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Title details for Shakespeare Was a Woman & Other Heresies by Elizabeth Winkler - Available

Shakespeare Was a Woman & Other Heresies

How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

by Elizabeth Winkler
Eunice Wong
Audiobook
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An "extraordinarily brilliant" and "pleasurably naughty" (André Aciman) 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, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard's biography is a "black hole," yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) "immoral."

In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking you from London to Stratford-Upon-Avon to Washington, DC, she pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries. As she considers the writers and thinkers—from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices—who have grappled with the riddle of the plays' origins, she explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his 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 interest turns to the larger problem 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.

"Lively" (The Washington Post), "fascinating" (Amanda Foreman), and "intrepid" (Stacy Schiff), Shakespeare Was a Woman and 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    May 9, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781797158723
      • File size: 416990 KB
      • Duration: 14:28:43

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from September 1, 2023

      In 2019, when journalist Winkler published the essay "Was Shakespeare a Woman?" in The Atlantic, a majority of Shakespeare scholars (and an army of anonymous internet trolls) were outraged. She approached the Shakespeare authorship debate in "a spirit of inquiry and open-minded skepticism," wondering how William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, the relatively uneducated and untraveled son of a glover, had written plays that demonstrated intimate knowledge of European aristocratic life, the practice of law, and several languages, all with a unique sensitivity to a woman's place in Elizabethan society. Soon after the essay's publication, Winkler was called a conspiracy theorist, her questioning of the Bard's gender likened to Holocaust denialism and Obama birtherism. With an expert blend of wry humor, enthusiasm, and careful attention to detail, narrator Eunice Wong perfectly presents Winkler's enlightening and delightfully entertaining first-person account of who, other than William Shakespeare, may have contributed to the vast body of work attributed to him and why it has become so taboo to question who the poet and playwright really was. VERDICT Listeners, however knowledgeable of the Shakespeare authorship question or "his" works, should relish Wong's engaging performance of Winkler's spirited look at a hotly debated literary mystery.--Beth Farrell

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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