Literary World Shocked as Professor Proves Shakespeare Plagiarized All of his Works

St. John's, Newfoundland, 2026-04-27—The literary world has been rocked by a Memorial University mathematics professor's proof that all of Shakespeare's works are in fact plagiarized.

Professor Clive Johnson recently published a paper that settled the long-standing question over whether the number π is normal—that is, whether or not every possible sequence of digits appears equally often. Johnson's paper proved that π is indeed normal, and as a corollary, that all of Shakespeare's works are plagiarized.

Professor Johnson explains: "All you have to do is look in the right place in the decimal expansion of π, and there you will find Shakespeare's works encoded in Unicode. We haven't found the right place yet, but the team did get very excited when we found that a sequence starting at the digit in place 10⁴⁹¹ + 42 reads: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ea*3&8Ψ😉Ҙrs; I come to bury Caesar. This proved that we are on the right track!"

Professor Johnson is leading a campaign to change the authorship of all of Shakespeare's works to "Shakes-π-re", but admits that he hasn't had any success with publishers. "One of them had the temerity to say I was making much ado about nothing!" he said. Another refused to pick up the phone for eleven straight days, answering only on the twelfth night when Professor Johnson called him at home with Caller*ID disabled. A third called the whole thing a "tempest in a teacup."

When Totally True News pointed out that Unicode, and indeed, ASCII, hadn't existed in Shakespeare's era, Johnson replied: "That doesn't matter! That plagiarizing dilettante could have used any encoding system and he would have found 'his' works! And besides, everybody says Shakespeare was ahead of his time, so maybe he did figure out ASCII? That would have been much easier than writing all of 'his' plays."

When asked if this meant that his paper, too, was plagiarized, Professor Johnson said: "You'll never pin a thing on me!" and terminated the interview.