Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

by Elizabeth Winkler Narrated by Eunice Wong

Overview

An “extraordinarily brilliant” and “pleasurably naughty” (André Aciman) investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy...and who the Bard might really be.

The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard's biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.”

In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking you from London to Stratford-Upon-Avon to Washington, DC, she pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries. As she considers the writers and thinkers-from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices-who have grappled with the riddle of the plays' origins, she explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Hovering over the mystery are Shakespeare's plays themselves, with their love for mistaken identities, disguises, and things never quite being what they seem.

As she interviews scholars and skeptics, Winkler's interest turns to the larger problem of historical truth-and of how human imperfections (bias, blindness, subjectivity) shape our construction of the past. History is a story, and the story we find may depend on the story we're looking for.

“Lively” (The Washington Post), “fascinating” (Amanda Foreman), and “intrepid” (Stacy Schiff), Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies will forever change how you think of Shakespeare...and of how we as a society decide what's up for debate and what's just nonsense, just heresy.

Editorial Reviews

July 2023 - AudioFile

Eunice Wong delivers this investigation of the scholarly study of Shakespeare. Journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler takes a deep dive into the study of Shakespeare's identity--specifically, how the controversial idea that he was someone other than the glove-maker's son from Stratford has been squelched by special interests for centuries. Wong cautiously delivers each word, explanation, and citation of facts, studies, and heresies the author draws upon to make her case. Her narration never flags or falters as example after example is parsed and analyzed. Wong's unemotional performance is broken by vocal pauses to signal the recitation of play lines, poems, and documentary evidence supporting the author's hypothesis. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/06/2023

This sharp debut by journalist Winkler expands on her 2019 Atlantic essay exploring the “messy, ugly dispute” over the authorship of works attributed to Shakespeare. Questioning how a relatively uneducated man from Stratford-upon-Avon could write such learned and feminist plays, Winkler suggests that perhaps “the author was not an uneducated man but an educated woman.” She discusses the numerous female candidates scholars have forwarded, including Mary Sidney, a translator who aspired to create “a body of English literature that could stand next to the great works in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian,” and Emilia Bassano, a poet who advocated for liberty from male oppression. She also surveys male authors believed by some to be the “real” Shakespeare, noting that playwright Christopher Marlowe is a favorite candidate because he died under mysterious circumstances “just weeks before ‘Shakespeare’ emerged.” Winkler doesn’t weigh in on the likeliness of the candidates, but instead uses the controversy to serve up thoughtful meditations on the role of the author, the objectivity of biography, and the limits of scholarly study (“Despite the most heroic efforts of feminist scholars, women of the past will always be, to some degree, ‘missing matter’ ”). Probing and smart, this is sure to stir up lively debate. (May)

From the Publisher

An extraordinarily brilliant and scholarly work, written with an unyielding sleuthing instinct and sparkling with pleasurably naughty moments. This page-turner is mesmerizing.”
—André Aciman, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name

“A fascinating detective story... whose irreverence is part of its appeal.”
—The Guardian

“Elizabeth Winkler is blessed with the clear-eyed wit of a heroine in a Shakespearean comedy. Her undoing of the fools in the forest of the authorship question is iconoclasm As You Like It—joy to behold, lesson for us all.”
—Lewis Lapham, founder of Lapham’s Quarterly

“As a literary-investigative reporter, Elizabeth Winkler... pursues her quarry with tenacity and grips it like a dog with a bone.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Lively.... Winkler is a crackerjack researcher, deftly laying out the myriad questions, arguments and mysteries swirling around Shakespeare.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Elizabeth Winkler’s Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies is one of the most engaging, riveting, scholarly, and challenging whodunits anyone with an interest in theater, human psychology, literature, and history can hope to read. Following in the footsteps of Henry James, Mark Twain, Mark Rylance, and innumerable other skeptics, Winkler writes about what has been essentially a centuries old theological dispute about the origins of Shakespeare’s astounding body of work like a Shakespearean drama itself: full of complex characters with false reputations and deceptive appearances.”
—Bessel van der Kolk, MD, New York Times bestselling author of The Body Keeps Score

“No, Elizabeth Winkler doesn’t reveal the true identity of the writer Ruth Bader Ginsburg termed “the literary genius known by the name William Shakespeare.” But she does explain how we’ve wound up with, among an army of others, a republican Shakespeare and a monarchist Shakespeare, a Shakespeare who hated his wife and one who loved his, a Shakespeare who wrote all the plays and a Shakespeare who could not write at all. Along her intrepid way, Winkler charts, with refreshing clarity, the much-contested ground underfoot, studded with flinty convictions, gnarled fictions, and a surprising number of land mines.”
—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary

“Fascinating and often delightful.... Shakespeare Was a Woman may represent something of an “emperor’s-no-clothes” moment for academia.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“A perfect introduction to a world of unbridled passion, retribution, and intrigue—I refer of course to the Shakespeare authorship question. Brilliant and mind-blowing.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of Booth

“A fascinating read. Winkler boldly pushes against traditional boundaries of gender and identity to show that meaning can be constructed in many different ways.”
—Amanda Foreman, PhD, internationally bestselling author of Georgiana

André Aciman

An extraordinarily brilliant and scholarly work, written with an unyielding sleuthing instinct and sparkling with pleasurably naughty moments. This page-turner is mesmerizing.”

