Significant Others - Bonus Episode: Elizabeth Winkler on if Shakespeare was a Woman

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

In this month’s bonus episode, Liza is joined by Elizabeth Winkler, author of the new book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies to discuss this question of Shakespeare’s authorship. Elizabeth and Liza dive into the compelling evidence that Shakespeare could have in fact been a woman and explore why even the thought of questioning his authorship is so taboo.Elizabeth's original article for The Atlantic can be found here.We’re working hard on Season 2! Until then we will be releasing special bonus episodes from time to time. Want to support the show? Rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts, and keep sending suggestions of Significant Others you’d like to hear about our way at [e-mail]!

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien. We're still working on Season 2. I promise it's coming. But in the meantime, we've got another conversation for you. And this one centers around a very dangerous question. Was Shakespeare not really Shakespeare? Author and journalist Elizabeth Winkler dares to explore that question and its taboo in her new book, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies. And we are so lucky to have her with us here today. Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining me to talk about this. You originally wrote about this subject in an article for The Atlantic. Is that right? Yes. In 2019, I wrote an article for The Atlantic about a newly proposed authorship candidate.

And can you, for anyone who has not had the pleasure of reading either your article or your book, can you give us a little bit of an overview? Sure. Well, I guess I should start by explaining a little bit about the Shakespeare authorship question because some people have heard about it and know all the details and then some people have never heard about it before you never quite know um what the case is but i so i began with i wanted to understand why so many great writers and thinkers over the years have doubted the authorship why they've suspected that the name was a pseudonym for a concealed author and i'd heard vaguely as a student there was a a question around Shakespeare's authorship. I studied Shakespeare as an English major, then again in graduate school. But when you're studying a writer, you study their works, you analyze the plays and poems, and there wasn't really any discussion of the biography or the authorship question. And then later on, I wanted to figure out why so many great minds wondered about this.

Henry James wrote, I'm sort of haunted by the conviction that the divine William was the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world. And Walt Whitman referred to what he called the mythos of Shakespeare and his belief that there was another mind behind the plays. And Mark Twain has a very funny essay in which he writes that no one actually knows and can prove that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote a play in his life. And he sort of makes fun of the Shakespeare biographers who he says built up the story of Shakespeare out of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures, an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky high. Vladimir Nabokov wrote a poem about the mystery. You easily, regretlessly relinquish the laurels, he wrote, concealing your monstrous genius behind

a mask. So it's a question that has engaged philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, historians, Supreme Court justices, because it's a matter of evidence. And I just think, I thought it's sort of a fascinating mystery. And the doubt arises essentially from a discrepancy between the man and the works, an evidentiary gulf. And you make such a compelling case in your article about why there's plenty of reason to doubt that Shakespeare would have been capable even of writing everything that we have attributed to him. So you mentioned that there have been multiple candidates put forward over the years. And I think you note that that started happening in the 19th century. Is that right? The first explicit theories for alternate

candidates began in the mid 19th century. That's right. There is some debate. Some people claim that there were earlier doubts about the authorship. But yes, the first alternate candidate put forward was Francis Bacon, who was an Elizabethan philosopher and statesman. And then subsequent male and female candidates have been proposed over the years. have been proposed over the years. And so, well, I've obviously been exposed to this question, having been an English major and also gone to graduate school in writing. So I was aware of the game, I guess you could call it, of doubting Shakespeare's authenticity. And I had heard a small number of names that had been sort of floated, I guess. But I had never heard of a female possibility until I saw the play, which you mentioned in your article, Amelia, I believe it's called. Oh, yeah. Yes. And that was my first exposure to this theory about what they refer to as the Dark Lady, which has a whole other backstory and Shakespearean scholarship. Right.

