SHAKESPEARE WAS A WOMAN and Other Grifts
Elizabeth Winkler's calculated her-esy
Happy Shakespeare Day!
To celebrate, here’s a second Orb deep dive, back-to-back with yesterday’s on Hedy Lamarr.
To refuse the trial, would in the common opinion seeme a shame; to accept the offer, in the best judgements is a shame; to take the foil, were a discredit; to give the foil, is no credit. A hard case, where Patience may be supposed simple, and avengement will be reputed unwise… I must either be a passive, or an active, Asse in Print. — Gabriel Harvey
Shakespeare? I hardly know her — rejected title for this essay
In 2019, The Atlantic published an essay called “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” Its writer, Elizabeth Winkler, describes how the events of #MeToo and a thrilling experience reading Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me” speech impressed on her how truly revolutionary Shakespeare’s female characters were. Could the playwright’s affinity for women demonstrate something deeper about “his” identity? Winkler posits that Aemilia Lanyer, née Bassano, a courtier and poet, should be considered as a candidate for having ghostwritten the works of Shakespeare.
Winkler recounts her experience with the essay and the viral controversy that ensued in her 2023 book/sequel, Shakespeare Was a Woman (by then, the question mark had been removed). She describes having approached the topic from a place of open-mindedness and curiosity, asking earnest questions she considered uncontroversial. Once posted on The Atlantic, she informs us, the essay “climb[ed] quickly to the website’s number one ‘most read’ spot.” Initial responses from readers were “cheery” and encouraging, but then the criticisms started rolling in. Soon the article was being pilloried on social media; counter-essays and denunciations sprung up across other publications and The Atlantic itself. Eventually, The Atlantic issued several corrections to the essay, at least one of which Winkler views as a craven concession to the scholarly establishment (“[they] corrected my ‘falsehood’… the professor said so, so it must be true.”)1
Winkler insists she was surprised by the backlash (really?), and points out that the criticism and vituperation had been “mostly male.” Well, if criticizing Winkler is a male occupation, unsex me. Let us descend.
In the quote at the beginning, Gabriel Harvey — Renaissance scholar, poet, Spenser-bestie, and veteran of the pamphlet wars (in her book, Winkler calls him a “gossipy critic”, uh, sure?) — describes the inner struggle of whether to engage in a bad-faith debate. Should one say nothing, and allow the other party to continue unchallenged? Respond, and stoop to the other’s level? Be a passive, or an active Ass?
As someone considering grad school in early modern literature, I seriously weighed whether to write here about SWAW. Winkler is correct about one thing: engaging in authorship question stuff, even to refute it, is frowned upon in academia. Winkler believes it’s because Shakespeare scholars, like Plato’s cave-dwellers, recoil from new ways of thinking as anathema. It’s actually (based on my experience) because they find the whole thing cringe. Exerting effort on the authorship question is like writing a thesis on The Room; like, sure, do what you want, but one day all of us will die, and shouldn’t we be pursuing some other, elevating topic worthy of God’s grace?2
But ultimately I decided that Winkler is just too crafty of a writer and that thorough denunciations of the final book have been too few and far between. So here we stand. Honestly, I approached this book, and Winkler’s satellite articles, with the intention of discussing the systems of beliefs held by Shakespeare-deniers. But that quickly fell through; one cannot read this book without concluding it’s a grift.
Winkler may earnestly believe there are riddles and ciphers and a vast cover-up behind the plays, and that Stratfordians are in denial; a well-established young journalist (Princeton, Stanford, the WSJ), she wouldn’t be the first intelligent professional to delve into authorship theories for the first time, think “wow!”, and jump headlong into Dunning-Kruger trough like it was a McDonald’s ball pit.3 But no matter her conviction or enthusiasm, there is no way for a journalist to write an entire book in this fashion — 300 pages of carefully-groomed facts and half-facts, “gotcha” interviews, leading rhetorical questions, slanted portrayals, out-of-context quotes, and vast extrapolations — without knowing what she is doing. Shakespeare Was a Woman is a grift. There’s no doubt about its manipulations.
