Was Shakespeare Mental?

According to songwriter and author Robert Boog, Shakespeare may not have been the writer we always believed him to be. And that there is evidence that the playwright Shakespeare, was bipolar.

Let’s just stop for a minute. I hold my hand up, as do many authors, to admitting that we suffer for our creativity. Most writers suffer from depression and most fiction authors hear voices in our heads. Which makes us a little schizo.

The depression takes us to a dark place where the writing is gold, and the voices we hear are our characters leading us the right way or having a go at us for putting them in a situation that the character would never have got into…
Have I lost you yet? Bear with me.
If we authors go through these periods of mental anguish and what we refer to as being in the “zone,” then if Shakespeare or any other writer went through the same thing back in those days, would they be thought of as being mentally insane?

So could Shakespeare have been bipolar? Yes, he could have. If you look at his work: the sonnets, the plays, most are very dark tragic, and even the comedies are so ‘out there.’ That in that era, he could have been mentally ill.

Robert believes that the author of the plays and sonnets didn’t want to be attached to the work and allowed someone else to take the credit.

In this episode of Behind The Pen. I go behind Robert’s songwriting to the screenplays he’s written, and then we discuss his latest book Shakeys Madness. Enjoy.