But is that, is this the first female possibility that has been presented? No, actually. The first woman put forward was Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke in 1931. A professor of economics named Gilbert Slater proposed her as a contributor to the plays in a sort of group authorship theory. He saw the plays as collaboratively written, and he suggested her to account for what he called the plays feminine intuition. So she's been there for a while. Amelia Bassano was proposed more recently in the 21st century. But there's a long history of feeling that there's something sort of weirdly feminine or female or feminist about Shakespeare. A lot of writers have written about it. The Victorian critic John Ruskin said Shakespeare has only heroines, not heroes. And Orson Welles wrote that there was something tremendously feminine about Shakespeare. Virginia Woolf talks about Shakespeare's sort of man-womanly androgynous quality. Then in the later 20th century, when there's a sort of a heyday of feminist literary criticism, you get a lot of feminist

Shakespeare scholars writing about the feminist quality to the works and the struggle for women in the plays to be treated the way men are treated. So it's really, it's a fascinating question. Was there a woman's hand somewhere in the mix? And initially, Emilia Bassano was thought to possibly have been romantically involved with him. Is that right? Well, they don't have any documented relationship. She was put forward as a candidate for the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. She had a relationship with the nobleman who was the patron of the playing company. So she's sort of tied in there with the theater world a bit. And her surname, Bassano or Bassanio, crops up in the plays. She's known to have had

literary interests and published her own volume of poetry later in life. And she wrote very feminist poetry, which is another interesting quality to her history. You write about trying to hear her poetic voice in the plays. Did you ever feel that you did? Well, I think stylistically, her poetry is quite different from what you read in the Shakespeare plays. I mean, they're all so different. You're talking about different forms. But there is, in some of Shakespeare's heroines, Amelia, for instance, and Othello, they make sort of these cries for equality and for recognition that sound rather like some of the passages in Amelia Bassano's poetry. So, you know, you can explain that all sorts of ways. Perhaps the author knew her

and was basing a character on her. Perhaps she influenced him in some way, or perhaps there was a woman involved in shaping the female characters or in helping edit the plays, think about the plays in different stages of their production. So do you have a sort of an armchair verdict, very informed armchair verdict? You know, in my book, I've really explored the theories for the different candidates, and I've tried to understand the controversy. My impetus for writing the book was to understand why this is so taboo to talk about. It's a really emotional subject for people. When you bring up the authorship question, you often get really furious reaction. People don't want to talk about it. And among Shakespeare scholars in English departments,

it's essentially forbidden. You don't question Shakespeare. And I wanted to understand why a question about the authorship of 400-year-old plays gets so riled up. And how is it possible, on the one hand, that Henry James, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Vladimir Nabokov, Supreme Court justices, all these people have had doubts about the authorship. And yet, if you try to discuss it with Shakespeare scholars, you can't go there. I feel like I remember there being sort of like a soft taboo on raising the question when I was in school purely because it was so unsolvable and it would get everybody so off track. So that's partially the issue too.

It's a really, really thorny problem. There aren't easy answers. You have to really dig into the history and literature of Renaissance England. It's difficult territory. But the other thing I think is that Shakespeare really functions in the West and in Britain in particular, But the other thing I think is that Shakespeare really functions in the West and in Britain in particular as a kind of secular god. In the 18th century, pilgrims started flocking to Stratford-upon-Avon to pay homage to the poet, and they would drop to their knees at the birthplace, which is purported site of his nativity, to worship him. They sang odes to Shakespeare about divine Avonian Shakespeare. They cut relics from the local mulberry tree, like pieces of the true cross. And then when you get to the mid-19th century, English departments start to develop, and ideas about Shakespeare were really enshrined and

institutionalized during this period of extreme veneration. And they've really, they've been passed down from one generation of scholars to the next. So it's almost a religious taboo to question Shakespeare. It's treated as heresy. And that's because no one takes kindly to the denial of their God. That is such a huge question that I would like to get to with you. But first, I just want to ask, if you feel that things are shifting, you know, people are beginning to, in this moment of sort of radical re-examination of all of our cultural gods, people are more brazenly trying to, you know, if not topple Shakespeare completely, sort of interrogate a little bit more, like, does he really speak for humanity the way that he has often, you know,

