In 2019, Elizabeth Winkler, a young writer at the Wall Street Journal, published a provocative essay in the Atlantic under the headline “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” In it she examined the case for seeing the hand of Emilia Bassano Lanier, a poet of Italian heritage born in the 16th century, in the plays attributed to the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon. The theory had been in circulation for a while – in 2018, the Globe theatre staged Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s sellout play Emilia, which dramatised a similar argument – but Winkler was unprepared for the scale of the backlash. Within 48 hours of the article’s publication, “I was besieged by a (mostly male) army of Twitter trolls,” she writes in this riposte to her detractors. The professional scholars were hardly more civilised: older, male academics and critics called her a conspiracy theorist, comparing her to Holocaust deniers, Obama birthers and anti-vaxxers; others declared her to be “in the grip of “neurotic fantasies”. Alarmed by the “ferocity of the internet reaction”, the Atlantic commissioned a series of responses to the piece, including a rebuttal by the eminent Shakespearean Prof James Shapiro, and altered some of Winkler’s assertions in the original in deference to his objections. “The professor said so, it must be true,” she remarks drily.
Far from being cowed by the condescension (Shapiro invited her to attend a performance of Shakespeare in New York, “as though I had never read or seen a Shakespeare play before”), Winkler – who is no upstart, holding English literature degrees from Princeton and Stanford – was spurred to greater curiosity by the vitriol. “Scepticism is usually a virtue in the scholarly world, but when it comes to Shakespeare, scepticism is a sin,” she writes. “There can be no recognition of ambiguities or uncertainties in our construction of the past. There is only adherence to the belief, which operates like a kind of religious fundamentalism… Anything else is a ‘conspiracy theory’.” She began to wonder: “Why were they so emotional?”
The resulting book, subtitled How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature, is a fascinating detective story that combines diligent scholarship with a lively journalistic approach in an attempt to examine the schism from all sides. On a picaresque journey around England, she interviews leading Stratfordians (those loyal to “William of Stratford” as the sole author) and high-profile heretics, who represent a range of possible candidates: Francis Bacon; Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford; Mary Sidney Herbert; Christopher Marlowe; Emilia Bassano Lanier; or a collaborative group of playwrights, akin to a contemporary writers’ room. Winkler is not flying the flag for any particular figure here; rather, she is attempting to hold up to the light of historical inquiry the absences and unanswered questions that dog any serious student of Shakespeare’s life and work.
She begins with the obvious mysteries: why, in a life relatively well-documented, is there no unequivocal mention of the Stratford man’s employment as a writer? How did a glover’s son from the sticks, with no more than a grammar school education, acquire such intimate knowledge of court manners and politics, European languages, legal process and Italian geography? (He must have talked to people, say the Stratfordians, who gloss over the anomalies with a catch-all appeal to his “genius”.) She traces the origins of the Shakespeare industry and analyses an exhaustive list of contemporary references that may or may not allude to Shakespeare’s true identity.
The difficulty is that many Renaissance texts, produced for an age that delighted in puns, anagrams and allusion, can be read to support whatever meaning you wish to project on them. Winkler can be guilty of this herself at times: early on, she contests the idea that Hamlet has any connection to the Stratford man’s son: “What parent would memorialise their dead child as a depressed man who contemplates suicide and the murder of his uncle, before being murdered himself?”, rather ignoring the fact that, viewed from a different angle, Hamlet is very much a play about fathers and sons.
Her conclusion may seem a cop-out to anyone looking for a definitive answer: she leans on Keats’s definition of “negative capability” – the possibility of living with uncertainty. She speculates on what could be discovered if “scholars were no longer constrained by the Stratfordian paradigm”. “We might gain a deeper understanding of the plays and poems; of Renaissance history; of the nature of genius; of the relationship between life and art. But negative capability doesn’t sit easily with history.” The one certainty is that there are a great many influential people and institutions whose livelihoods and reputations depend on not questioning the solitary genius of the glover’s son from Stratford. In tackling the subject head-on, with an open mind, Winkler has produced a thoughtful and persuasive contribution to the debate, whose irreverence is part of its appeal. Let’s see whether her opponents choose to attack the arguments or the writer.
Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature by Elizabeth Winkler is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
