and I have other examples too. There's another thing in the closet scene where Gertrude says, where Hamlet says, I must to England. And Gertrude says, I, you know, I had forgotten about that. And that's something that had happened many scenes earlier where Claudius had said that he was going to send him to England. like,
Divia (21:17)
Maybe forgot.
Yeah.
Draculaic (21:43)
Generally speaking, and there's examples too of like, you know, mobs in Shakespeare are standing in for people watching the plays. And so when Shakespeare wants to tell you something about how to, about what he intends for his audience, it's generally reflected in sort of the timber or the text of the plays. And I don't really see.
Divia (22:04)
Okay, so you think he was not trying to do any sort of subtle, like, I'm not who I say I am. You would not count, you basically dismiss any evidence of that.
Draculaic (22:13)
Yeah. And in fact, what I would say is the opposite. I say that there's evidence in his work that he is who he says he is. And those are both sort of implicit and explicit. So some examples of those. It's interesting because think where it was talking about Henry IV. And he had some really interesting things to say, some things that I hadn't really thought about before. And it was interesting, I thought, by the way, that he was talking about Shakespeare's emphasis.
Divia (22:24)
Yeah, what are some examples?
Draculaic (22:42)
One, that Shakespeare would have known the whole acting troupe, is undoubtedly true, which is a very good point. And two, that the emphasis on family I thought was pretty interesting, particularly because you guys.
Divia (22:49)
Yeah. Okay, but that said, at least some of the candidates that people think might not be Shakespeare also had families. This was one thing that I, like if I were to go back to that one after I looked into this a little more.
Draculaic (23:00)
Yeah, absolutely. And if I were to put my sort of literary critic hat on, I would note that you guys went in your conversation to talk about family. So it was obviously something that was important to think were. And I think there's something in Shakespeare where one of the things that's sort of a miraculous feature of the plays is that if you have something that you're passionate or you care about, you will find it in the plays, which is kind of neat. Yeah, exactly. As one of my TAs put it when I was in undergrad, it's all there, which is kind of amazing.
Divia (23:10)
Yeah.
Yeah, because they cover so much.
Draculaic (23:31)
The thing that I thought he was gonna say about Henry IV is that I think in Henry IV and Henry V, which are very, very interesting plays, that what they found is they found court records of John Shakespeare, Shakespeare's father. they found, you know, there's summons where he was like had to go to court because he wasn't showing up to church because he was afraid of debtors that were gonna come after him. And there were other people that were.
Divia (23:58)
as you sing.
Draculaic (23:59)
listed in this, and I'm happy to send you this document. And some of the people that are mentioned as his neighbors are people that are minor characters in Henry IV, part one and part two. Yeah.
Divia (24:01)
Yeah.
interesting. But that does seem like some pretty good. I like that. I did not know that.
Draculaic (24:14)
Yeah, and like for me, it's like, just why would you do that if you weren't William Shakespeare, if you didn't know these people, right? And there's some other stuff, there's some other incidental stuff too, like the fact that the, so the sonnets, and I'm a little bit wary of reading too much autobiography into the sonnets. I think that's a mistake you can make because there's a thorough distance and Shakespeare is certainly sophisticated enough not to have it just be pure autobiography.
Divia (24:22)
Yeah, okay.
show.
Draculaic (24:44)
by graphical content, but there is one sort of sonnet that's famous where he talks about, like the dyer's hand, I am immersed in the thing that I am writing about. that metaphor suggests knowledge of dying, particularly glove dying, which is the profession that John Shakespeare had. Yeah, so there's a fair amount of like,
Divia (24:55)
Okay.
That's his dad. Interesting. Okay.
Draculaic (25:12)
circumstantial evidence. And there's other stuff too, like the fact that, so he has a lot of classical illusions in his plays, particularly to Rome, which I know your husband would be very excited about. the, you know, a lot of that, you people have, have traced it and what they've figured out is that a lot of the illusions that he refers to are things that are explicitly in the
curriculum that he would have encountered as somebody who is learning Latin in Stratford in grammar school. It's not like he has like super deep complex. Yeah, it's like exactly. the stuff that like, and so the stuff that he references is stuff that he would have been familiar with. You know, there's a lot of that kind of stuff where it's like, there's, it points to
Divia (25:47)
Okay.
It's not like a deep cut. It's the normal curriculum stuff.
Draculaic (26:09)
it points to somebody who was this person.
Divia (26:14)
Okay, so would you humor me? I felt this is one website, Shakespeare Oxford fellowship.org. I asked people for links to look at. This is one that someone sent me in response to that. And I, I don't know. This is one that I was looking at a bunch before I was talking to you. And it has 12 reasons to question Shakespeare. It has some other lists too, but would you humor me and I can go through these and you tell me what you think of them. Okay.
Draculaic (26:21)
Mm-hmm.
Sure, go for it.
Divia (26:39)
So the first one is where's the paper trail and basically says that no one has found any letters written by Shakespeare to anyone and that this should be surprising.