Winkler runs through the greatest hits of anti-Stratfordian rhetoric: documents are scarce, he didn’t go to university, the will didn’t have books in it, aren’t professors a stuffy bunch, plus a random list of cool famous people were skeptics (Sigmund Freud, Sandra Day O’Connor, Mark Twain…). There are many errors of the Google-able kind; for example, Winkler claims that radio scans found Shakespeare’s grave to be empty; they didn’t. And there’s the National Treasure stuff: minutiae, random details, atoms of oddity that we’re assured are really clues and ciphers that reveal the conspiracy. Consider: a statue of Shakespeare built in the 1700s gestures towards the quote “life’s but a walking shadow” (hmm!). Some of the quarto plays are printed without a name (interesting!). Venus and Adonis is printed with a name, but on the second page (suspicious!). If you look at the emblem below (do) from a book completely unrelated to Shakespeare, and if you take the Latin phrase mente videbor, add if you an “I” to the end, and then if you change around the letters, it becomes an anagram for tibi nom. DeVere. (This implicates William Shakespeare somehow!)
Passion about Shakespeare’s identity, which Winkler praises in her fellow skeptics, becomes in Stratfordians a bizarre fetish to be psychoanalyzed. “I tried to understand… why they care so much,” she tells The Guardian. (Like, girl! Aren’t you the one who wrote a book?) In Winkler’s eyes, the majority of scholars, historians, and other relevant experts who refuse to countenance authorship theories must suffer from a kind of bard delusion, like a cargo cult continuing their blind devotion instead of confronting the realities in front of them.
As though she’s drafting an undergraduate paper on steroids, Winkler deploys a breathless rhetorical question (or several) in every other paragraph. A historical document or fact says X; the established interpretation is that it means X… but what if it means something more? Two random men writing about Shakespeare generations later got the location of his grave wrong. “Did they know something other people didn’t?” The Earl of Oxford had daughters. “Did they hold the manuscripts?” No piece of evidence is so ironclad that it can’t be remixed and contested with an if.
“My name is Will,” he writes in Sonnet 136, but does he mean his real name or his pen name?4
I’d take a shot for each of these, but I’d prefer to read Shakespeare, not meet him.
SLIM BLONDE WOMEN
Discussions of authorship theories are interspersed with Winkler’s travel writing and interviews; determined to explore the controversy, she flies around the world interviewing a mix of (mostly) skeptics and (a few) defenders of the Bard. She walks the lavender-lined paths of Stratford-upon-Avon, visits the gilt and marble halls of the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC, calls at the eclectic, book-filled homes of anti-Stratfordians. Her hosts serve platters of charcuterie and vittles: Mark Rylance offers “tea and slices of fruit tart” in his garden; the wife of Oxfordian Alexander Waugh lays out “venison, courgettes,5 omelet, sausages, and salad.” (Marjorie Garber, a neutral party, offers tea, madeleines, and strawberries. When Stanley Wells, president of the Birthplace Trust in Stratford, offers Winkler tea, she waffles and ends up not having any.)
As a rule, the anti-Stratfordians are chic, cheeky, eccentric, exuberant. Mark Rylance, she points out, lives in a “multiethnic community” (okay?) and the Waughs inhabit a charming farmhouse full of “fireplaces, paintings… books crammed into every nook, books spilling off the shelves.” The Waugamans (a bit more polished) meet her at their tony social club in D.C., where they’ve proudly led a schism in the Shakespeare Group.6 The woman are all elegant and hot and, like Shakespeare’s comedic heroines, as witty as their menfolk. Claire von Kempen, musical director and Rylance’s wife, is “a vibrant blond woman in a sundress.” Rylance’s daughter Juliet, an actor, is also “slim” and blond. Ros Barber, a Marlovian researcher, has “long blonde hair and watchful eyes.”7 The tour guide at Wilton House (seat of the Pembroke family) is a “petite woman with very English teeth.” I paused when reading that one, wondering why this woman in particular had received such an insulting descriptor. As it turns out, the tour guide is one of the opps: she is unable to answer one of Elizabeth’s questions about Wilton’s Shakespeare statue.
The statue, she explained, was commissioned on 1743 by Henry Herbert, the 9th Earl of Pembroke, and erected to honor Mary Sidney, who’d been a Renaissance “literary lady.”… I went up to ask her [if there was anything more to this Mary-Shakes dedication], opening my notebook in the hope that she would have some useful details to share.
“Mary Sidney was a literary lady,” the tour guide repeated.
“Yes… I understand that,” I said. “But how do we know the statue was erected for her?”
“It’s a historical fact,” said the tour guide.
“But where did it come from?” I tried again. I had never come across it.
“It’s a historical fact,” she repeated. She was growing slightly flustered. “It’s a historical fact!”
Realizing I was getting nowhere, I let it go, and the guide moved gratefully into the house.
