{"id":630,"date":"2023-05-30T16:44:16","date_gmt":"2023-05-30T16:44:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/27\/?p=630"},"modified":"2023-06-05T07:55:14","modified_gmt":"2023-06-05T07:55:14","slug":"shakespeare-was-a-woman-and-other-heresies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/27\/shakespeare-was-a-woman-and-other-heresies\/","title":{"rendered":"Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Elizabeth Winkler<\/strong>
416 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviewed by Don Rubin<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When American cultural writer Elizabeth Winkler published a free-lance article in the venerable and well-respected journal The<\/em> Atlantic<\/em> four years ago speculating rather innocently that Shakespeare\u2019s plays were more than simply feminist-inflected and suggested that maybe Shakespeare was actually a woman using a male pseudonym, she quickly found herself under attack from those who prefer Shakespeare just the way he has been traditionally portrayed: as a barely-educated provincial male.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traditional Stratfordians, of course, seem to ignore the fact that the writer — whose female characters are often seen reading in the plays or showing off their erudition as cross-dressing lawyers or even (like Gertrude and Cleopatra) running countries as Queens — never actually bothered to teach his own daughters to read or write. How dare one question the rags-to-riches Stratfordian creation myth? Or anything else that might seem slightly off about the man from Stratford as the world\u2019s greatest author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Things like the dating of the plays which — shoe-horned into the dates of the Stratford man \u2013 require us to believe that he wrote two to three full-length plays a year (in iambic pentameter for good measure) for 17 consecutive years all while occasionally acting.  And then, while in retirement for another six years back in provincial Stratford, wrote not a poem or even a letter to anyone. Nor did he keep a single manuscript. Or when this most famous writer died, the theatre world in London (still producing his plays) took absolutely no notice. No eulogies. No nothing. A silence which lasted seven years until the two sons of Mary Sidney (one of them married to the daughter of the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere) published a collection of Shakespeare\u2019s plays — the First Folio. Add into this, the fact that the well-researched life of the Stratford man shows not a stitch of documented proof that he<\/em> was actually a writer.<\/em> Yes, there was a writer named Shakespeare. Yes, there was a man from Stratford named Shakspere. But were they one and the same?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was into this loaded mousetrap that Winkler walked with her speculations about Shakespeare possibly being a woman named Emilia Bassano. After publication of her magazine article, Stratfordians round the world went wild. Some actually going to her editors to demand corrections and apologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that was when Winkler\u2019s journalistic instincts took over. She quickly realized that she<\/em> had become part of what was a larger<\/em> story and that larger story was not that Shakespeare had genuine feminist leanings but that anyone even hinting that someone other than the man from Stratford could have written the plays was not just to result in a wrist-slap from academe but was to be seen as akin to religious heresy. Thus the sub-title of Winkler\u2019s book on what happened after her wallop: \u201cHow doubting the Bard became the biggest taboo in literature.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think every writer in the world should want to know how this situation came about and why, as should everyone who traffics in the works of Shakespeare whether as director or actor or anything in between. Winkler\u2019s splendid book offers hours of absolutely fascinating reading on the subject of what is essentially academic censorship. Its impressive research and bubbling prose will actually make this subject come alive for anyone with even a modicum of theatrical or historical curiosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is certainly the most accessible short history I know of the evolution of things such as Shakespeare Studies, English Literature as an academic field and what is called the Shakespeare Authorship Question. How did an oeuvre of writings from the 16th<\/sup> century in England grow over 400 years into a national industry, one now protected with a fundamentalist ferocity by anglophone academics who willingly serve as a sort of scholarly Swiss Guard. In this most amusing yet intellectually troubling volume, Winkler asks why, in a world where diversity of thought is queen, it has become so intellectually explosive to even talk about research-based alternative ideas related to Shakespearean authorship. Why such historical research is responded to with knee-jerk epithets comparing it (usually without looking into it) to UFO sightings, Flat Eartherism and doubting the holocaust?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most coherent reason for refusing to look into the historical substance of the issue is, of course, because \u201cWe have the works. Who cares who wrote them?\u201d Fair enough. And true enough. But if research proved that, say, James Baldwin actually wrote the works of Arthur Miller would that not change interpretations or enrich understandings of them? As if learning (as we have in recent decades) that Bertolt Brecht\u2019s works were not created alone by this German poet but were actually the result of many hands, often many uncredited female<\/em> hands, would that not make us rethink some of the ideas behind at least some of the many important plays that boast the Brecht hallmark?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winkler\u2019s book begins with the simplest of questions: \u201cwho has the authority to determine the truth about the past?\u201d Given that the answer would normally be historians, she then wonders why, in the case of Shakespeare, such authority seems to be only in the hands of \u201cShakespeare scholars, a small but highly prestigious subset of English literature professors\u2026[whose] prestige derives from their specialty. They are priests\u2026of the highest god \u2013 the god who gives English literature its very raison d’etre\u2026.interpreting and mediating for the masses the meaning of Shakespeare\u2026glow[ing] with the radiance cast by his rays.\u201d And for them, she says clearly, \u201cthe theory that William Shakespeare might not <\/em>have written the works published under his name \u2013 does not exist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winkler\u2019s quest to understand this anomalous approach to history is comprised of a combination of her own literary and historical research (she has degrees from Princeton and Stanford) and through interviews by those very authorities to try and understand why the authorship question is a heresy akin to denying a god. Among those she approaches is the high priest of Stratfordianism \u2013 Prof. Stanley Wells, Emeritus Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, a man who actually stated publicly in 2011 that \u201cIt is immoral to question history and to take credit away from William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.\u201d To which Winkler asks incredulously: \u201cImmoral to question history \u2013 when inquiry is the very basis of the historical discipline?\u201d (18).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She also meets with some of the leading heretics, prefacing those encounters by quoting Mark Twain, who once said: \u201cSo far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon never wrote a play in his life. His biography is built up, course upon course, of guess, inferences, theories, conjectures \u2013 an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high\u2026.Facts and presumption are\u2026all the same\u2026..