When Queen Elizabeth sought to root out Catholic uprising in her country, and to quelch potential plots against her in England, it is well known that she turned to spies and spymasters within her court to find, identify, and execute anyone who was a threat to the crown. One key method Elizabeth used to make sure the new generation of English boys supported her government and the Protestant religion was through indoctrination. What better place to teach them how to act, and how to think, than at university. Universities like Cambridge and Oxford were, during Shakespeare’s lifetime and well after, used by the government as a place to teach, as well as to root out, anyone who held sympathies for the wrong cause. As theater and performance formed a huge foundation for education in the 16th century, plays like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, were often used as a way to facilitate these goals, frequently blurring the lines between education and the intention to imbue young minds with what Elizabeth saw as the right way to think and believe. Our guest this week, Robert Stefanek, has researched spies in Elizabethan England and how Hamlet being a student at Wittenberg University may be much more than a passing nod as his youth and status as a student. Robert contends that being a student at university specifically is a reflection of the entire culture of spies, undercover agents, and covert operations that defined a university structure that in Tudor England was designed, right down to the very walls of the buildings themselves, to confine, control, and indoctrinate, a new generation of young men that Elizabeth wanted to see graduate as her allies.