We’re going to try another new feature here on the Nook: Citation Needed. Citation Needed is a column where we explore unique “factual” claims that could perhaps use better support. Let’s get started.

***

There’s an active debate among historians as to whether Shakespeare was a real person. Sure, there’s the fact that we know he was a real person from commonly kept records at the time, and all the documentary evidence appears to favor him being the author of the plays attributed to him. But how could a commoner like Shakespeare both know and understand the complex life of the royal court? How could such great plays be written by someone with little education from dirt poor Stratford? Frankly, how could a man who came from nothing write beautiful plays that spoke to the human condition?

The answers to these questions are simple: Williams Shakespeare had telepathy. It explains everything. The lack of education? That can be solved if you know how to read minds. Knowledge of royal courts? He might not have been allowed in the royal court, but he was definitely interacted with people who were. Just read their minds, and you know everything. Who knows more about the human condition than a man who’s seen the inside of everyone’s mind? Nobody.

It explains so much. How else could Shakespeare write such beautiful sonnets about beautiful women and a mid-summer’s day? Keep in mind, this is England, which has little of either of those. Maybe he met a Frenchman once. How could an uneducated tradesman understand the motivations of a king like Henry V? What? You think a man like Henry V was a man like any other, as if some nobody could understand him? Would a man with no education ponder what it means to exist like Hamlet? No, without a university degree, the most complicated thoughts you will ever have concerning human existence are worrying about whether your live-in girlfriend is pregnant right after you get laid off from the 7-Eleven. The only way Billy Shakespeare could write these amazing works of art is through the power of telepathy.

Now, you might ask what documentary evidence I have of this. None. But the only alternative is to believe that people who have no formal degrees in the fine arts or even any formal education are fully capable of creating great art, which is a prospect I can’t handle. Or that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, but the people who believe that are nuts.