sort of been given credit for? Does he have huge gaps, or whoever wrote the plays and the sonnets, do they have gaps in their understanding? And so the question being, do you feel that there is a little bit of a shift in terms of the, I mean, I guess the allowance for probing some of these things more officially? It's a really good question. It's a strange thing. I mean, officially, scholars are moving more towards the idea of collaboration, that the plays were written collaboratively and that Shakespeare had co-authors, which is a pretty radical move to be making, to be saying that, okay, he didn't do these alone. which is the full collection of Shakespeare plays published in 1623, exactly 400 years ago, even though they only have Shakespeare's name on the title page, there are actually other hands hidden in these works. So they're now saying that, which is something for a long time they didn't want to say, they didn't want to go there, because it really opened the floodgates too much,

right? Because if you're saying there are hidden hands in these plays, how do you know Shakespeare is also not a hidden hand, right? So there is a movement towards co-authorship and collaboration and even using technology now to try to identify different hands in the plays. But they don't want to get rid of Shakespeare himself. So they actually still react quite strongly to that. But there are renegades among Shakespeare scholars. When I was researching my book, I would talk to some scholars who privately admitted doubts about Shakespeare.

There was one professor who wrote to me saying, yes, of course, Shakespeare could have been a pseudonym or a scam or a committee of various people. But he didn't really want to go there. And he said, you know, I think we have enough cut out for ourselves in figuring out what's happening in the plays themselves, you know, rather than worrying about who wrote them. Although I wondered if figuring out who wrote them might be somewhat helpful in understanding the plays a little better. but she was trying to write an essay about a novel and asking me what I thought. And I was giving her my feedback and she said, oh yeah, my teacher says that that's how people talked about books in your era, but we don't do that anymore. And I couldn't even keep track of like which era was the one that looked to who the author was and which was the era that said, no, we divorced those two completely. But it does feel like a sort of pendulum that just kind of waves back and forth. Yeah. I mean, there's been a big push in the latter half of the 20th century with postmodernism to sort of divorce the text from the author and the death of the author. The author is not important. It's the text that's

important. It's the interpretation and the reader's response to the text that's important or performance of the text, which is all fine. And that stuff is all interesting, but don't we also historically want to understand where these great works came from? And that's really the impetus behind the authorship question is this desire to understand the origins of great literature, to understand genius, to really want to know the author. And Shakespeare is such a mystery. That's why people want to know more. Do you feel there's been more resistance to the examination of, you know, peeling back the veil of Shakespeare, you know, on the face of it, or a greater resistance to that, even when you start to propose that it could have been someone of a

different gender? Officially, you're not supposed to question Shakespeare at all. And even male candidates, alternate male candidates are looked on as being heretical. But of course, it's even more radical and insane to say that perhaps there was a woman somewhere in here because if Shakespeare is God, and he is in a lot of ways, especially in Britain or in the Anglo-American sphere, then to say God was a woman, that's just a step too far. a step too far. And you note, at least in your original article, that there are shreds of evidence that do point people in directions of whether it was the first woman you mentioned or Amelia Bassano. And they're just sort of overlooked. They're not even noted by historians, right? Well, Shakespeare scholars are technically English literature professors, which is an interesting sort of departmental problem. This is really a historical question, but it's not treated in history departments. It's left

to the English departments. And technically, they're literary critics. They analyze. They're not historians in the same sense, although they might contest that and they probably wouldn't like me for saying that. Yeah, in academia, there's no official room for pursuing research on this question. And that alone is really strange to me because academia should be all about intellectual inquiry and research and to have a taboo on something and say you just can't research this topic is a very bizarre phenomenon. But there are exceptions to that.

So in 2018, the University of London started offering an online course called Introduction to Who Wrote Shakespeare. And you get these little pockets. I spoke to a professor of theater at York University in Canada, and he started offering a course on the authorship question. And his colleagues in English scoffed and said, oh, no one's going to sign up for that. And then there was a waiting list every year. There's another professor in Baltimore who has published on the subject. And so there are glimpses and exceptions to the