\u201d (54-5). Twain, of course, was not alone in his doubts. Among others are such notable 19th<\/sup> century intellectuals as Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne and, in the last hundred years, actor-directors such as Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Tyrone Guthrie, Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between interviews, we are taken briefly through the lives of the major authorship candidates \u2013 William of Stratford, himself of course, but also Edward de Vere (the Earl of Oxford), Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon. She adds in as well Emilia Bassano \u2013 the Italian musician and psalmstress who got Winkler into such trouble with The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history really is fascinating. It was David Garrick\u2019s 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee where Bardolatry emerged, when Shakespeare began to be \u201cheld up as proof of Britain\u2019s cultural superiority\u2014of its right to rule\u2026.the mutually reinforcing mythologies of the nation and its poet, the empire and its hero-god\u2026.[when] the idea of Shakespeare would become inseparable from the idea of Britain itself\u2026\u201d (111).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The purchase at auction in 1847 of the house on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon that Shakespeare was supposedly born in (without proof) added in still another layer of veneration. To be \u201cpurchased for the nation\u201d by a hand-picked committee of Shakespeare scholars with funding donated by the public, the auction room was apparently  \u201cpacked with people who wished to be deceived\u2026.They knew it was an illusion, but they loved the illusion. It was a beautiful illusion. Plus, the illusion made good economic sense. The purchase\u2026solidified Stratford-upon-Avon as a tourist mecca\u201d  (129-31).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her research includes some history of English literature itself as an academic subject. \u201cAt the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were no English departments and no such thing as a degree in English literature\u2026.Around the mid-nineteenth century, however\u2026a discipline called English literature arose, founded on and formed around Shakespeare. It arose, first and foremost as a substitute for religion\u2026.\u201d (147).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhile Europe was full of students \u2018liable to dangerous explosions of political feeling\u2019\u2026the men and women of Britain\u2026[were to be] immersed in the \u2018civilising, softening charms of the noblest literature in the world.\u2019 \u2026. women were agitating for education. They needed to be placated\u2026.English seemed a \u2018convenient sort of non-subject to palm off on the ladies\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere was a third group, too, that the Victorians sought to control: the natives that they conquered\u2026.Armed with Shakespeare, secure in a sense of their national identity and cultural superiority, they could venture forth to impose their higher civilization on the natives\u2026.English was institutionalized at the height of the Victorian deification of Shakespeare, swapping the old Judeo-Christian God for one that Britain had ready at hand\u2026.\u201d (151).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as Shakespeare became more god-like, some began to dissent from the common view. \u201cIn 1848, a minor American novelist named Joseph Hart suggested that \u201cShakespeare was a \u2018mere factotum of the theatre\u2019 and a \u2018vulgar and uneducated man.\u2019 The plays were collaborative works produced by educated writers whose identities had simply been lost\u2026\u201d (153).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another American, Delia Bacon began arguing in this same period \u201cthat the true authors were a group of courtiers led by Francis Bacon\u201d (154). She blamed literary critics especially for not looking deeply into the issue saying that when it comes to Shakespeare they simply \u201cveil their faces, filling the air with mystic utterances which seem to say, that, to this shrine at least\u2026there is yet no admittance.\u201d \u2026Delia deconstructed the workings of the myth\u2026.the Baconian theory went global. From Italy to India and Serbia to South Africa writers debated the authorship question.\u201d  By the end of the nineteenth century, the authorship question, we learn, \u201chad become the literary controversy of the day, generating some 160 books, pamphlets, and articles\u2026.\u201d (160-62).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among Winkler\u2019s interviews on both sides of the question are the Birthplace Trust\u2019s Stanley Wells, actor-director Mark Rylance, Harvard professor Emerita Marjorie Garber, Oxfordian independent scholar Alexander Waugh, Marlowe scholar Ros Barber and Oxfordian scholar Roger Stritmatter, the latter the first person to get a doctorate based on an authorship subject (Edward de Vere\u2019s Geneva Bible).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ever polite but often frustrated, she approaches each of these people with an open mind and similar questions. Some of the interviewees come off well. Some do not. Wells, for instance, comes off quite badly arguing that authorship doubters are simply malicious people and especially malicious against the Birthplace Trust. Attacking the doubters\u2019 motives rather than their research, Wells plays amateur psychologist suggesting that \u201cit\u2019s impossible to determine psychologically complex motives which may have their basis in class issues, sociological issues, even in jealousy.\u201d He adds that independent scholar Alexander Waugh, grandson of novelist Evelyn Waugh, \u201cseems to resent the fact that the Trust makes money\u2026.\u201d Insisting that Stratfordian facts are all on his side, Wells says little more than that doubters such as Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Mark Rylance (two of the world\u2019s greatest Shakespearean actors) are both simply \u201cbonkers\u201d (177).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interviews with Waugh and Rylance themselves are among the longest in the volume and among the most delicious because Winkler\u2019s descriptions are always so right on. Waugh is described as \u201ca classic in the venerable tradition of the English eccentric, with hair flying wildly around a bald crown like an electrocuted scientist\u201d (223). An Oxfordian, Waugh calls the works of Shakespeare \u201cnot only his [Oxford\u2019s] gift to mankind but atonement of his own sins\u201d (239).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Rylance, on the other hand, looks more widely and seems to favor \u201ca collaborative view of the authorship\u201d given the different genres being used and even the changes in the versification over the course of the plays. Interestingly, he feels if other candidates were allowed in, it could actually widen interest in the works generally. As he sees it, if another author were accepted, Stratford would not be abandoned because Will of Stratford would always have a place in the story. \u201cIt would be brilliant,\u201d Rylance says, \u201cif the Birthplace had exhibits devoted to the alternate candidates. Why not have bus trips to Oxford\u2019s house and Bacon\u2019s?\u201d (288)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, Winkler wonders what riches actually lay on the other side of uncertainty? What might be discovered if the authorship were truly open to academic study without fear of attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe might gain a deeper understanding of the plays and poems\u201d she says. \u201cOf Renaissance history; of the nature of genius; of the relationship between life and art.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book closes with an oddly wonderful interview with a post-modern critic — retired Harvard Shakespeare professor Marjorie Garber. Refusing to term herself a Stratfordian, she insists here on being known simply as a Shakespearean, someone only interested in the works themselves, a position \u201centirely consistent with her post-modern approach to literature generally \u2013 the irrelevance of the author, the supremacy of the text\u201d (333).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cIf it came out that the author was someone else, you wouldn\u2019t feel you have to rethink your interpretation of the plays in any way?\u201d I asked.