Draculaic (26:50)
I think the part of that that I dispute is that I actually went through and I've read some of the stuff as well. So the part of that that I would dispute is that it's surprising that this is the we.
Divia (27:06)
Okay, and they claim, it says, and I have not fact-checked this myself, but it says, thorough survey of two dozen other English writers of the time found all of them had more documentation of their literary careers than he did. I guess that's different from the letter thing. Sorry, this one has two things, that people, that they claim that people are not recognizing him as a writer and that they did recognize other writers of the time as writers. Sorry, okay, so you dispute that this is surprising.
Draculaic (27:29)
Yeah, I don't think it's surprising. think that relative to his sort of cultural importance that we have actually a surprising, if anything, surprising amount of documentary evidence suggesting that he was a human being that lived at that time. Yeah, mean, why would we wouldn't have those? I don't think.
Divia (27:43)
but he just didn't write letters.
You think even if, you think basically the fact that we don't have them is very little evidence about whether he wrote them. You think he probably did write letters, we just don't have them?
Draculaic (27:57)
I mean, it's possible, like, mean, who is he writing to? He's probably writing to like, you know, yeah, and back in Stratford and why would, I don't know why we would have those necessarily. I think that the amount of documentary evidence that we have relative to the person that he was at the time is actually pretty strong.
Divia (28:00)
I don't know his family, his friends.
Okay.
Okay, and then similarly this thing about no one during his lifetime clearly recognized him personally as a writer. Does that seem true to you? Does that seem relevant to you?
Draculaic (28:29)
I mean, again, I think that's just not true. think that, you
Divia (28:34)
Because that's the intention with the thing you previously said, right about the guy with the folios who was talking about him and recognizing him.
Draculaic (28:40)
Yeah, Ben Johnson and also like, you know, the gross worth of wit talking specifically doing a takedown of him. You know, that's definitely during his his lifetime. And it's definitely referring to him as a writer. It's not like, you know, there may be like a semantic thing here where they're not specifically talking about, you know, Shakespeare is a writer, but like, there's a lot of implication that, you know, this is a writer who's competing with us.
Divia (28:47)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, okay. All right, and then number two, this seems sort of similar and I think you just dispute this one. Number two on their list is why the gap in the historical records during Shakespeare's lifetime references to the author. Shakespeare basically impersonal, some don't even use the name, but just to allude cryptically to works like Venus and Adonis. Many references imply Shakespeare as a pen name. See number six, so I guess we'll get there. The documents we have relating personally to Shakespeare of Stratford reveal mundane business activities, but never hint at any literary career.
Draculaic (29:37)
Yeah, mean, Shakespeare, this is a bit of a simplification, but Shakespeare was somebody who wrote, again, these sort of unimportant, defemoral plays at the time, made money doing that, and then used that to find real... And Paul, this is true, but mostly plays. This was mostly where he made his money. And he used that for real estate. And most of the records that we have are about his real estate, because...
Divia (29:47)
Mm-hmm. And poems. He did write all the-
Mm
Draculaic (30:06)
Again, it's, I think a lot of this is sort of again, a species of the idea of like, there's sort of a fallacy here, which is that because we place such a value on the literary content now that there must be somehow some thing historically that would have preserved, you know, that would have would have captured that. And I think that once you sort of understand that there's a big disconnect between
Divia (30:29)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (30:35)
you sort of develop. Yeah, that a lot of this room's
Divia (30:35)
how we see them and how they saw them. Then you think a lot of these things are no longer actually surprising with that view. Okay. All right, let's see some of these other ones. Yeah, this is pretty similar. It says that Shakespeare's family and friends didn't talk about him as though he was a writer. Says Shakespeare's son-in-law, Dr. John Hall kept a journal in which he wrote of the excellent poet and Warwickshire native Michael Drayton, but Hall, dude.
Draculaic (30:41)
Exactly. Yeah.
Divia (31:04)
never mentioned the Shakespeare himself as a writer.
Draculaic (31:07)
Yeah, you'll note that the first thing there is poet, not playwright, right? And so, I think that it might be useful to think of playwrights and actors at the time as being in a kind of a weird state because they had benefactors that were in the nobility, but they themselves were somewhere between upwardly mobile,
Divia (31:13)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (31:37)
people and also sort of like traveling carnies. You know, there's like, you guys talked about Falstaff and about Henry IV and like, you know, the thing about the Henry plays is that it's full of brothels and it's, there's a mistress, Quick, who's running a brothel and like, there's like all this, you know, sort of very, yeah, not just low bar, but like extremely lower class stuff and like, the evidence is a real familiarity with that world and
Divia (31:52)
Yeah.
like lowbrow stuff.
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (32:05)
In fact, the Globe Theater at the time would have been basically in the brothel district. Shakespeare's at the time would have been somebody who would have been thought of as being somebody who wasn't particularly, again, sort of like in his lifetime was upwardly mobile, particularly at the beginning of his career, wasn't somebody that was particularly high class.