rule and suggestions that things may gradually shift. But, you know, it's like paradigm shifts in any field. There's a great quote from Max Planck that science advances one funeral at a time. You know, that's how paradigm shifts happen. They're very slow. And you see this in, That's how paradoxes happen. They're very slow. And you see this in geology. Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift was ridiculed for decades before geologists accepted it. Or if you look at more recent American history, historians rejected the notion that Thomas Jefferson might have fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemings, until DNA evidence proved that he did. So it's a larger problem of groupthink and confirmation bias that you often see in academia. And there's a dynamic that encourages conformity insofar as scholars look to their department chairs, they look to journal editors, they look to peer reviewers for approval. And you aren't going to win the approval or get the grants or get the positions, get tenure, if you're asking questions that aren't supposed to be asked. Okay, so now onto this really massive subject that you've already alluded to once in terms of the deification of an individual, the obsession with genius, the sort of predisposition amongst,

I would say, generally amongst the human race to want to attribute incredible things to a single person. What do you think that's about? I mean, we see it everywhere. We see it in our pop culture. We see it in our politics. We see it in our systems of socializing ourselves, and certainly in art. And I'm so fascinated by this sort of tendency, impulse, need, whatever it is. And I'm curious what you think about it. I mean, it's a great question. Why do we need gods? But the fact is that we do. There's that old saying that man created God, not the other way around. And I think in a secular world, we don't have, of course, we don't have organized religion.

It doesn't have the same force in our society that it once had. And so we do create other gods that we can cling to and that we can look to because we have a sort of need for the sacred. And Shakespeare is one of those figures who satisfies our need for the sacred, for something that surpasses our ability to understand. He has that mystical, mysterious, superhuman quality. And one Shakespeare scholar trying to explain how Shakespeare managed to write the works and how he acquired all the knowledge in the works. He said Shakespeare was superhuman, which is hilarious as an explanation because, of course, that's no explanation at all. But actually, we love not knowing, and that's part of what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare.

We love the mystery. Shakespeare. We love the mystery. And so to some extent, trying to answer the question and trying to get to the root of the authorship question, it demystifies Shakespeare. It solves the mystery. And maybe we don't want to solve the mystery. We like keeping Shakespeare as the God figure that he is. So I think that is a big part of it. I'm imagining that that class you mentioned in Canada with its waiting list, that even if they could provide conclusive evidence, I bet you that class would still be really popular in terms of like, let's look at it again. Let's see if it really holds up. Let's think about other possibilities because just as much as we want to want some of us to be extraordinary, we also want to then unmask them as ordinary. It's like a complementary need. Yes, that's absolutely true. And that's also part of the danger in looking into the authorship. What if you find out that the person who wrote the works

was someone who did bad things or has some ugly aspects to their biography, then it brings Shakespeare sort of down to earth. And that can be very unnerving too. We don't want to see our gods as being like us, flawed. I think that is an issue when you start to dig into a few of the authorship theories. Well, yes, because humans are inevitably flawed. And I'm quite certain, even if the William Shakespeare that we all think of was in fact the sole author of all of that work, I guarantee you he was not perfect. He probably did some stuff we don't want to know about. No, exactly. But it's really funny when you read the Shakespeare biographies, they're sort of fairytale-like. They tell a rags to riches story of this boy who comes from nothing, his father's illiterate, provincial background, and somehow becomes

the greatest writer in the English language. And there's no clear evidence of how he did that or how he acquired his knowledge or how he even became a writer. But it's a great story. And we love it. It's an archetypal rags to riches tale, a kind of Cinderella story. And we love stories like that. So we have an emotional attachment to that story that makes it very difficult to examine critically. It's funny. I'm thinking that it's sort of like a cinderella myth and i'm thinking oh that's what they gave us that's what women have been given is the cinderella myth you know whereas the the men are usually cast in the shakespearean hero role but i'm thinking also about the book hamnet i'm not sure if you've read that or not but no actually i've reviewed it a few years ago when it came out beautiful novel yes and now it is being turned into a stage show as well, adapted to a play. So I wonder if as the

constraints loosen a little bit and as, you know, looking more closely at who we hold up gets to be a little bit more of a thing that we are all not just able to do, but encouraged to do, all not just able to do, but encouraged to do. If we'll see more kind of, it's almost like fan fiction in a way, you know, like more artistic explorations, I guess, of the various possibilities that could exist, which could be cool. Yeah, I think there will be more exploration. I mean, there was the play Amelia. There was another play in DC recently called Jane Anger, which was based around a woman in 1589 who published under the name Jane Anger, which is probably a pseudonym. And she wrote a very feminist-tracked pamphlet right on the eve of the first Shakespeare plays when they first came out. And so the play played with the idea of whether Jane Anger had a role in Shakespeare somehow. And Hamnet is a kind of another form of

