Elizabeth Winkler on How Doubting Shakespeare Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

Related:

Edward de Vere.

Katherine Chiljan – The First Folio Fraud.

Cracking open Shakespeare’s First Folio at the Blue Boar Tavern.

Michael Dudley — The Bard Identity: Becoming an Oxfordian.

Wikipedia:

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies is a 2023 nonfiction book by journalist Elizabeth Winkler about the Shakespeare authorship question. The book explores the possibility that the works of Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, and details the history of how the Shakespeare authorship question became an academic taboo.

The book was published by Simon & Schuster under the full title Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature. It contains interviews with various Shakespeare scholars, including Stanley Wells, Alexander Waugh, Marjorie Garber, Stephen Greenblatt, Ros Barber, and Mark Rylance. Winkler explores arguments for alternate authorship candidates, including Edward de Vere, Mary Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Emilia Bassano.

Video Title: Elizabeth Winkler on How Doubting Shakespeare Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature. Source: Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Date Published: June 16, 2023. Description:

Elizabeth Winkler 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?