Divia (32:09)
Yeah, disreputable.
Okay, and so you think this, and that explains why his family and friends didn't talk about him as a writer. You're like, he wasn't their conception of a writer. Yes, he wrote these poems, but it sort of wasn't that big a deal. And so it doesn't seem surprising to you they wouldn't have mentioned it that way.
Draculaic (32:46)
Yeah, that's roughly accurate.
Divia (32:48)
Okay, another point five on here is why the complete silence when he died, it said in an age of copious eulogies, the reaction to Shakespeare's death was eerie silence. I'm guessing what you're gonna say here is, yeah, he wasn't considered that important at the time. Okay, and then, so this also disputes what you said earlier. This list says that authorship doubts arose more than 30 years before the first folio.
Draculaic (33:02)
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.
Divia (33:14)
This says, dozens of writings raising question about the author's identity were published for decades before Shakespeare's death in 1616. And it did not arise first, much later. Do you have any, I mean, I don't know. I haven't really tried to fact check any of this, but this is a claim here.
If they have some sort of, I don't know, we can try to dig into the citations, but.
Draculaic (33:35)
I think it would be interesting. I'd have to dig into what those specifically are, but here's my guess. I think that, so this is actually something I talked about with your husband, which is that, you know, for the first several years of the printing press, it was mostly being used for misinformation and for attacks on people. That was the only bulk of what was being published. And like, I think that
Divia (33:57)
Okay.
Draculaic (34:03)
probably there's some amount of like, you know, people who are contemporary rivals of Shakespeare who are, you know, trying to undermine him. And I don't know if these really necessarily qualify as doubting his authorship.
Divia (34:20)
Yeah, so the one that it mentions specifically, claims there more, but the one it lays out, it says, the title of a 1611 epigram did so openly and with startling bluntness, addressing Shakespeare as our English Terrance, where Terrance was an ancient Roman playwright notorious as a suspected frontman for two hidden aristocratic writers.
Draculaic (34:35)
so there, so you have to have an insert of an interpretive leap to do that, right? So like, yeah, like, the thing about referring to him, it's interesting, because like people at the time called him, you know, had various ways of referencing classical writers, like the one that he gets the most is probably audit for the metamorphosis. And like, I think that there's sort of a stylistic reason for that, that like, you know, that
Divia (34:39)
I guess so, yeah.
Draculaic (35:04)
Even though it's sort of thematic for Ovid, it's also stylistic, the idea of taking sources and transforming them, which is like a huge part of why we value Shakespeare, I think, is in what he does with his sources and the experience of his plays. But like referring to him as Terrance is just referring to, I think that's a stylistic thing. That's more about like he writes histories, right, which is what Shakespeare wrote partially.
Divia (35:29)
Yeah, okay, you're like, if you're looking for parallels between Shakespeare and Terrence, the maybe Terrence was a front man for other people is like not in the top few most obvious parallels.
Draculaic (35:37)
Exactly. Yeah.
Divia (35:39)
Okay, all right. Here's another one. People talk about his will, that it has detailed disposal of household items, no mention of books, manuscripts, desks, musical instruments, or anything suggesting literary, artistic, or intellectual interest.
Draculaic (35:54)
Yeah, but you have to think about, and again, I'm not really a historian, but like, the question is, like, what did legal documents at the time focus on? And they often focused on material wealth, as opposed to like, tangible assets, like books or manuscripts. And so he does.
Divia (36:13)
What is the difference between you're saying because of like a book or manuscript meaning like they didn't have copyright like
Draculaic (36:20)
It's just not the kind of thing that would appear in a will, I think. Well, he does sort of famously and possibly notoriously bequest his second best bed to his wife, which is a very famous thing in the will. And some people think that that's insulting, but other people think that, well, the second best bed was the marriage bed. And so it's a bed that would have had like,
Divia (36:23)
intellectual property would not appear in a will. But what about like a writing desk?
second best bed to his wife. Yes, that's right.
you
What was the first best bet?
Draculaic (36:49)
the first best bed. That's a question. the thing. yeah, I, the, second best bed would have been the, possibly the bed that had more emotional significance. And so that's possibly the reason why he requested it. it is important to note that like the will does have requests to other actors, in it. So it's not like.
Divia (36:54)
I would have thought that would be the best bed, again, I don't really know.
Draculaic (37:19)
So it's, I think that a lot of these points are like, if you forgive me for saying so, a little bit legalistic, where like, they're focusing on the letter of something as opposed to like the context and the spirit of something. And so like, yeah, like specifically there aren't like books and manuscripts in the world, but like he's mentioning other actors. And, you know, and I think that suggests a connection to the theater. And
Divia (37:26)
Sure.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, but I mean, think no one's disputing that he was an actor, right? So that's sort of, think, equally well explained by he's an actor and also by he wrote the plays.
Draculaic (37:57)
Potentially, but I mean, like it certainly suggests a connection to the theater. And so like.
