Now that the experts have been gathered at 60 Minutes With Shakespeare to answer the very important scholarly issue of Shakespearean authorship, I thought maybe we could queue up some other equally important issues for them to tackle next?
Is it true that Shakespeare hated Mondays? There’s no evidence to suggest that any of his plays were written on a Monday, so from that we can assume that he preferred to take long weekends. Burden of proof rests on those who seek to prove that Shakespeare was at his most productive on that particular day, preferably between the hours of 9 and 11.
Shakespeare’s favorite color was green, true or false? Looking at his complete works we can see that green is mentioned almost 25% more frequently than his second favorite, red. Orange is clearly his least favorite, mentioned less than 1/10th as frequently as other colors. And, since the color orange figures prominently in the national flag of Ireland, we can therefore conclude that Shakespeare was making a very early political statement about the United Kingdom.
Can you confirm or deny that Shakespeare did, in fact, once argue with his wife? Since we have no shortage of evidence in the intervening centuries that shows that married men do indeed argue with their wives, it is only logical to assume that everything that some men do, Shakespeare must therefore have done. There is strong indication that this particular fight was about that earring in the Chandos portrait. He liked it, she thought it made him look gay.
Was Shakespeare a cross-dresser? His plays are loaded with boys dressing up as girls dressing up as boys. Since we know his work to be mostly biographical, this is a logical assumption we can draw. Additionally, state of the art computer-based textual analysis is currently being performed to determine whether the number of times a king is killed in the plays is a statistically significant indicator that Shakespeare, too, once killed a king.
Has anyone but me noticed that if you take all of the sonnets, dump all of the letters used into a big pile, then withdraw the letters in a certain order it spells out “Hello my name is Edward de Vere and I wrote all this poetry stuff and theatre junk”? Granted you end up with a bunch of letters leftover, but that’s an error introduced by the typesetter.
Thank you for your time. The world must know! I have to get back to my email, Roland Emmerich has shown interest in obtaining the movie rights to this post.
Emmerichs 'contribution' is that Shakespeare was too stupid to sign his name properly. He missed an opportunity to claim that deviations in the signature are concrete proof that Oxford was practicing the forgery of some dunce's signature so he could pass off great works in a theatre where the Dunce of Avon merely pushed a broom on the stage between performances.
I don’t know anything