Local tour guides giving scripted presentations for minimum wage are not the only adversaries that Elizabeth destroys with facts and logic. The book itself could be considered a supercut of Stratfordians Getting Owned, in encounters both real and imagined. As Winkler reads the correspondence in which James Shapiro fails to win John Paul Stevens to Stratfordian orthodoxy, she imagines “Shapiro pounding his fists on the table.” She quotes Oxfordians’ tales of reducing Stratfordians to gibbering fools with “red,” slack faces. Got ‘em!
When she interviews Stanley Wells in Stratford — after approaching him without disclosing her intent to discuss the authorship question, then being declined by him once he finds out she’s been disingenuous, then continuing to email this ninety-year-old man until he finally relents — she grills him on a laundry list of minor hints and texts oft cited by Oxfordians. Why, she asks, does the 1594 pamphlet Willobie His Avisa mention “Shake-speare” with a hyphen? What about Thomas Vicars, who mentioned a poet “whose name comes from shaking and spear”? Is Vicars’ quote really about Shakespeare, or is it implying a taken identity?8 Why hadn’t this quote been in a certain book Wells had compiled on mentions of Shakespeare? Were he and the Stratfordians hiding something? Wells is rattled, and Elizabeth goes for the jugular.
“You don’t remember that?”
“No. Where is this?”
“Thomas Vicars, 1628,” I repeated, perplexed. Did he really not know it? “Do you take that to be referring to Shakespeare?”
“Well, it sounds like it, doesn’t it?”
“What would that mean to you?” I asked.
“Well, it’s just a sort of joke, isn’t it?”
I tried to explain the context to him: that Vicars lists the other great English poets by name… but refers to Shakespeare in this strange, winking way…. I had not anticipated this: a Shakespeare professor who’d written several books on the authorship question professing total ignorance about basic pieces of Shakespearean history. Did I need to preface each question with a short tutorial?
Winkler’s bile aside, anti-Stratfordians are fond of this kind of maneuver: rattling off minutiae, then declaring victory when Stratfordians don’t remember the details or aren’t confident making assertions without the text in front of them. If these “experts” don’t know lists of certain sources back-to-front, it must follow that their scholarship is incomplete — their understanding shallow — their careers a sham; it’s like a game of “Oh, you like that band? I bet you don’t know this song” from hell. The blitzkrieg-by-facts is a reliable tactic for sophists because it provokes shame and frustration in the target, especially if you’re an expert who truly cares about the subject at hand. When they “get” you — confront you with something obscure that you hadn’t read before and which they insist is a “basic piece of history” — you feel like, Damn, maybe I do need to start over and re-learn everything I think I know.
I have mixed feelings about James Shapiro,9 but in Contested Will, his book analyzing and debunking authorship theories, there’s a great passage in which he describes what it feels like when Oxfordians — or Baconians, or whoever — bring up a new fact or “proof” that paralyzes you. There’s panic, confusion, even concession and reconsideration. In Shapiro’s case, he was inspecting documents known as the Wilmot lectures, which claimed to date the Baconian theory to as early as 1785. Reading the lectures for the first time was “gripping”; when Shapiro sees the baleful sentence about Shakespeare’s fraudhood, “my heart skipped.” In such moments, you feel Oxfordians have actually drawn blood, might actually have unearthed some fatal discovery that stands up to scrutiny. But then you actually read through the “evidence,” and give a fair consideration to the context, and are forced to dismiss it as non-evidence. (Shapiro, reading the Wilmot passages again, identified several historical inaccuracies and malapropisms that quickly proved the document a forgery.)
I will admit that Elizabeth Winkler stunned me a few times in SWAW, citing interesting early modern passages that got my heart pounding a little faster. What do you mean, there’s a late-17th century actor named Edward Ravenscroft who said that Titus Andronicus was rumored to have actually been written by a “private Author to be Acted”? What do you mean, there’s a marginal note in a book called Polimanteia that places Shakespeare’s name next to a cipher about Edward de Vere? Could the anti-Stratfordians (though fewer people could deserve it less) be right?
But the chilling power of these clues relies precisely on their being read in a vacuum — as whispers and mementos, floating articles of doubt. When you explore them fully in the realm of the surrounding text, they lose their aura of importance, and their alleged implications about hidden Shakespeare authorship disintegrate completely.
