Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

In The Corisco Conspiracy , Raphael Sóne's has written a book of fanfiction that takes readers on a wonderful romp, exploring possibilities about the mystery that is Shakespeare. It can be a fun for any reader, but especially for those aware of four things: (1) Shakespeare authorship debate (and authorship collaboration research). (2) The Gunpowder Plot. (3) Shakespeare scholarship’s "turn to religion," circa 2000, considering (among other things) Catholic influences. (4) Awareness of how Shakespeare has been used as a tool of empire, mostly for the benefit of fair-skinned English people. The Corisco Conspiracy: A Memoir of William Shakespeare , combines some of these, as well as an awareness of how the author’s Jesuit predecessors attempted to overthrow the English government and return Protestant England to Catholicism. Many agree that Shakespeare collaborated with other writers far more than the First Folio would have us believe. What if some of them were African, or M...

In 2016, Gary Taylor, editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare, explained in a BBC article that Christopher Marlowe was being credited in their latest edition of the plays as co-writer of some of the plays long attributed to Shakespeare alone. But if there's a hint of Marlowe's voice in some of the plays, where does that come from? Marlowe himself? or some other Marlowe-influenced source? Carol Rutter of the University of Warwick thinks it wasn't Christopher Marlowe directly, but Shakespeare's fellow actors and their knowledge of Marlowe's plays from performing them, that influenced the plays: This is an important conversation to have, especially when scholars of Shakespeare are often not playwrights themselves, and with only scholarly knowledge of the creative process rather than first-hand knowledge.