April News Roundup
Archives, AI, and Authorship
Annual Gathering for Paying Subscribers
First up is a reminder about our annual Subscribers/Members-only online gathering on 11 May 2025, 6:00 BST. The program is still being finalized, but it will include Sir Mark Rylance speaking about the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt and how this supports honest enquiry and research. Other papers will explore the Shakespeare brand and the role of fiction in spreading interest in the authorship question. Paying subscribers will receive the Zoom link in advance of the event.
We hope you can join us!
Shakespaire Marriage Counseling
It’s hard to know where to begin with this news item. It appeared in nearly every major news outlet in one form or another. Here’s the short version:
Prof. Matthew Steggle from the University of Bristol's Department of English released a study into a fragment of a letter discovered as part of a book binding in Hereford Cathedral Library, henceforth named the Hereford Letter, addressed to “Good Mrs. Shakespaire.” The fragment has nothing to do with writing, literary pursuits, or authorship. It is, as is most documentary evidence connected to the man from Stratford, about money.
Media, supported by Steggle, is now reimagining the state of the Stratfordians’ “marriage.” The conjectures are wild, frankly.
The existence of this fragment has been “known” since 1978, but now it has been decided that the “Good Mrs. Shakespaire” in the letter refers to the woman married to the man from Stratford and that they were living together in Trinity Lane in London.
“So, it’s a story about the Shakespeares’ marriage, really, as well as about Shakespeare’s London contacts. (Steggle quoted by the BBC.)
This editor is wryly amused by the New York Times headline Overlooked Letter Rewrites History of Shakespeare’s Bad Marriage. If a mere fragment of a letter, with yet another 17th-century spelling of Shakespeare, can rewrite 400 years of the traditional authorship narrative, the fragility of that narrative is exposed. Oh, how little it takes for the traditional narrative to be amended. Perhaps there’s even hope for correction.
“I. Do. Not. Buy. It.”
So says Jodi Picoult as quoted in an Australian-based CBR City News opinion column about the authorship question, with a review of Picoult’s novel By Any Other Name embedded. While the column’s title implies putting the man from Stratford on trial, the author Robert Macklin leans into research published by SAT Trustee Dr. Robin Williams in Sweet Swan of Avon on Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke’s candidacy. The timing of this column is no doubt linked to the release of Picoult’s book in Australia, combined with April as the traditional birthday month for the Bard.
“So this time the authorship question is academically respectable.”
Macklin’s assessment is, “While the massive Shakespeare industry will no doubt scoff, By Any Other Name arrives just as the authoritative Oxford Shakespeare has deemed some eighteen of the plays to contain more than one creative hand.”
Picoult kindly contributed two posts to this Substack. Dr. Williams contributes frequently under our editorial byline.
News from the Francis Bacon Society
Our friends at the Francis Bacon Society have shared some of their latest activities.
First up is The Great Stratfraudian Lie: More than One Hundred Contemporary Witnesses to Francis Bacon’s Authorship of the Shakespeare Poems and Plays, by A. Phoenix (790 pages, 2025) published on academia.edu. There is a companion video on YouTube.
Next up is a short paper titled Francis Bacon Myth-busting, Ten Reasons Why Francis Bacon is Shakespeare, also available on academia.edu.
And a tongue-in-cheek YouTube video from actor and educator Jono Freeman examines the legitimacy of the Stratfordian argument in an eleven-minute look at some fallacies in three traditional scholars’ arguments.
Last, the Francis Bacon Society has launched an online bookstore.
AI Authorship Tests
Who knew Popular Mechanics was interested in the Q? Even that publication can find a way to connect to Shakespeare by using digital, not mechanical, entry via AI. Written by Michael Natale in collaboration with Biography.com (thank you Hearst Corporation), the story charmingly refers to the “39 shows attributed to the Bard of Avon,” ignoring the Ben Jonson dedication in the First Folio, “To the Reader.” The story continues by referring to the community of doubters as a “contingency,” which we suppose is better than “conspiracy theorists”. Despite the headline stating that “A Bombshell New Study Suggests Shakespeare May Not Have Written 15 of His Famous Plays,” the article is based on research published more than five years ago advocating for John Fletcher as an active collaborator and even authorial substitute. Sorry to disappoint.
However
A new study from Zeev Volkovich and Renata Avros published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and titled, “Comprehension of the Shakespeare authorship question through deep impostors approach,” investigates whether an AI-powered deep neural network could shed light on the authorship question. The authors refer to this analysis method as “Deep Imposter.” They concluded that fifteen works are not “Shakespearean.”
Those include not just the usual suspects of “Shakespeare Apocrypha” (works with no clear author sometimes attributed to Shakespeare) like A Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Faversham, but also some of the most beloved staples of the Shakespeare canon such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Volkovich and Avros stop short of declaring with outright certainty that the plays identified were not written by the man from Stratford. Frustratingly, they also do not declare who the alternate author(s) might be, but present research suggesting Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe.
So, while this method can point out that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is linguistically distinct from the bulk of Shakespeare’s other work, it can’t say for sure whether that’s because the play was written by a secret second author or just a case of throwing in a riff on Apuleius’ The Golden Ass to get an extra giggle or two out of an audience—even if it wasn’t Shakespeare’s usual style.
New Documentary Exploring Authorship
Searching for Shakespeare, directed by Gustavo Garzon and Daniel Waerner, with a screenplay by Mariana Sagasti and Victor Cruz, has premiered at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival (BAFICI) to much acclaim. As its starting point, the documentary shows Garzon working with Shakespearean texts but developing doubts around their authorship via discussion with Sagasti, charmingly filmed in a kitchen: a profound conversation in very ordinary surroundings. Viewers will see some familiar faces interviewed, including SAT Trustees Sir Mark Rylance, Dr. Robin Williams, SAT Director of Research Dr. Ros Barber, several notable guests, as well as Sir Derek Jacobi. When we know more about the distribution schedule, we will share those details here.
Progress?
It seems the tradition of celebrating the Bard’s birthday in April not only provides an excuse for writing about Shakespeare, but this year includes writing about the authorship question. The Statesman published an article about the Marlovian theory. The article is more a review of the authorship argument and is suggestive if not persuasive.
The second, by RTL Today out of Luxembourg, is a summary of the Q, skipping many details but highlighting Oxford’s candidacy, starting with Looney and ending with very kind words about Alexander Waugh, who sadly passed away last year.
How delightful if April became the time of year when commentary and research on the authorship debate were regularly published instead of Stratfordian bardology.
Omn the question of the spelling of names, I found these interesting facts in a study called ‘Shakespeare Before Shakespeare', by Glyn Parry and Cathryn Enis (2020, OUP), which I think contains an interesting sidelight on the spelling of the name Shakespeare. It concerns John Shakespeare’s persecution by the informer Langrake for supposed wool brogging and usury. Pages 101 to 106: in 1569, John Shakespeare was in good standing in Stratford - he was on a jury as ‘Shackspere’. By 1572, John ‘Shaxspere’ was accused of buying wool in bulk During that year, in pursuit of the claims, the Exchequer issued a writ against Johannem (accusative) Shakespeare. 1574, John ‘Shakspere’ is summoned to appear: the sheriff replied that he had seized “Shakespere’. In 1575 the next writ names John ‘Shakyspere’ for wool dealing. A duplicate had to be issued later for ‘Shakispere’.
The book shows that ‘Shakespeare’ was one of the possible spellings of John S., and therefore presumably of W.S. in everyday life.