The Guardian had an interview with an American author who has written a book entitled Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies. Although she claims not to be interested in the issue of authorship it appears fair to say reading the interview that it runs through her work like lettering through a stick of rock.
The subject in question is perhaps the final blasphemy of British culture: the theory that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon might not have written Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and other plays and poems that bear his name.
That framing is interesting, isn't it?
The doubters point to Shakespeare's lack of higher education and aristocratic background and the scarcity of personal documents and literary evidence directly linking him to the works. Some suggest candidates such as Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as potential authors of Shakespeare's plays.
I can't help but notice that some of these folk were, in class terms a little more exalted. Just saying.
Some grand claims are made about what the implications are.
It would of course have been the hoax of the millennium: no need to fake a moon landing. The theory remains decidedly fringe, outside the mainstream academic consensus and, as Winkler puts it, "not permitted". In her book, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, she writes that "it has become the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature.
Or as the book states:
"In literary circles, even the phrase 'Shakespeare authorship question' elicits contempt – eye-rolling, name-calling, mudslinging. If you raise it casually in a social setting, someone might chastise you as though you've uttered a deeply offensive profanity. Someone else might get up and leave the room. Tears may be shed. A whip may be produced. You will be punished, which is to say, educated. Because it is obscene to suggest that the god of English literature might be a false god. It is heresy."
Heresy? Obscene? The final blasphemy? Or for some of us the final yawn of ho-hum.
I'm fairly immune to this sort of stuff. Because at this remove there's no way to 'prove' it one way or another. It will always be open to question, as are so many other questions. In part because having conducted historical research on figures who were alive in Ireland in the 1920s and earlier and who are now long passed I know how difficult it can be to find information and piece it together into a useful patchwork. And if that's true of someone I can be entirely sure existed and whose relatives I've interviewed what of the difficulties of attempting to do similar with someone from the 17th century?
Shakespeare nobility, a woman, another man, whoever.
I'm not sure it matters. I'm not sure how Shakespeare was a 'false god' whether Shakespeare or someone else wrote the plays. The plays exist - they are not beyond criticism, but they are fascinating despite/perhaps because of their time. Perhaps authorship is the least of it when it comes to this. The play's the thing I suppose.
As it happens I hope to visit Stratford on Avon briefly later in the Summer, the first time I'll have been there that I'm aware of. Should be interesting. Get some tea and scones there. Look at the river. Take a quick look at houses Shakespeare lived in. So they say. Shakespeare not Shakespeare, but perhaps written by someone with the same name!
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