For example, that remark from Edward Ravenscroft actually means something quite different: the actor, discussing his own rewrite of Titus Andronicus, contends that he’s heard via the grapevine that the “Master” hand of Shakespeare was brought on to a “Private Author’s” play to punch-up the “Principal Parts or Characters.” So Ravenscroft is not rejecting Shakespeare’s authorship — he’s claiming to have heard a rumor about collaboration and script doctoring, in which Shakespeare is still acknowledged as an expert writer (Winkler carefully cuts that part out).10
And the Polimanteia “cipher” just consists of author William Covell listing Shakespeare amongst recommended works of poetry (“all praiseworthy”); it occurs next to a passage that describes how Oxford (the university) ought to be proud of Samuel Daniel, its poet-alumnus. Is “courte-dear-verse” an anagram for de Vere (“our secret de vere”), or is it just praise for Daniel’s poetry? Why would this margin note be a secret decoder ring for the main text, when all the other margin notes in Polimanteia are straightforward? The whole thing is a nullity.
And by the time you check everything, and explore the text in earnest, and gain a solid footing on William Covell’s Polimanteia, you realize that they’ve won anyway, because your brain is thinking like theirs: locking in on tiny targets, searching for clues, approaching another human being’s labor of love not for its own merits but because it might be part of The Great Renaissance QAnon.11
A few Shakespeareans interviewed by Winkler manage to escape by refusing to play the game. Stephen Greenblatt, new-historicist critic and author of Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Will in the World, prefers to discuss broad topics like knowledge-construction and epistemology; he steers the conversation towards a recent book on extra-terrestrials, which frustrates Winkler (“I tried to bring us back from aliens to Shakespeare”). Marjorie Garber, a critic who concentrates her focus on the texts themselves, refuses to engage in any discussion of authorship at all.
“You don’t consider yourself a Stratfordian, then?” I asked.
“I’m a Shakespearean,” she insisted. “That’s what I am. I’m interested in the plays.”
We went in circles like this for four hours.
Winkler seems to think such doggedness reflects well on her, or demonstrates her own greater commitment to the truth. But what really comes across is her unwillingness to engage with the authorship question on any narrative terms other than her own. For Winkler, the “authorship question” is compelling as a debate, as a struggle of heretics and gatekeepers over facts (and thus a perfect subject on which an intrepid journalist could write a victorious exposé). When she encounters attitudes that differ from this model — such as Greenblatt’s free-wheeling philosophical digressions, or Garber’s outright indifference — Winkler is largely unable to engage with them or deviate from her own pre-planned interrogations. The result is dead-end conversations (four hours!) and squandered opportunities for discussing alternate takes on the “authorship question” as a concept or belief.
Speaking of which, Mark Rylance is one of the bright spots of this book. Unlike the other anti-Stratfordians, he seems to be approaching doubt itself as a creative experience only distantly tethered to facts or arguments thereof. He’s doing something almost spiritual and Montaignian with his questions about Shakespeare; like Greenblatt, he sees the idea of an “authorship question” as a way of playing with broader philosophical problems. He comes across as lovely, caring, open — floating about the issue with the spirit of liberty that C. L. Barber famously identified with Shakespeare’s comic worlds. But his geniality is complicated by its function within the larger anti-Stratfordian project: you can’t help feeling that his colleagues, as acerbic and aggressive as they are, need Rylance and his dreamy sweetness to rub off on them. He’s their token pacifist; he provides character evidence; when you’re being mean to anti-Stratfordians, you’re by extension being mean to Rylance. And who wants be mean to Mark Rylance?
LATER ON, WE’LL CONSPIRE
Anti-Stratfordians reject the label of “conspiracy theorists,” and go to great lengths to assure us that such terminology is dismissive, inaccurate, and meant to stigmatize them. Winkler leans into this angle in SWAW, spending multiple passages on the inflammatory nature of the accusation. For Lit Hub,12 she supplied an op-ed: “Doubting Shakespeare’s Identity Is Not A Conspiracy Theory.”
