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