Divia (38:02)
Right, but I guess I'm saying like, think that part, I think both the Stratfordians and the anti-Stratfordians would be like, yes, of course Shakespeare had a connection to the theater. He was definitely an actor. Right?
Draculaic (38:14)
I mean, sure, I'm happy to take that point.
Divia (38:16)
Or I don't know, if that's not true, then that's what I've been assuming.
Draculaic (38:20)
yeah, I don't really know enough about the anti-stratfordian position to say that, but I mean, if they're going to concede that he was an actor, certainly. But, I guess one of the things that follows from that though, is that, the other thing to say about the plays is although there is like a strong authorial style to Shakespeare and then I'm only sort of lightly touched on it with like some of the things like doubling. And I can certainly talk about that. I could talk about that for two hours by itself, but, I think that.
Divia (38:39)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (38:50)
You know, it's also important to note that the plays themselves were like collaborative to a degree and that there was like, mean, that's true of like anybody that's true of like television today. It's true of movies today that like, know, yeah, you have a writer's room, but then you also have a director and then you also have like interactions with the actors and the actors also give you thoughts and feedback. And sometimes you ad-libs and sometimes that works its way into the plays. And so like, I think that,
Divia (39:03)
Yeah, you have a writer's room.
Draculaic (39:20)
understanding the nature of the theater itself and the way that the plays were written, you the idea that somebody would be just an actor and be relegated to being an actor, but not a writer is, you know, somebody who would have been written the plays would have had, I think, extremely deep connections to the actors around him too. I think that's sort of an important point to make. And so,
That's the kind of thing that you would see in a will.
Divia (39:52)
Okay. All right. Some other things. Some of these seem more compelling to me than others. So I'm going to, I think, you know, we already talked about, I think we're, and I talked about the people say that his people were not impressed with his signature. I'm not sure. I think I'm persuaded that I shouldn't wait that one too highly. If you want to say more about that, feel free to add your own two cents.
Draculaic (40:07)
Mm-hmm.
I mean, spelling was really inconsistent at the time. Handwriting was really inconsistent at the time. The language wasn't really fixed, which is part of the reason why Shakespeare is able to like do so much with the language at the time. He's sort of at the right place at the right time to do that. you know, legal documents were rushed and formal and, you know, the fact that there were multiple signatures was pretty common, I think. So I
don't really find that particularly, yeah.
Divia (40:44)
Okay, yay. All right, so here's another one. This is like one of those details that, I don't know, maybe the closest to a claim that this document, this list has to some sort of smoking gun. So the thing about, right. So this says the dedication of the sonnets in 1609 described the author as our ever-living poet. And it says that standard sources confirm that ever-living was used to indicate a deceased person.
And that they think that this, yeah, and there was another one somewhere else on the list about like, why didn't he write about, I forget, something that happened before this William Shakespeare's death that they thought it was surprising.
Draculaic (41:28)
Yeah, but like, okay, so everliving, you'd have to dig into the etymology of like what that means. like, you know, everliving could be potentially something that's used to describe somebody who's dead. It could also be somebody that a term that is used to like, metaphorically suggest literary immortality, rather than like an actual death, you know, and
Divia (41:48)
Okay, so you question that it's obvious that ever living would mean that the person was dead. You're like, maybe, but that's not obvious.
Draculaic (41:55)
Yeah, think a lot of this stuff, if I had to sort of characterize a lot of these, I think that a lot of them sort of beg the question where they sort of force you towards a specific interpretation of something and that interpretation either might not be correct or might not be the whole story.
Divia (42:12)
Yeah, and then there's another whole list on here that I could get into or not that basically, I don't know, among the anti-stratfordians, it seemed more compelling to me, though I didn't, I really didn't do a very deep cut here, that Earl of Oxford seemed like the most compelling candidate to me. And they also have all of this compilation of like, look at all of these.
parallels basically between the Earl of Oxford's life and particular things and particular characters and stuff that is in Shakespeare. And I think it's hard for me to really do a decent Bayesian analysis of this. Like, I don't know how much could somebody like Shakespeare's written a lot, how much could somebody kind of find these sort of parallels with a lot of other people too. But I don't know, does any of that interest you? Do you find any of that compelling? Do you want some examples?
Draculaic (43:05)
So I find it interesting, certainly. And I find it interesting, but not for the reason probably that the anti-stratforians think. So like one of the many doubles in Hamlet. So there's obviously one big double is that there is a play within a play and that each of the characters in the play within a play maps to two of the characters in Hamlet. So there's that kind of doubling. except for one character, which maps to three characters.
But that also telescopes out from the play into real life. And I think that's really interesting that Hamlet himself as a character is a double, is somebody who is both the Earl of Essex, who was once Queen Elizabeth's favorite sort of courtier, but then subsequent after Hamlet stages a rebellion against her and is executed. But his biography is that his
Divia (44:00)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (44:04)
you know, father was murdered and his mother remarried. And he was somebody who dressed in black like Hamlet. And so there's like that echo there. But at the same time, there's also King, the future King James, James the Sixth at the time, later to James the First when he's the king, who was melancholy and who was a scholar and whose mother, his father also was murdered. And in that case, the father, the mother remarried the murderer, just like in Hamlet.