AudioFile - JULY 2023

Eunice Wong delivers this investigation of the scholarly study of Shakespeare. Journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler takes a deep dive into the study of Shakespeare's identity--specifically, how the controversial idea that he was someone other than the glove-maker's son from Stratford has been squelched by special interests for centuries. Wong cautiously delivers each word, explanation, and citation of facts, studies, and heresies the author draws upon to make her case. Her narration never flags or falters as example after example is parsed and analyzed. Wong's unemotional performance is broken by vocal pauses to signal the recitation of play lines, poems, and documentary evidence supporting the author's hypothesis. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2023-02-17
Diving into a Shakespearean drama.

Journalist and literary critic Winkler makes her book debut with a witty, irreverent inquiry into a fraught question: Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? That question inspired her essay, “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” published in the Atlantic in 2019, in which she proposed that Italian writer Emilia Bassano might have written, or contributed to, Shakespeare’s plays. The response by scholars was vicious. “In literary circles,” Winkler quickly discovered, “even the phrase ‘Shakespeare authorship question’ elicits contempt—eye-rolling, name-calling, mudslinging.” But that question has persisted, like “a massive game of Clue,” since the Renaissance, fueled by the lack of evidence that the man born in Stratford was the same man who wrote Hamlet. No obituary appeared after Shakespeare’s death, and he bequeathed no manuscripts, unusual for a man of letters. Furthermore, he seemed never to have traveled outside of England yet had intimate knowledge of European court life, other languages, and even ancient Greek. Winkler is well versed in Shakespeare’s works as well as the “vast, complex” literature on the authorship question. She reports on conversations with stolid Stratfordians who have devoted their careers to defending Shakespeare’s identity and with enthusiastic anti-Stratfordians who point to other individuals—or collaborators—as more likely playwrights: Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere, and Mary Sidney, who, like Bassano, could help to explain Shakespeare’s prowess in writing feminist drama. Suppose, Winkler suggests, “the author was not an uneducated man but an educated woman, concealing herself beneath a male name, as the heroines of the plays so often disguise themselves in masculine garb.” Winkler does not aim to solve the mystery but rather to point up the problems of ascertaining historical truth. “We take our knowledge of the past from sources we trust,” she writes, “few of us going back to check how a ‘historical fact’ was arrived at, whether it’s correct.”

A shrewd, entertaining journey into a literary quagmire.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176923926
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Prologue Prologue
In England in the summer of 1964, an unusual case came before the courts. It involved a squabble over the will of Miss Evelyn May Hopkins and the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare. Miss Hopkins had died, leaving a third of her inheritance to the Francis Bacon Society for the purpose of finding the original manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays. She referred to them as the “Bacon-Shakespeare manuscripts,” believing the true author of the works to have been Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan philosopher and statesman. The aim of finding the manuscripts was to prove that Bacon was, in fact, the author of the works attributed to Shakespeare. Her heirs were not pleased. Naturally, they preferred that the money go to themselves. Seeking to reclaim their inheritance, the heirs brought a suit against the society, arguing that Miss Hopkins’s provision should be set aside on the grounds that the search would be a “wild goose chase.” To support their case, they solicited the testimony of scholarly experts. The Right Honorable Richard Wilberforce, a justice of Her Majesty’s High Court, presided.

Counsel for the next of kin “described it as a wild goose chase; but wild geese can, with good fortune, be apprehended,” observed the justice. Many discoveries are unlikely until they are made, he pointed out: “one may think of the Codex Sinaiticus, or the Tomb of Tutankhamen, or the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Wilberforce was a stolid Englishman, a former classics scholar at Oxford University who rose through Britain’s legal ranks to become a senior Law Lord in the House of Lords and a member of the Queen’s Privy Council. Having reviewed the evidence submitted to the court, he summarized it as follows:

“The orthodox opinion, which at the present time is unanimous, or nearly so, among scholars and experts in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature and history, is that the plays were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, actor.” However, Justice Wilberforce continued, “The evidence in favour of Shakespeare’s authorship is quantitatively slight. It rests positively, in the main, on the explicit statements in the First Folio of 1623, and on continuous tradition; negatively on the lack of any challenge to this ascription at the time” of the First Folio’s publication. Furthermore, the justice found, “There are a number of difficulties in the way of the traditional ascription... a number of known facts which are difficult to reconcile.... [S]o far from these difficulties tending to diminish with time, the intensive search of the nineteenth century has widened the evidentiary gulf between William Shakespeare the man, and the author of the plays.”

The justice went on to consider the testimony of the scholarly experts. Kenneth Muir, King Alfred Professor of English literature at the University of Liverpool, supported the plaintiffs, Miss Hopkins’s aggrieved heirs. He considered it “certain” that Bacon could not have written the works of Shakespeare. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, departed slightly from his English literature colleagues, taking what the justice deemed “a more cautious line.” Though Professor Trevor-Roper “definitely does not believe that the works of ‘Shakespeare’ could have been written by Francis Bacon, he also considers that the case for Shakespeare rests on a narrow balance of evidence and that new material could upset it; that though almost all professional scholars accept ‘Shakespeare’s’ authorship, a settled scholarly tradition can inhibit free thought, that heretics are not necessarily wrong. His conclusion is that the question of authorship cannot be considered as closed.”

Justice Wilberforce agreed. The question was not closed. The evidence for Shakespeare was too slim, the problems too many. The scholars might be wrong. Even if Francis Bacon was unlikely, new material might show someone other than Shakespeare to have been the author. Whoever wrote them, the manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays had never been found. Their discovery would be “of the highest value to history and to literature,” Wilberforce proclaimed. Indeed, he added, to the consternation of the plaintiffs and the Shakespeare scholars, “the revelation of a manuscript would contribute, probably decisively, to a solution to the authorship problem, and this alone is benefit enough.”

Miss Hopkins’s bequest to the Francis Bacon Society was upheld.

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