And now even Orthodox scholars are stripping that certainty away. I think this is what's interesting because the people that are doing these studies, they still believe in the man from Stratford in that sense. They have a main author. They're now saying at least one play in the Folio is barely written by him, as you say. But I think the question is, we don't really know where the texts came from and whose hands they passed through and who fiddled with them before they ended up in the Folio. And isn't that a wonderful thing? Isn't it a wonderful thing that we don't know and that we continue to search and investigate, hoping to come up with some kind of certainty? So I think it's a wonderful thing. I mean, it is throwing up new theories now that have little evidence to back them up. So one of the leaders in this area is, of course, Brian Vickers, and he's written some marvellous, fantastic work, and his idea is now that Shakespeare was a kind of Michelangelo figure, doling out work to various authors to come up with the finished masterworks. It's again a very romantic idea, but there's no evidence for it. For myself, I don't see it working in that way, and again I don't know, but I think these texts are texts that have been produced over many, many years going through many, many hands, often with a loss of knowledge around who did what, who wrote what, and then finally ended up needing - usually, or often needing - an author's name, often not, but just coming to us in this published form, but that bringing no real certainty with it. It's what I say in the first lesson with my students. When I hold this play in my hand, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, what do I mean, given that Romeo and Juliet was published five times anonymously before it was given a name, what do I mean by this text Romeo and Juliet, and what do I mean by this author William Shakespeare? And it's a really, really complex issue, and it's from that question that I investigate the Shakespeare authorship question in its entirety with my students. When they do these stylometric studies, what they're often doing is comparing, or they're saying, "This is this author's style that we've taken from these published works, and this is what we've decided is Shakespeare which we're taking from these central plays that we haven't currently decided a co-authored. Isn't the problem that is actually very hard to define because we don't know where the texts came from, what this thing is that we're calling Shakespeare that we're comparing against? Because a few years ago you might have compared, for example, a Henry VI play. Perhaps not one, I think that's been in doubt for some time, but they're now talking about co-authorship on the other two Henry VI plays as well. So we get to define what is Shakespeare, what do we mean by a Shakespearean style? Are all these famous quotes of Shakespeare's? Are they all one author or are these coming from several authors? How can you tell? Well, I think that's right and although this new stylometric school is very interesting and it's throwing up lots of interesting conclusions, it's not a science. It's probably not even a pseudoscience. It is based on all of those kind of caveats if you like, the starting material that they'll compare Shakespearean plays against are other Shakespearean plays. So Hamlet may well be for them, that's Shakespeare and that's what we compare all of these other plays with, but there's all sorts of questions around that. So, the subject area self is full of interesting gaps and as long as we don't turn this into the new orthodoxy, then I think that's fine. That it produces lots of questions rather than brings lots of answers. I think people are always reaching for certainty. I think this is one of the problems, isn't it? That very quickly something can be crystallized. For example, Hand D, which we look at on the MOOC and which the British Library are representing as a sample of Shakespeare's handwriting with three additional pages to Sir Thomas More and there are big problems with that. And when you get something, so august an institution as the British Library saying this is Shakespeare's handwriting, that seems to have settled the matter. Yeah. So that certainty, that desire for certainty, comes from all sorts of places. And there are certain drivers like the emotional need, the personal needs and so forth. But of course, that certainty also comes from we have a number of buildings, and indeed a whole town, that if you like is dedicated to that person. Millions of people go there every year to those houses where that person lived and so of course from both sides there's a real need for that kind of certainty to say, "I'm visiting these houses where that person who wrote those plays that I love lived and moved and isn't it wonderful?" and so on and so forth. So there's all sorts of drivers for that certainty. And again, I think even that is hugely complex and we need to embrace that complexity. So I think, very early on when I became interested in the Shakespeare authorship question, it did surprise me, this drive to simplicity and I'm much more interested in the drive to complexity, actually in all walks of life and that we should embrace complexity rather than simplicity. And I think it's one of the malign influences of our modern day politics is this desire for, this need to give simple messages which belie if you like, the complexity of reality.