And so there's a lot of stuff in the plays that is like drawn from the actual observable lives of many people in the play. And there's ways in which, know, a trivial example of Macbeth that is also about King James is where they talk about, there's this, you know, the idea of secession, which is a very interesting word in Macbeth, ends up being
Divia (44:34)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (45:03)
like a major sort of one of the major thematic points. And there's a point in which there is a bunch of kings that are lined up. And the joke is like, it's sort of a half joke. And Macbeth is sort of sees this vision of these kings and what should the line stretch out to the crack of doom. And like, obviously one of the people that's included in that is James the first. there's like, there's like, you know, the plays themselves, I think Shakespeare is very
unique. One of the arguments against covert sort of political content being smuggled explicitly into Shakespeare is one that there are better candidates for that, that we would have done that more explicitly.
Divia (45:42)
What do you, sorry, can you, what do mean? They're better candidates.
Draculaic (45:45)
There are people who are more explicitly political in their content. Marla, yeah, exactly. And one of the things that's true about Shakespeare is that Shakespeare is very, very good about balancing in his plays and not really signaling too much one side or the other. One example of this is that, you know, one of the things that's true, and this could be a two hour conversation by itself, is that Hamlet is something that's legible both.
Divia (45:49)
Like playwrights at the time, you mean? Okay.
Draculaic (46:14)
to Protestants and to Catholics. And that would have been a very complicated thing because Protestantism was relatively new. was Elizabeth's father that had set up the Church of England. And most of the people in the country, to include Shakespeare's father and probably Shakespeare himself, were covert Catholics. I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about this. And there was a thing about
You know, one of the conspiracy theories is which was Shakespeare's secret Catholic. And I talked to my thesis advisor about that and he's like, yeah, they all were. That was true, true of everybody at the time. But like, it's a very complicated moment, you know, sort of in terms of the sectarian history of Elizabethan England. And so Shakespeare would have walked that line. And I think that generally speaking, when politics arises, he's somebody who's very careful.
Divia (46:49)
Interesting.
Draculaic (47:10)
in the way that he represents it, he definitely can be perverse and provocative, which is something that is characteristic of his place, but he's not somebody who is explicitly political in the way that some others.
Divia (47:21)
Okay, yeah, because this is also something that comes up is like, how did he not get in trouble for writing the controversial stuff that he did? And maybe that's your answer to that. You're like, well, he was very careful actually.
Draculaic (47:31)
He was pretty careful. like, for the most part, you'd have to, you'd say like relative to other playwrights, like, you know, this stuff that he does is pretty, again, pretty careful. The closest thing that he does to getting in trouble, as I understand it, is that, again, when the Earl of Essex stages his rebellion against Queen Elizabeth, one of the things that he does is he stages, you know, he puts on a,
Divia (48:00)
Who was the Earl of Essex?
Draculaic (48:01)
He is one of the people I was talking about as being a model for Hamlet.
Divia (48:08)
Right, yeah, I was just wondering if you knew what his name was. I can look it up.
Draculaic (48:11)
no, I don't know his name off the top of my head, he, his, his history is that he was sort of the most favorite courtier of Elizabeth. She sends him to go pacify Ireland. He fails at doing that. He comes back. there's a, there's a whole thing that, that, that sort of erupts as a result of that. And he, you know, and he falls out of favor with her and then he gets upset and he stages a rebellion.
that fails and he's executed for that. By the way, the thing that he does is to stage a play when he does this, which is something that even though this happens subsequent to Hamlet is also something that is echoed in Hamlet. the play that he stages is Richard II. And there's sort of a famous thing there where, so like Richard II is the play that comes right before 100 IV.
Divia (48:48)
Okay.
in Hamlet.
Draculaic (49:10)
part one and then part two and then Henry the fifth, which is sort of all arguably one sort of limited series, if you will. And what happens in Richard the second, Richard the second himself as a character is among other characters in Shakespeare, kind of a proto Hamlet. There are other characters that are like this too. Brutus is kind of a proto Hamlet in some ways as well. But the thing about
those plays is that a lot of them are centered around Henry V as a character. And there are different models for what kind of kingship Henry V is going to have. That's an enormously complicated topic. one of the things that, know, and there's different sort of ways, different foils for Henry V in which he is, you know, he's not like his father, Henry IV. He's not like
Divia (49:51)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (50:10)
This guy Hotspur, who's his contemporary, who's a little bit too hot headed, sort of the sunny Corleone of the plays. He's not like Falstaff, who is on the one hand very witty and is very gifted with language, but is also like a person of ill repute and a person of low honor. And he's not like Richard II. And Richard II is somebody who is somebody in the play who confuses his mirror image for himself, who doesn't understand the difference between
Divia (50:28)
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (50:39)
having the kingship as sort of a title and being a king is a big part of that and is too reflective and is successfully overthrown by Henry IV, who is a person who is more of action and is less of sort of the mind. Henry, when Essex stages his play as a protest against Elizabeth, he stages Richard II.
