Awesome!

Lovely lecture!

What words come to mind? Cheapskate, skinflint usurer, tax cheat, grain hoarder, cad with a second best bed. The Shakespeare who left Stratford did so after an undisclosed transformative experience. Ordinary country folk don't just wander off a hundred miles to London and take up with a theater company unless something is up. If we take Ben Jonson at his word there was something funny about Shakespeare and he put it in writing, "he wrote out of his head perfectly and never had to scratch through anything". Sounds like a modified Shakespeare to me, maybe a rather large walnut fell on his head and he woke up with a rare gift. Why were so many previously unpublished plays in the First Folio? Who had custody of them? The North/Leicester's Men origin of source plays/material would indicate that rewriters would not need any specific knowledge of anywhere because all of the necessary information was already there. Shakespeare or Shakespeare proxy was an artful rewriter who had a close association with Ben Jonson and his circle, John Florio for example. Good show