Hey everyone, Sebastian here. Welcome to the last of the OFH Throwback episodes for this summer.

Season 6 of Our Fake History will begin next week with the first new episode of season 6 dropping on September 15th 2020.

In honor of a very weird back to school season, we are going to revisit one of the earliest episodes of Our Fake History.

Episode number 5 did Shakespeare write the plays. Now as many of you probably know when I'm not making this podcast, I work as a high school teacher here in Toronto.

In my nine years of teaching, I have taught a buttload of Shakespeare. And honestly, I love Shakespeare.

In the world of education, there's a huge debate around whether or not Shakespeare is still relevant or if English departments are overemphasizing the Bard.

And I agree that perhaps we need to back off Shakespeare a little bit in order to make room for more diverse voices in the English curriculum.

Maybe you don't need to read Shakespeare every single year in high school. But with that said, I would hate to see the Bard vanish completely.

As I tell my students, once you crack the code of Shakespeare's language, then you're treated to works of art that have stood the test of time for a reason.

The plays are dirty and funny and violent and still deeply poignant. I also think that understanding Shakespeare is key to becoming a media literate.

Shakespeare is so deeply baked into the history of English entertainment that knowing the Bard gives you a better perspective on film, music, poetry, literature, basically anything cool.

But without fail, every year a student asks me about the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare did not write the plays.

I will often treat my students to sort of a miniature version of what you're about to hear in this podcast.

And then I tell them that if they want to know more, they can check out our fake history and go deep on Mr. Major's thoughts on the Shakespeare controversy.

Now, I should let you know that there are many things about this early episode that I don't love.

First, I feel like I kind of rushed this topic. If I was to approach this topic today, this would have easily spun into a trilogy.

Back when I made this episode, I didn't know I did trilogies yet. When I first conceived of our fake history, I thought of every single topic as being a one-off.

Anyone that's been listening to the show for a while knows that I very quickly abandoned that idea and got into making multi-part series for the show.

Now, I still have a personal rule that no multi-part series can be longer than three parts.

It's a little arbitrary, but I just think trilogies are nice, and I think the more parts you add to the series, the more likely it will be that people will stop listening.

So trilogies are as far as I will go. But I know what you're thinking. Sebastian, you're a little too obsessed with the trilogies these days.

Every topic seems to balloon into a trilogy. And yeah, you know, you might be right. So perhaps I could learn something from the brevity of these early episodes.

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