Shakespeare’s Plays Written By Monkeys, New Evidence Suggests

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Over the centuries, there has been controversy over whether or not Shakespeare actually wrote all of his plays. The full answer will likely always remain a mystery, but a historian at Harvard has unearthed some letters the playwright penned in his latter years that suggest that the Bard generated the story ideas, but had an army of highly-trained monkeys write out the actual plays.

“The documents suggest he had multiple writers’ rooms set up, with five to ten simians going back and forth over the story ideas he would pitch to them,” says Doctor Eli Sturngood, professor of Anglo Saxon Studies there at the university. “Some of my colleges now believe that there are two versions of King Leer because he assigned two different teams to try and revise an earlier draft that another team had originally written.”

Sturngood says that Shakespeare most likely employed a rare breed of primate that used to be native to the British Isles. The Papio Anglo is a highly intelligent species, closely related to the African baboon, which disappeared from Europe around the same time Shakespeare was performing. Sturngood feels there could be a connection between their exodus and a brash of heated creative differences between Shakespeare and his writers.

“There’s correspondence between Shakespeare and a friend, where he talks about being furious with his creative team, and the descriptions he uses suggests that they were short, hairy, and had tails.”

Not all of Sturngood’s colleagues agree with his assessment of the documents, though. Many feel that it’s much more likely the strange comments are a result of Shakespeare simply becoming eccentric in his last few years.

“Being [a writer] myself, I know that sometimes you feel like you get your ideas from a team of monkeys in your head,” says Sturngood’s supervisor, Associate Dean Anette Kipperidge. “Maybe he started to take that metaphor a bit too literally?”