I remember in school finding someone’s website where he’d carefully analysed every sonnet to show how Shakespeare was having an affair with the queen. I’m sure

I remember in school finding someone’s website where he’d carefully analysed every sonnet to show how Shakespeare was having an affair with the queen. I’m sure you’d never guess what all those love sonnets were really about… You get a bunch of these crackpot theories in mathematics — well known universities would regularly get letters about squaring the circle, proving formats last theorem, etc. I wonder if the rate has decreased now that it is easier to access good information online, e.g. maybe a lot of people attempting to square the circle misunderstood what it meant when it was said that it couldn’t be done. And you get them in physics too (theories based on the weird analogies you get in popular magazines, or reading the wrong things into the ‘artists conceptions’ that accompany the articles). It’s surely not surprising that history gets its own crackpots, especially as so much more is debatable there.