And he does that because he wants to draw the parallel between Elizabeth and Richard II and claim that he is Henry IV, essentially. you know, Shakespeare is somewhat insulated from this and Shakespeare is, you know, sort of a juggler to remove from Essex. And I think it may or not be his particular troop that stages this play. But the
Divia (51:17)
Okay.
Draculaic (51:36)
That's as close as he gets, I think, to anything that is really going to be. Yeah, I think that there's definitely things where he's poking. I think it is characteristic of his plays that he loves to be right on the edge of, know, perversity and like right on the edge of things that are permissible. But I don't think he's overtly directly political in the way that, you know, even other contemporary playwrights were.
Divia (51:39)
to anything really controversial.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Okay. All right. Here, that makes sense to me. Here's some other questions. So this is at least a little bit about these parallels people talk about between the Earl of Oxford's life and some stuff that shows up in plays. So at one point they talk about how Polonius is, has been long recognized. I don't know what that means as a parody of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley. So would you, does that seem right to you? I don't know if you're familiar with this one.
Draculaic (52:29)
It seems entirely possible, but it seems like they're...
Divia (52:32)
And you're like, he could have done that anyway, basically. So it's true that Oxford knew this guy, he was his guardian and later his father-in-law. But is that, yeah. So I don't know if it's true that that Polonius is meant to have a lot of parallels to that guy. But then, yeah, if it were true, would you think it was much evidence or would you be like, no, because Shakespeare could have done that also.
Draculaic (53:01)
Yeah, I mean, I think probably the latter. think that, you know, it's probably the case that, you know, I think it's illustrative to think about contemporary writers and what we think about contemporary writers as being analogs for this. just because you're somebody who is not inside, not an aristocrat and not somebody who's of the nobility,
doesn't mean that you sitting in Los Angeles can't write about the White House.
Divia (53:34)
Yeah, you're basically like you would have known a bunch of gossip. And so if there are parallels between what he wrote about and stuff happening in aristocratic circles, like you don't think that's surprising basically.
Draculaic (53:43)
Yeah, and he would have had patrons and he would have had like access to this. Like, it's, I don't think that's surprising at all. And I think that, you know, London at the time, it was a pretty small town and he would have had been a degree or two removed from this stuff at most. like, I think that, you know, don't forget at a certain point he becomes, you his players become the King's men. And so they would have had, you know, more direct access. Like, I think that,
it's entirely possible that somebody of Shakespeare Station would have had access to all this kind of biography.
Divia (54:17)
Okay, cool. So I think I don't have a ton more from the things that I was looking at as obvious questions to ask you, though I'd love to, I don't know, to just think about it a little bit more on my own and hear more thoughts about it. I think you have definitely done a good job answering the things that I did bring up. In particular, I...
Draculaic (54:44)
I hear that.
Divia (54:45)
Yeah, the thing you said about, like, well, he's, like, mentions his specific neighbors. That seems more compelling to me than maybe any other individual thing you said, because the idea that he would write about aristocratic stuff or like, you know, sometimes I guess I didn't bring this one up directly, but people would be like, but whoever wrote this seemed to know so much about details of the law. And like, why would Shakespeare have known that? Yeah, OK.
Draculaic (55:13)
I have a theory about that, by the way. So one of the things that people talk about with Shakespeare's life is that there's lost years, that we know about what he did when he was a young man, and then we don't really know all that much about what he did in sort of his teenage years, as it were, and then we sort of know about him as a playwright. And...
My personal theory, just a personal theory, is that one of the things that he could have done is he could have been a paralegal. I have worked as a paralegal myself, so maybe that's me projecting on that. I think that the kinds of things that you're trained to think about as someone who prepares for the law are things that you see reflected structurally in the plays. That you're trained to think about weighing
Divia (55:43)
Yeah.
I'm just saying.
Projecting.
Draculaic (56:08)
arguments back and forth without making a decision. And you're trained to think about legal strategy. like one of the things that I think is, so one of the things that's a big core part of the thing that I wrote is that I think that Shakespeare just as an aesthetic form is very interested in things that are their own opposites. And one of the things that he does a lot is, and this, this in some cases is
Divia (56:11)
Okay.
Draculaic (56:36)
subtle and in some cases it's overt. And one case place where it's overt is in Macbeth, where they talk about equivocation and about, which was a legal strategy at the time, which is in order to not say something that was going to be incriminating, you would say something that was going to be, you know, that was equivocating instead. so there's equivocation.
doesn't just sort of show up as like a named sort of thing in the text that people talk about as a strategy, but it's also something that is part of the content and the structure of the text itself.
Divia (57:15)
that the text includes people equivocating? Is that what you're saying?
