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I think that was very important to Bacon... personally. I think he went to great efforts to get a house for the Stratford man, to make it so difficult for us to prove that it was Francis Bacon, because it is very difficult to prove.

At his heart, Shakespeare was a YA author. So many of his plays are set with high school-aged characters. He understood the passion, the confusion and drama that marks that life stage.

Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.

I think nobody since has written such extraordinary work as Shakespeare writes. The characters he writes are full of inconsistencies, which is a great human quality - I mean, we're all very inconsistent in the way we behave.

I studied Shakespeare in college, but not theatrically, more in terms of literature, and then I kind of took a break from it. Now there's resurgence in my appreciation for him. It's amazing: there are so many book titles and song titles that come just from lines that he wrote.

But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.

I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

Shakespeare was a dramatist of note who lived by writing things to quote.

He's a man who... well, one of the great things about Shakespeare is that his characters are inconsistent, and that's something I think makes him a writer above most writers because inconsistency is what we, as people, are full of. We maybe don't see it in ourselves too often, but we are inconsistent.