Stuff You Should Know on Authorship
The popular Stuff You Should Know podcast, rereleased on May 30, 2026, takes on the Shakespeare authorship question, with hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant discovering that what they expected to be a “fun, little, semi-easy episode” turned out to be considerably more complicated. They survey the evidence for and against the Stratford attribution, touch briefly on several alternative candidates (including “Mary Sidman [sic] Herbert”) and ultimately declare themselves genuinely agnostic. Not bad for 55 minutes on a subject they concede could easily have filled ten episodes.
SAQ debate on Reddit
A relatively new Reddit community, r/SAQDebate, offers a forum devoted specifically to discussion of the Shakespeare Authorship Question, away from the regular “Shakespeare” subreddit. Although its stated aim is open, evidence-based debate rather than advocacy for a particular candidate, the conversation currently leans decidedly Oxfordian—but Stratfordians and other viewpoints do turn up to keep things interesting.
The Authorship Question Goes to the Opera
In the July 17 episode of Don’t Quill the Messenger: Shakespeare Authorship Explored, host Steven Sabel talks with composer and authorship educator Daniel Steven Crafts about teaching the Shakespeare authorship question—and about Crafts’s considerably more ambitious undertaking: a full-length opera based on the life of Edward de Vere as author. Taking Oxford to the opera stage is certainly thinking big.
“The American nonprofit theater movement is over”
Oskar Eustis’s announcement in the New York Times that he will leave the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park in 2028 came with a blunt verdict: the American nonprofit-theater movement is “over.” The Los Angeles Times asks what might replace it, turning to L.A. theater leaders experimenting with fair-pay models, touring, and locally rooted work.
The decline of nonprofit theater is usually narrated as a crisis of funding, costs, and post-pandemic attendance. But the audience crisis has a longer prehistory. As the idea took hold by the 1930s and became dogma by 1960 that Shakespeare’s plays “only exist in performance,” the communal reading practices that once made people confident, invested theatergoers were progressively displaced. Perhaps theater’s future depends not only on finding new ways to stage and fund the plays, but on restoring ordinary people’s permission to speak them together—by reading Shakespeare out loud and in community.
The Mad Mind of Shakespeare
Vegas City Opera and the Nevada Shakespeare Festival promise to take audiences inside The Mad Mind of Shakespeare, assembling song and speech from Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. Authorship-minded readers may wonder whether that singular “mind” belongs to the Stratford playwright, the writers and sources with whom he worked, or the modern artists doing the assembling. The Mad Mind of Shakespeare is guided by “a mysterious spirit.” No word yet on whether the spirit will identify itself—or produce documentary evidence.
A Noble Maiden’s Antonie
Edinburgh’s new Noble Maidens Theatre announces the cast of its first production, Mary Sidney’s The Tragedie of Antonie. Sidney translated Robert Garnier’s French closet drama into English in the early 1590s, producing the first English dramatization of the Antony and Cleopatra story. It is a work Shakespeare apparently knew (according to scholars) when writing their own tragedy. Sidney has also been proposed as an authorship candidate, but no disputed attribution is needed to establish her place in Shakespeare’s literary world: here is a surviving, published text bearing her name, preceding and acknowledged as informing Antony and Cleopatra. Its revival by a young, research-led company is a welcome opportunity to encounter that relationship in the opposite direction: not merely reading Sidney as a footnote to Shakespeare, but Shakespeare in the light of Sidney.
Anyone still in doubt about who was Shakespeare need only read The Royal Secret 2015 faction novel b author John Bentley which like Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall has a grippingly inclusive narrative sequences including those with the true Shalespeare's relationships with two Queens. One his lover and the other his mother, Elizabeth 1st.