\u201cI rethink my interpretation of the plays every day,\u201d she said.

\u201cIt wouldn\u2019t make you go back and look at them differently knowing they came from a different person?\u201d

\u201cI don\u2019t think of them as coming from a person,\u201d she said. \u201cI think of them as a text\u2026.\u201d

But wasn\u2019t she just a little bit curious? Didn\u2019t she want to know the origin of the plays about which she clearly cared so deeply? I was baffled. We talked and talked and got nowhere. The sun set.<\/p>\n334<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For Winkler, her long struggle here with the authorship issue ends not with a bang of new understanding but with a whimper of continuing bafflement at the refusal of so many intelligent people to even look at the issue. And that for her is ultimately the hardest nut of all to crack. The nut of dismissive and cultured indifference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, this new volume is not only a delightful read but, I truly think, an important one for theatre workers, literary scholars, critics and historians, the curious and even the committed. Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies <\/em>is not just a generational challenge to a 400-year old issue about yet another dead white male but a gauntlet of sorts thrown down in front of a whole new generation daring them to commit to challenge old ideas with new approaches in even this most arcane of intellectual areas. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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*<\/a>Don Rubin<\/strong> is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at Toronto\u2019s York University and Editor of Routledge\u2019s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre<\/em>. Managing Editor and Book Review Editor of Critical Stages<\/em> (critical-stages.org), he has been an active figure in the Shakespeare authorship movement since 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2023 Don Rubin
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN:2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n

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