Draculaic (57:18)
the text equivocates. like equivocation is like when you sort of refuse to make, or you imply something that could be taken in multiple ways. so that kind of ambiguity is something that's in Macbeth. And also there's like a lot of equivocating between two things that would seem to be contrary in the play. And so like famous examples are things like
Divia (57:25)
take a position in a clear way.
you
Draculaic (57:48)
know, is fair and fair is foul. There's a lot of what we would think of as like paradox, but they would call equivocation in the play. And that's like.
Divia (57:50)
Yeah, okay.
Interesting. Okay, so in that case, you basically are like, yes, it does seem like Shakespeare has particularly deep legal knowledge, and you have an alternate explanation, which is that he perhaps studied the law or like had was employed in a way that gave him a lot of exposure to legal concepts.
Draculaic (58:05)
Yeah, pretty.
Yeah, that seems completely plausible to me.
Divia (58:17)
Okay, cool. All right, well, I think, I don't know. mean, talking to you, I'm like, this all sounds very reasonable. I have not talked to any sort of equivalent anti-stradfordian, you know, in like this type of back and forth. I've read some stuff, but I feel like that's never gonna be as persuasive to me as talking to someone who has reasonable responses to them and my questions. So.
Draculaic (58:40)
Mm-hmm.
I have a couple of things I want to add too, which so one of the, it's interesting that one of the things that you brought up is not sort of the core argument that I hear a lot from people who think that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare. The core argument that I hear is that, and possibly this is just a result of the research that you've done, but one of the big arguments that I hear is that the
Divia (58:46)
Yeah, go.
Draculaic (59:12)
you know, it had to have been somebody from the nobility to write these plays because of the quality of the plays themselves, because they're so, such rich texts. Yeah.
Divia (59:22)
Yeah, yeah, no, certainly I did, this occurred to me, but I guess I didn't find that one that persuasive, which is why I didn't bring it up, though I do wanna hear what you have to say about it.
Draculaic (59:31)
Yeah, it's interesting because that's the one that I hear the most actually is that, and that I usually hear it as some form of like, well, he couldn't have written these plays because he only had a grammar school education, which would have been extremely rigorous Latin recitation for most of his young adulthood. like, I think that the, so I think I have some good arguments against this, which are that the,
Divia (59:45)
Yeah.
Draculaic (59:59)
Number one that is okay. one example of this is if I mentioned to you two movies that came out in 1994, Timecop and Pulp Fiction, which of these do you think by common consensus would be the movie that people 100 years from now will be most likely to look back on as being something that was of merit, of literary merit?
Divia (1:00:12)
Okay.
I mean, certainly Pulp Fiction seemed like the one everyone talks about now, so I guess that would be my best guess. I've seen, I think I've seen, I've seen at least part of Pulp Fiction. I don't know if I've watched it all the way through. I don't think I've seen Time Cops, so yeah, that would be the obvious answer.
Draculaic (1:00:38)
You are not alone in not seeing Timecop. And if I ask you which of these two movies was written by somebody who graduated from a university versus which of these two movies was written by somebody who dropped out of high school, which ones?
Divia (1:00:52)
Yeah, I mean, I'm guessing it's that, you the famous one is that people would assume it's pulp fiction because it's the famous movie that the educated person wrote it.
Draculaic (1:00:58)
Yeah, and so I think the thing that I want to say is that writing is a very strange art because you have to be literate and you have to be somebody who is engaged in sort of intellectual affairs to some degree. you know, certainly there were books at the time that Shakespeare is alive and he certainly was by all evidence, you know, somebody who read very widely, even if he may not have.
Divia (1:01:21)
Mm-hmm.
I mean, obviously he referenced a bunch of stuff.
Draculaic (1:01:27)
Yeah, and there's some cases where you can see like the, you can see his sort of stitching a little bit where one famous example of that is that there, I think, I forget who the historical source is, but there's a historical source when he's writing Anthony and Cleopatra that is talking about her barge. And you can see the original text and you can see,
her barge like a burnished throne, dot, dot, dot, in Anthony and Cleopatra. And you can actually see the source and you can see what he's written and you can see how he's doing the transformation of that. so you.
Divia (1:02:01)
Okay.
Yeah, I think I saw something also somewhere, I can't remember now, about the to be or not to be speech as referencing some other thing.
Draculaic (1:02:16)
what was that? I could give you an hour just on the to be or not to be speech. but I, the, the, the overall point I want to make is that writing is a very strange thing where you have to be widely read and literate to be good, but you also have to have talent. And, you know, just cause you've gone to the university and, know, it doesn't mean the time cops going to be a good movie. And conversely, you know, like,
Divia (1:02:17)
I might be remembering that right.
Okay, nevermind, ignore that because I don't remember what it was I saw about that.
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
Draculaic (1:02:46)
you can drop out of high school and still have this obsessive interest in film and film history and how to put story together and have a real talent for writing plot and dialogue, right? So like, it's not.
