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.

September is now upon us and, as promised, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has released 60 Minutes With Shakespeare, which should stand up as the definitive resource for smacking down the Authorship debate once and for all.  60 questions, 60 Shakespearean scholars from around the world.  Amazing amount of work went into this.  Heck, they even got Roland Emmerich himself – the director of the movie Anonymous which seems to be the driving point behind this recent push – to answer a question.  

Having said all that, here’s my thoughts. I appreciate that there are people who question authorship, and thus the Stratford position needs to be defended, especially by the people who are caretakers of history.  It just doesn’t interest me, as a debate.  Of course the Stratford folks get together and answer 60 questions that “prove” Shakespeare wrote his works. But you know what? I completely believe that an Oxfordian group could get together and create this exact same site, and pull out 60 of their own experts (using that term loosely) to answer 60 questions that claim to prove that Oxford did it.  I’m not taking sides – I’m simply pointing out what appears obvious, that if you are clearly on either side, then no amount of proof that you offer can ever be seen as anything but completely biased.

Make up your own mind.  Go listen.  Pick out the questions you’re most interested in, or hunt down the experts you most want to hear from.  I’m going to end up listening to all of them, I’m sure.  But if I’m going into it as secure in the knowledge that Shakespeare wrote his works as I am that the sun is going to rise in the morning, I’m just not quite sure what I’m supposed to get out of it.