Shakespeare fan fiction, yes. But what I found so fascinating about that novel actually is that it's another kind of feminist take on Shakespeare because it's all about Shakespeare's wife and imagining her life. And she's imagined along the lines of Shakespeare's heroines as a Rosalind or Viola or even sort of like the witches at points. She's magical. She has this touch with language and spells and herbs, and she's kind of rebellious and, you know, trespassing sort of the norms of her society. And so she's clearly modeled on Shakespeare's heroines, but you also get a sense that this woman is a writerly type, you know, like she seems far more interesting than her very boring husband in the novel, who's kind of... Pedestrian. more interesting than her very boring husband in the novel who's kind of pedestrian kind of very very dull and and he's very dull because actually it's so hard to imagine his character um and because there's there's not much for us to imagine so the the weird thing i felt about that novel was actually the the wife seemed like a more interesting, like she seemed like the person who should be the writer of the two of them. You wrote another piece for The New Yorker about the world's first recorded

author. And this is a little bit off the subject of being a significant other, but I just found it to be such a fascinating subject. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that too. Sure. Yeah. There was an exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York on her and her work this year, which was the impetus for the piece. But Anne Hedewanner was a priestess and actually a princess, the daughter of a king in ancient Mesopotamia. And in the early 20th century, when excavations were being done of that region, temples were being uncovered, the tombs of kings and so forth, some shards were found, which sort of brought her back to life after thousands of years. And there are tablets of poetry, which archaeologists and Assyriologists believe to be hers, in part because in one of the works, she identifies herself. She says, I, and Hedwana, you know, in the text itself. But there is a debate around her authorship. It's sort of interesting. It's the opposite of Shakespeare,

because with Shakespeare, we're told not to question and not to go there, but with Anne Hedwana, there's a huge amount of skepticism and a resistance to believing, for some reason, that a woman in this world could have written some of the earliest poetry that we have. Fascinating. Is there anyone else who comes to mind for you on the subject of significant others in literature? I looked at Vladimir and Vera Nabokov. She obviously was not a co-writer of any sort, but she was enmeshed with him to such a degree that they practically function as two halves of a whole. I looked at Sophia Tolstoy. I am always very interested in what it looks like for a person who produces something

that speaks to a lot of people, what it looks like in their smaller sphere. And I just don't know if there are other great partnerships or interesting couples that come to mind for you. I mean, it's such a fascinating question. And there's so many women in so many different fields. I think of the French philosopher, Emily du Chatelet, whose work is now, scholars now believe her work was used to create Denis Diderot's great encyclopedia, her philosophical works. But of course, she didn't receive any attribution and the encyclopedia is just attributed really to male editors. Colette in the early 20th century Colette the French novelist her first four novels which are about the coming of age of a young woman

were published under her husband's name which is so you know just kind of ludicrous on the face of it it's a fascinating problem the undocumented nature of women's work and it's something that I spend a lot of time on in in the sort of the female section

of my book. And in part, it comes from the fact that women were excluded for so long from the official sites of learning and knowledge production from essentially from university systems, right? But also because there was such a stigma for so many centuries on women publishing work under their own names. And this was really strong in the Renaissance. So there's a poem that I quote where a writer refers to a woman who powders a sonnet as she does her hair and prostitutes them both to public air. So the idea that writing for a woman, writing a sonnet or selling your words in the marketplace was a kind of prostitution. It was