Divia (1:02:58)
Yeah, I guess this one, right, again, I'm pretty persuaded by this. Like I think for sure, I don't know, I would expect there to be some correlation between elites in general and a conflict. Like of course there's a big correlation there, but the idea that some guy that wasn't one of the elites couldn't have done it, I don't know, it seems to me like he could have, I guess.
Draculaic (1:03:16)
Yeah, I think for some people this also becomes like kind of a stocking horse conversation about, you know, class and merit. And I think that like, that's really complicated with writing. And it's complicated in the following way, which is that unquestionably there are people who come from the aristocracy that are extremely talented writers. know, Sir Philip Sidney is one of them. All the romantic poets are lords, Lord Byron.
And there are a lot of people in a lot of great writers that are aristocrats. Conversely, there's a lot of great writers that come from extremely modest circumstances, including peers of Shakespeare. Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe both come from relatively
Divia (1:04:04)
I mean Christopher Marlowe is one of the candidates people also bring up.
Draculaic (1:04:08)
Yeah, but like he's also somebody who comes from modest circumstances. I forget what his parents are, but they're like, they're definitely lower class working class people. and, know, which is pretty characteristic of playwrights at the time. And, the, you know, other people that are people who come from the lower classes, you know, George Orwell, although I don't really think of him as a fiction writer so much as a polemicist, but, you know, Charles Dickens.
is somebody who comes from the lower classes. Like there's a lot of people from the lower class as well. like overwhelmingly, the bulk of writers are bourgeoisie through time, overwhelmingly. And it's because my theory about that.
Divia (1:04:37)
Yeah.
Well, also it wasn't considered respectable to be a playwright, right?
Draculaic (1:04:57)
Yeah, it's also not considered respectable to be a writer, generally speaking. Yeah. And so in order to be somebody who has enough leisure time to be a writer, but not so much prestige that you don't write, the sweet spot is, think, to be sort of middle class or upper middle class, which is the overwhelming bulk of most writers through history. So I think there is...
Divia (1:05:03)
at all, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Draculaic (1:05:25)
an effort by some people to claim Shakespeare as somebody who had to have been at the upper class. But you had other people that were contemporaries that were of the upper class that were unquestionably great writers. It's just that Shakespeare happened not to be one of them. And I think that, and I think just sort of as a code of that, I think that the, one of the things about that is that it is again, sort of an accident of history that we give
Divia (1:05:39)
Yeah, I buy it.
Draculaic (1:05:54)
merit to the plays. I think that that has to do with the fact that they just happen to be literary documents that are extremely engaging and they can operate in sort of many dimensions at the same time in a way that, you know, courtly poetry doesn't.
Divia (1:06:04)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, no, I think you're right to bring that up, because even though I didn't personally find it persuasive, that is a top thing that people do like to say about this.
Draculaic (1:06:16)
you
Divia (1:06:22)
All right, I think, I don't know, think I might be, I might not have too many more questions. Any final words on your end?
Draculaic (1:06:30)
you know, not, we've, mostly talked about authorship stuff. I've mostly dabbled in the other stuff that I've talked about. I feel like I've just sort of touched the surface on some of the stylistic stuff. I certainly think that, there's stuff that Thinkwart was saying about how much he admires Henry IV and Lear are very interesting. I, would, had we but world enough in time, I would be very happy to talk about my opinion about why those plays work the way they do. But that's probably a separate conversation.
Divia (1:06:57)
Okay, let's say at least one thing though. If anyone who's listening to this wanted one recommendation for you for something to particularly check out or maybe read it again or read it for the first time or any passages, what's your top Shakespeare recommendation for people?
Draculaic (1:07:12)
it's my top Shakespeare recommendation, like in terms of the plays.
Divia (1:07:15)
Yeah, like I don't know, it could be for me too. Like I read a bunch, I read some of the, you know, like I read Rummy and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet and some other stuff like that in school. And then I've been to see Shakespeare in the parks. I've probably seen like a bunch of Shakespeare plays that I haven't really read, but I don't know that much about Shakespeare. So if you had any recommendation for me, what should I check out more?
Draculaic (1:07:38)
Yeah, sure. So I think it never hurts to reread Macbeth or Hamlet, both of which are great plays and which are extremely, extremely interesting and complicated. But if you're looking for something off the beaten path that most people haven't read as a Shakespeare play, that is a great Shakespeare play. The Winner's Tale is something I might recommend. It's, yeah, it's.
Divia (1:07:48)
Yeah.
Cool, I have not read it. And I don't think I've seen that performed either.
Draculaic (1:08:06)
Yeah, there's one of Shakespeare's favorite puns is on bear and various different sort of permutations of bears, which, you know, as a Berkeley grad, I'm very, very excited about. But that's the play that has the famous exit pursued by a bear. And when that happens, he's been punning on bear for like three acts before that happens.
Divia (1:08:22)
nice.
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate getting to learn more about this.
Draculaic (1:08:30)
Yeah, no. This is great. Thank you for taking the time.
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