I am obsessed with the Shakespeare Authorship Question

There is an argument that Shakespeare didn’t write his own works. I am fascinated by the argument. I don’t know if I know what the answer is. I don’t know if anybody knows what the answer is, but I am fascinated with the debate.

When I first came in contact with this argument I didn’t have any interest in it. I thought ‘Who cares? What difference does it make?’

Then, when the head of The Globe Theater in London, Mark Rylance announced himself as an Oxfordian, somebody who believes that Edward De Vere wrote the plays, then all of the sudden, I thought, “Wow, I should maybe look into this.” That was so fascinating that he would make that bold statement. I started to look into it. As I started to look into it, I started to become more and more fascinated by the different facets of the argument. Fascinated by what we don’t know.

I think what we don’t know is sometimes the more interesting thing. I am obsessed with the Shakespeare’s authorship question.

On one side there are people that say, there is no way Shakespeare couldn’t have written those works. He came from this tiny little town. He didn’t have access to the resources, the education, he wasn’t part of the court. There was no way that he could have known the things that he knows. There’s no extant examples of his actual manuscripts. There is only 6 signatures and half a page of a play called Sir Thomas Moore. How is it that the most incredible writer in the English language, undisputed master of the English language is possibly not a person at all, he doesn’t even exist?!

The greatest volume of work ever written in our language might not have been written by the guy that everyone thinks it was written by. That’s a mystery, that’s fantastic.