immoral to be out there with your work and with your words. And even J.K. Rowling was asked to change her name for publication so that it would not sound feminine. Exactly. It's not as if we're fully past it, even though, you know, obviously it's not expressly forbidden necessarily in our culture, but it is still seen as a liability. Yeah, there are all sorts of reasons, especially in the Renaissance, from commercial marketability, which is what J.K. Rowling was probably concerned with, to social propriety for women to conceal the fact they had a role in the writing of plays or poetry. And there's a wonderful scholar, Phyllis Rackin, who points out that the very taboo, the very stigma on women writing makes it

not more likely that they didn't write, but just more likely that they weren't given, that they weren't acknowledged, that they weren't recognized for their writing. So she is convinced that women were contributing to plays and did have a hand in the theater of Shakespeare's day, but uncovering their names might be extremely difficult to do. it just brings to mind the question, like, what were the people in charge so afraid that all of these women might say? Why did they invest so much energy in keeping women from having a voice? Which is obviously a very large sort of unanswerable question or very answerable, depending on how much time you have. And it seems as if almost the genius of whatever strange arrangement ended up possibly taking place with Shakespeare's work is that the ideas did get to exist, right? That whoever offered them or wherever they came from, we got them. And that's probably

the most important thing. Yeah, absolutely. The Cambridge scholar Juliet Duesenberry says Shakespeare's drama deserves the name feminist because in his plays, the struggle for women is to be human in a world that declares them only female. And I think that's a great summation of the dynamic, the gender dynamic in the plays. But then the question is, how is it that this 16th century male playwright came to write feminist drama? How remarkable. Whether that was because of the involvement of women or a woman or the influence of women in his life or ideas that were circulating at the time about women. We have these wonderful plays. My final question for you is, if there is a person who you consider to be

in your professional or working life, a significant other for you? Oh, interesting. Well, I'm unmarried, so I can't cite... Which is even better, by the way. I can't cite a silent husband behind the scenes who's been saying my work they're never silent by the way other um is there an author who particularly i was gonna say i feel like i'm most influences influenced by the writers i read and um and Woolf, since you mentioned her, is one of my favorites. Her essay, A Room of One's Own, and the whole idea that for most of history, anonymous was a woman, was a huge influence on me in thinking about this whole phenomenon of women

having contributed to so much work that we just don't recognize as theirs. But also a more contemporary writer who I love, Janet Malcolm. I don't recognize as theirs. But also a more contemporary writer who I love, Janet Malcolm. I don't know if you know her work. She's a journalist. Yes, of course. Yes, she died a couple of years ago. And she was really, I would say she was my significant other in this because she was the model I look to for how to approach a controversy like this. Because it's so tricky. How do you wade into this territory? People who question Shakespeare are really attacked pretty viciously as being classist

or a conspiracy theorist or on the same level as an anti-vaxxer. There's really ludicrous comparisons, but I think it's such an interesting controversy. And so I looked at her work and she wrote about controversies around Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. There's a partnership to look at. Yes, correct. She has a book called The Silent Woman. And there was so much controversy around the circumstances of Sylvia Plath's suicide. So she goes around talking to Plath biographers and people who knew her. And then she has another book called In the Freud Archives, which is about a controversy among Freud scholars. And I used her, honestly, as my guiding light. I don't know what

I would have done without her. Whenever I was stuck, I thought, what would Janet do? Oh, that's so great. She made me realize that the way to approach this was to dig into the history. Yes, but also go around and talk to these people. So in the book, I go around and I interview Shakespeare scholars as well as skeptics around the authorship. And I've woven those interviews through the book. So you see these confrontations and these discussions. And I don't know that I could have written this book without Janet Malcolm. Well, I hope that it has a fantastic reception,

which is what it deserves. I think in the spirit of inquiry and debate and openness to challenging long-held ideas, I think it's really crucial, especially now, anytime, but especially now. And your work is so lovely. I'm just happy to have more of it in the world anytime. So good luck with everything. And thank you so much for talking with us today. It's been a pleasure. Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies is out on May 9th. We'll be releasing bonus episodes right up until season two comes out, so do be sure to hit the subscribe button. And as always, we welcome any and all suggestions for upcoming episodes.

You can email us at significantpod at gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening.