A thrillingly provocative 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, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Writers and thinkers who’ve considered the evidence—from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices—have long suspected some else behind plays such as Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And while Shakespeare professors admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” to doubt the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral”—a sordid conspiracy theory. Fascinated by this taboo topic as much as by the mystery, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler set out to probe the origins of this most incendiary controversy.
Playfully irreverent and charmingly erudite, Shakespeare Was a Woman & Other Heresies goes on a riotous adventure through a comedy worthy of Shakespeare’s pen. Whisking readers from London to Stratford-upon-Avon to Washington, DC, Winkler pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class helped create the version of the Bard we know and love today—and to explore who may have been hiding behind Shakespeare’s 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 subject becomes the larger question 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.
An irresistible work of literary detection, Shakespeare Was a Woman & 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.
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“An extraordinarily brilliant and scholarly work, written with an unyielding sleuthing instinct and sparkling with pleasurably naughty moments. This page-turner is mesmerizing.”
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André Aciman, PhD, New York Times bestselling author