Watch the interview with Elizabeth Winkler who has taken a wonderful, funny, deeply-researched look at many of the people and virtually all of the ways traditional Stratfordians twist themselves into knots defending the uneducated William of Stratford as the author of The Works. Her book is Shakespeare Was a Woman – and Other Heresies, but it is in the subtitle that the fun begins: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature (Simon & Schuster). A scholar who studied at Princeton and has a Master’s degree from Stanford, she published an article four years ago in The Atlantic exploring whether a woman might have been involved with the authorship, accounting for their astonishing insight into women’s lives. The blowback from academia was immediate, furious, and personal. She was chastised not for being wrong, but for raising questions about so-called “settled truth” in the first place.
And it’s actually the nature of truth that Winkler is after. Who determines what’s true? Why does the nature of truth about Shakespeare change century to century? Why is challenging authority such a no-no? Winkler wears her knowledge lightly, and her book is a pleasure to read. She is a cultural reporter who carries the reader with her into the offices and living rooms of people who profess to have all the answers, but struggle to answer her questions; make appointments with her and then break them; or say they don’t care not at all about who wrote Shakespeare – it’s the poetry that counts (huh?). If she is ever looking for a new title, let me suggest, “All the Bard’s Enablers.” Find the book on Amazon.
