In May 2019, Elizabeth Winkler, a Wall Street Journal reporter published an article in The Atlantic pondering the presence of so many powerful and complexly delineated women in the works of Shakespeare. Could it be possible, she wondered, that a female hand could have been involved in the writing of the works – or at least in some of them?
Given the pervasive acknowledgment that many women had historically been erased from the production of creative works for which they were at least partially responsible and the knowledge that women in order to publish had to use male pseudonyms at certain times – think of the Brontës, George Eliot, Colette et al – one would have thought that Winkler’s ideas were worth consideration. Not so, it seems.
As she recounts in the opening chapter of Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, the (predominantly male) mainstream Shakespeare community saw fit to counter her article with accusations of her holding views “akin to a Holocaust denier”, of being neurotically deranged, of being a fantasist. She quotes the response of Prof James Shapiro of Columbia University, author of the popular 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: “to speculate about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is to pursue conspiracy theories,” while equating Winkler “with Obama birthers and anti-vaxxers”.
The “literary paper trail” that shows that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems attributed to him does not exist
Winkler was, she writes, both shocked and devastated by the extreme nature of these responses. Why, she wondered, was the posing of a literary and historical question being seen to be “on a par with Holocaust denial and vaccine refusal”? Four years later, the result of this quintessentially #MeToo moment is this fascinating book, in which Winkler ponders the Shakespeare authorship question in all its complexity and, more specifically, how and why she became the target of such exaggerated outrage.
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What is the Shakespeare authorship question? Well, very briefly, the “literary paper trail” that shows that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems attributed to him does not exist. He left nothing in his own hand (except for six wobbly signatures) – no books, no plays, no poems, no letters; no records showing he attended school; no records of having travelled abroad. There are lots of records of his business dealings, some of him acting and a few of him evading tax. The issue then is not that this Shakespeare of Stratford could not have written the plays but rather that there is no evidence that he did. This missing paper trail has led over many years to considerations that someone else wrote the plays; Marlowe, DeVere, Bacon or Mary Sidney, among others.
Shakespeare’s name appeared on 17 plays during his lifetime and another 18 some seven years after his death. However, his name did not appear on some plays experts attribute to him and does appear on others that they agree are not written by him. Most recently, complex computer analysis has shown that many other writers of the time had a hand in the published plays of Shakespeare, a fact now accepted by all Shakespeare scholars. Clearly, this is a complicated, unresolved and dynamic area of historical and literary study. And yet, Winkler enters the field and is dismissed as a neurotic (note the gendered slur) conspiracy theorist.
What Winkler does reveal is a field of study peopled by scholars satisfied they have established the truth and unwilling to have their views questioned
In her book, Winkler sets about trying to understand why this literary/historical question is conceptualised as a moral one by doing what all good journalists do. Namely, she informs herself of the subject and then goes out into the field and interviews many of those concerned. These interviews allow the story to truly take off, and it is where Winkler contributes something refreshingly new to this subject.
We see her interviewing post-Stratfordians (those who believe it unlikely that Shakespeare wrote the plays) such as Mark Rylance, Ros Barber and Alexander Waugh. These interviewees are full of energy, passion, good humour and a clearly profound love of the plays and poems. In their discussions with Winkler, we hear the justification for various alternative authors.
Winkler then interviews some notable Stratfordians (those who hold that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays) such as Stanley Wells, Stephen Greenblatt and Marjorie Garber. These chapters are really very strange, for these giants of orthodox Shakespeare scholarship come across as evasive, unfocused, impatient and perhaps most surprisingly, as incurious. They seem, well, distracted.
Winkler, in the end does not attempt to reach a conclusion regarding who wrote the plays of Shakespeare. That, I suppose was not her goal. Nor do we really learn why she was vilified for asking questions. It is a shame that Shapiro refused an interview as we may have learned more about this matter. What Winkler does reveal is a field of study peopled by scholars satisfied they have established the truth and unwilling to have their views questioned. But knowledge is, of course, dynamic and change will come despite this reticence.
Professor William Leahy is Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.
