Podcasting and Shakespeare

Hello and welcome back to another weekly blog post. We’ve been doing a project about Shakespeare recently, and I actually just finished my first co-hosted podcast episode. The topic of the episode was “What makes a classic?”, and my co-hosts Grace and Kaia helped me answer that question. But I won’t spend a lot of time talking about that, because you can listen to the episode yourself right here in this post. The main thing I’m going to talk about in this post is something that I thought was quite interesting while we were learning a bit about Shakespeare.

We talked a bit about how little is actually known about Shakespeare himself, and an interesting topic came up. How do we know if Shakespeare even wrote those plays? Or exist in the first place? This theory mainly comes from Shakespeare’s humble upbringing conflicting with his literacy skill and writing genius. But if he didn’t write them, who did? Well, these theories suggest that someone else wrote the plays, but used Shakespeare as a pen name or Shakespeare took credit for their work. There are lots of different people who are claimed to have been able to do this, but going over all of them would take forever. So instead, I will go over the most popular candidate, Sir Francis Bacon.

Sir Francis Bacon was the Lord Chancellor of England, as well as a philosopher and scientist. The theory that it was him stems from letters he sent expressing some of the ideas featured in Shakespeare plays. There were also some old papers mentioning Shakespeare and him together. So, had Shakespeare really been Sir Francis Bacon all along? Probably not. Actually, almost definitely not. The evidence presented is lacking and doesn’t have much going for it other than coincidence. Sir Francis was also busy being the Lord Chancellor, and probably didn’t have much time to write a bunch of plays.

So, it looks like Shakespeare was Shakespeare and wrote all those plays all along, what a surprise. So yeah, that’s about it for this blog post, make sure to stay tuned for more.