Elizabeth, when you formulate a theory in which Shakespeare’s theatre colleagues, actor collaborators, fellow shareholders, Folio compilers, and very talkative friends and rivals (plus wives and families of all of the above) were hushed up or kept ignorant about a person they all knew (and/or observed daily); and in which some courtier or noble person would be constantly drafting plays and maintaining intimate familiarity, collaboration, and manuscript exchanges with an acting company nonstop for 30 years; and for which unconnected diarists and scribblers and artists were simultaneously planting clues and anagrams for other in-the-know sophisticates to find in random places; all with a shared imposition of secrecy; your theory is by definition a conspiracy theory. You have to shove Elizabethans into it like Bill and Ted shoving their ever-growing squad into the phone booth, and by the time you string together four of five disparate tidbits of “evidence,” William Shakespeare starts to look like a vast 16th-century Goncharov that the entire literate community of England just decided they would pull on their decedents, at which point you’re writing an alternate-history picaresque with a central concept so charming I’d actually have to forgive you.13
Authorship-question scenarios are annoying to read about because their existence hangs on retconning whole personalities and social environments to sustain these webs of secrecy: Shakespeare’s contemporaries are converted into water-carriers, reputation-protectors, cipher-pollinators, hypocrites, underlings. Ben Jonson (an otherwise forthright and moralistic commentator, who refers to Shakespeare as a good if somewhat annoying friend) can’t be taken literally when he commends Shakespeare in the First Folio; he must actually be engaging in doublespeak with his fellow conspirators, or blinking in Morse code to future generations with some aristocrat’s gun to his head. Francis Meres, who praises Shakespeare amongst other writers, gets turned into the fucking Riddler. The folks in Stratford who designed the monument that calls Shakespeare a writer (“like Virgil in his art”) must have been speaking in cyphers so veiled that no one today can fully crack them, or otherwise were gulled by the real conspirators into believing that their garlicky neighbor was a poet. Who knew there were so many early modern Satans sowing fossils to deceive us?
UN-SEXUAL HEALING
Despite her infamous article in the Atlantic, and despite the more-assertive title of her final book, Winkler seems to have retreated from her earlier convictions about the possibility of Shakespeare’s womanhood.14 There’s a brief chapter on female candidates, including Bassano, Penelope Rich, Oxford’s daughters, and Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke. Did you know Mary Sidney had (or was at least depicted with) a lace ruff that had swans on it? Years later, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the “sweet swan of Avon,” just hoping that someone someday would put the two together.
For a researcher who professes such an interest in women’s literature, Winkler features next to nothing of her candidates’ own literary output. Sidney’s and Lanyer’s poet-ness serves only as a clue to their potential Shakespeare authorship, not as something to explore any further.
The obvious reason for this omission is that the works of Aemilia Lanyer (e.g. the religious poem Salve Deus Rex Iudearum) and Mary Sidney (her translation of Garnier’s French tragedy Antonie) evince styles and sensibilities incongruent with Shakespeare’s works. They come from a different poetic atmosphere; they’re weighty, formal, classical, courtly, more fixed in meter; they really do not read like Shakespeare’s fast-moving, more fluid verse. Explanations for this have to be made — Winkler suggests that Salve Deus and Antonie may have been fronts written to maintain the illusion of separate authors, and that the male speaker of “Shakespeare’s” sonnets was either an experiment or else a similar elaborate disguise. We are also forced to consider that these women’s pious daily lives may have been a facade, while their true hearts lay in writing smut like Venus and Adonis. (The thing about women getting to be Shakespeare is that they no longer get to be themselves.)
Winkler seems to realize that these extrapolations can only be sustained for so long, and quickly abandons her case for these two candidates. I also suspect that Sidney and Lanyer are hurried offstage simply because reading their books would be a lot of work, and citing basic trivia about their lives is much easier than attaining any deeper knowledge of their minds as writers. Preferring more dramatic storytelling, Winkler instead imagines romantic period-drama scenes for them, like
Mary Sidney roaming the grounds, her red hair flashing against the expanse of green, while [her brother Philip Sidney was] composing his Arcadia and his lovelorn sonnets to the black-eyed Penelope Rich.
And she loves the fact that Penelope Rich’s bedchamber
was adorned in black: black velvet trimmed in gold lace and silver demask. (What a strange thing history is that we can know with certainty the color of Penelope Rich’s bedding but entertain grave doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare.)
Like, if this is want you want from early modern women’s history, just go watch Reign.
Additionally, Winkler — like the LDS posthumously baptizing a saint — makes the case that Virginia Woolf may have been a covert anti-Stratfordian, and that A Room of One’s Own contains hints and vibes thereof.15 Even the cover-up has cover-ups: Woolf, in an essay about writing openly, was not writing openly. Instead, she must be re-imagined as a scared equivocator, burying her true beliefs due to the threat of male retaliation. This is because the female experience that ultimately interests Winkler most — more so than writing or composing — is that of victimhood and vulnerability, particularly for the rhetorical possibilities and high stakes that they lend to her own project.
By and large, Winkler uses the notion of female victimhood to frame her own experience as an anti-Stratfordian. Evoking the domestic subjugation of Taming of the Shrew (or maybe Foucault’s Discipline and Punish), Winkler conjures images of herself being brutalized for her dissident beliefs. Like an idealized Katherina, she is flogged by Stratfordian Petruchios: “[When you bring up the authorship question…] A whip may be produced. You will be punished, which is to say, educated.” She frames the Twitter backlash for her Atlantic article as a form of “mostly male” abuse, an extended “torture”-by-ping. She picks out loaded words from criticism she receives, attempting to prove it’s some kind of yellow-wallpaper psyop, with men all but calling her hysterical: “I was deranged! I was neurotic!” The motif of Stratfordians “gaslighting” gets mentioned often. In an interview, Winkler remarks that she’s committed blasphemy against a “father-god.”16
While it’s disquieting that Winkler’s book has been so feted and promoted, it’s worth noting that the same trendiness and talking points that make SWAW so successful also ensure its obsolescence. In fact, this book already feels dated: many of her tactics — the hidden-women’s-history themes, the #MeToo namechecks, the superficial callouts of Western canon and academia — seem incredibly cheugy in 2024.17 Publishers have been been pumping out trendy bad-feminist revisionist histories for 10 years now, to diminishing returns; Winkler is preaching to a choir that is moving on. Even the Globe, whose 2018 production Emilia features in SWAW, has since chased the Overton window to more vogueish takes on early modern gender, and platformed theories that Elizabeth I was actually non-binary.
Today, we can acknowledge how historical authorship theories have reflected the needs and preoccupations of their times. We can enjoy reading about the 19th century Baconians, truffling through the sonnets for hidden ciphers, or the 20th-century Oxfordian obsession with psychoanalyzing Hamlet for similarities to de Vere and vice versa. Eventually we’re going to look back on Shakespeare Was a Woman with the same mix of cringe and fondness: not as a paradigm shift but as the paradigm; a time capsule of biased historiography and feminism used for clout; a case study in all the ways legacy media girlies were dumb and self-serving in the late ‘10s and early ‘20s; proof that any bad idea could (and still can) fail upwards to an Atlantic essay and a Big Five book deal if the author has enough bylines, prestige degrees, and connections.18
I am ashamed that women are so simple.
DIRTBAG STRATFORDIANISM
Anti-Stratfordians identify with a distinct type of rebellion: intellectual, provocative; at the same time gracious, witty, self-deprecating. They crave — would not exist without — debate, or the idea of debate as a salon affair in which they are the most open-minded players, scoring hits against the old guard. Like Field Commander Cohen (or Marlowe), they assume the role of important spies, parachuting acid into strait-laced cocktail parties (to which they naturally bring great snacks). The antique books collected by the richest of them serve as outward manifestations of an inward intellectual refinement. They are, like swans of Avon, free-floating, nimble, blithe.
And they hate dirt. Winkler hates dirt, and often mentions it to call attention to the Stratford Man’s essential lowliness, moral/physical/social. She repeats all the old canards about how the Stratford Shakespeare family was slovenly and thuggish, and while she’s too liberal to say outright that this precludes their scion from creating art, she doesn’t have to. The dog whistles are there. Guttural variations on the name are trotted out: Shaksper, Shagspere, Shaxpere, Shakspur. The glover’s son blends with his father — an acquisitive Johannes fac totum, grubby, money-grubbing.19 John Shakespeare, Winkler points out, was once fined for leaving out a pile of dung (“This story stinks of shit,” she imagines the anti-Stratfordians quipping), we can see the son is just as gross and petty: accumulating land, shaking down those who couldn’t pay him back. In 1596, Shakespeare had a writ (restraining order) taken out against him: allegedly, he put a man named William Wayte in “fear of death.”20 Physically, he seems to have been repulsive, as we know from those old quotes Winkler supplies about his paintings and sculptures: a “self-satisfied pork butcher” with “a lubricious mouth” and “course expression,” a “hydrocephalic” skull. A specter from Chandos portrait: dark, sloe-eyed, canine, skin smudged with accumulated grit.
Winkler finds it perturbing how Bardolaters seem willing to embrace this dirt, even worship it. She recounts (like a disgusted anthropologist) that a town in Texas built a fake Globe in 1936, with a gift of soil from Shakes’ garden in Stratford — “sacred dirt,” she eyerolls. Thomas Jefferson visited Stratford, kissed the earth. To make a pilgrimage to Stratford is to “squelch [one’s] feet” in its mire. At its ugliest, historical bardolatry is brutal like its central figure, echoing fascist images of “blood and soil” (really, she goes there); boot-stomping, mouth-breathing, sordid. Winkler decries the Disneyfication of Stratford; she seems to think the place was more honest in the 18th century, when it was full of huts, tenements, beggars, animals, shit. That seems to be, deep down, what Stratfordians are worshipping.
Maybe we should. Anti-Stratfordians wax poetic about how “terrified” their opponents are to be confronted with the idea that a country lowlife could not have written the works. But to be honest, I’ve always found the traditional Stratfordian narrative far more disturbing. Its underlying implications — that genius happens independent of human merits; that the rest of us, despite our effort and classical training and deservingness, will be effaced by it; and that a fen of shit harbored, briefly and eerily, a kind of presence besides which none of us will ever matter — far more terrifying. Maybe we should embrace the dirt. Maybe the sordidness will bring us closer to the real thing.
My call to action is this. As lovely as it is (the spring), April 23rd should no longer be used to celebrate the poet William Shakespeare. Instead, Shakespeare Day is to be moved to November 29th — the day Shakespeare was issued a restraining order. As dirtbag Stratfordians, we ought to use that day to challenge people for promulgating their officious skepticism and their cleaner, better-heeled candidates. We should use mean words like “conspiracy theorists,” “hacks,” “manipulators,” and “dilettantes weirdly obsessed with charcuterie.” Because in the end, being a bastard is one of the few things we could ever share with William Shakespeare.
“said so, so”? Did this thing have an editor?
Plus, there’s no way to critique it without working oneself up into an irritated froth, and anti-Stratfordians love to point to that precise agitation as evidence that they’ve truly stunned the enemy. Alexander Waugh, in Winkler’s book, asserts that Stratfordians get mad because “they’re terrified” and “nobody loses their temper that much unless they sense that they’re on weak ground.” I don’t know, Alexander. Have you ever been poked 10 times on Facebook?
There’s a reason why anti-Stratfordians tend to be smart, credentialed, and educated — lawyers, doctors, psychologists, programmers, professors of varying subjects — but seldom early modernists. These are people who for the most part enter early modern history through the authorship question and not vice versa, and naturally find its intellectual complexity attractive.
Anti-Stratfordianism is sometimes called elitist because of the well-heeled types it attracts and because of its central quest of unstating a working-class writer figure. But I don’t think snobbery is the actual reason anti-Stratfordians tend to be rich and white-collar (after all, they’re the first to state that they’re not classist). I think it’s simply because beliefs tend to spread within people of the same echelons and systems of taste. Anti-Stratfordianism is a luxury belief because the college-educated cultural class is precisely environment in which a naughty, avant-garde, intellectual, bibliophilic theory would flatter common sensibilities. You might be a corporate lawyer, but if you start smirking about Shakespeare at parties and compiling obscure Elizabethan “clues” on Oxford forums, then you’re suddenly an enfant terrible, interesting to your friends.
Someone in the comments below points out that Shakespeare authorship is a great non-controversial controversy: piquant enough to lend an air of scandalousness, but not actually taboo enough to get you kicked out of a job, canceled on social media, sued, or persecuted.
Winkler also discusses William, Earl of Derby, as a potential candidate. Evidence in his favor is the fact that, like the writer of the Sonnet 135, his first name is William.
“courgettes” is rich for “zucchini”
If this is how the rich destroy themselves, I’m for it
Copyeditor, are the women blond or blonde?
Anti-Stratfordians are also translating Vicars’ Latin wrong, as someone pointed out on Facebook. Vicars describes celebrem illum poetam qui a quassatione et hasta nomen habet, which means “that celebrated poet who from ‘shaking’ and ‘spear’ has [his] name.”
Habet means “has,” but Oxfordians translate habet as “take” — implying that a “celebrated poet” has “taken” Shakespeare’s name. But that’s an extremely creative stretching of “habet.” Accipit or assumit or usurpat would be closer to “taking” or “taking on” a name.
Anyway, add Thomas Vicars to the phone booth.
I think that engaging with the authorship question, which began as a noble act of scholarly self-sacrifice and has since defined his career, has made him too combative and a hasty writer, especially in his op-eds.
Ravenscroft, like many Enlightenment writers, was convinced that he himself could clean up Shakespeare’s messiness, and was probably trying to shore up his own rectitude in revising and improving of Titus Andronicus.
Funnily enough, the anti-Stratfordians of rival camps are completely able to apply logical analysis and skepticism to debunk each other’s claims. When Winkler confronts Marlovian Ros Barber with the “court-dear-verse” clue, Barber immediately starts picking it apart, and explaining why it’s likely not an allusion to Oxford. Later, Barber explains why she thinks Christopher Marlowe must have faked his death, been spirited away by spymasters, and moved to Italy to assume the identity of Shakespeare.
Throughout SWAW, I was frequently reminded of the book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, in which doctors in a mental hospital select three men — each of whom believes he is Jesus Christ — and have them talk together over several years. The men, schizophrenics, have no trouble pointing out the errors in each others’ beliefs, but they can’t apply this thinking to themselves. Obviously anti-Stratfordians aren’t ill. But the author Milton Rokeach’s central thesis is that the mental behavior of the Three Christs reveals a lot about the mental behavior of the rest of us.
In case you still take Lit Hub seriously
For example, Winkler brings up the Cambridge university play Return from Parnassus, in which Shakespeare is referred to as a writer and placed within the whole university writer vs. actor-cum-playwright rivalry. WHAT IF, she begs us to consider, the jokes about Shakespeare’s lack of university education actually hint at some larger knowledge that he was a fraud? Then the telephone booth has to expand to fit the student playwrights, student actors, and student audience, plus any of their townie girlfriends.
Anti-Stratfordians: you’ll never meet people more convicted about possibilities.
Also, I’d hazard to say that since most of Winkler’s sources seem to have originated from Oxfordian webpages, and since she spends the most of the book’s airtime on Oxfordians and de Vere, she’s shifted her suspicions towards Oxford.
In Room, Woolf writes about the life of “Shakespeare’s sister,” in which a hypothetical sister of Shakespeare equal to him in genius is brutally subjugated and her possibilities of writing crushed. Woolf’s thesis is that Shakespeare’s time was sexist such that a female equivalent would have been structurally and cognitively impossible, which Winkler believes is such a naive thing for the genius who wrote Orlando to say. Woolf seems to be insisting that (and Winkler mock-ventriloquizes for her) “no, no, no, a woman absolutely could not have written Shakespeare,” like a blithering scholar in denial. Why didn’t Shakespeare’s sister try, like, a pseudonym?
Since she can’t abide Virginia Woolf being a dull Stratfordian, Winkler concludes — or inserts “wonder” — that perhaps the outspoken critic and feminist titan Virginia Woolf “felt it was too dangerous to say aloud what she suspected about Shakespeare [being a woman].” Was Woolf “whispering, between the lines of her too-obvious errors, some other truth?” Once enlisted to the anti-Stratfordian cause, Woolf can be re-assimilated as a writer in Winkler’s good graces. Jesus Christ!
If she’s facing off against the Freudian father-god, I’m not going to psychoanalyze what it means when she writes about herself showing up at Stanley Wells’ doorstep like a “naked, undisguised wolf.”
To be honest, they were cheugy in 2019, when she first wrote the article.
For an example of how connected Winkler (or her publicity team) is:
The one where Shakespeare looks like a pirate and has an earring. It’s theorized to have been painted by one of Shakespeare’s theatrical companions, perhaps Burbage (another earthy mechanical).
Again, this is the kind of “damning” snippet in which Antis take a piece of evidence for Shakespeare and turn it into evidence against with careful cropping. The restraining order concerns an incident in which Wayte claims he was threatened by Shakespeare, Francis Langley, and two women, Anne Lee/Lea and Dorothy Soer.
Langley was the owner of the Swan Theatre, where the Lord Chamberlain’s men had performed. Wayte had a powerful, corrupt father in Southwark, Richard Gardiner, with whom Langley was feuding. Soer and Lee were (likely) a landlady and brewer’s wife from Southwark, respectively. It would seem this piece of evidence further enmeshes Shakespeare in the world of the theatre and the company of kickass women, which isn’t exactly the “own” that anti-Stratfordians seem to think it is.
Like, do we need to add all these people to the phone booth?
Rhapsodic, and extremely well done. There ought to be a rasa (the Sanskrit sort, not the Latin) for the perfect simultaneous deployment of snark in the critical deconstruction of a bad argument, and this ought to be the sort of example that some student is asked to emulate to master the form. Best of luck with grad school, should it happen!
Great review! I would praise you publicly, but certain clues give away the fact that this piece was actually written by the Earl of Oxford’s wife. Nice try.