“It’s a funny thing,” admits Elizabeth Winkler. “I don’t really like controversy. I don’t seek it out. There are some people that thrive on it and I don’t. I find it upsetting and distressing to see my work and my ideas misrepresented and twisted. It’s not fun. But you study the history of the subject, you know that’s how it goes.”
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
This passage neatly captures Winkler’s lucid and light-footed approach to the subject. The 33-year-old American journalist and book critic, who holds English literature degrees from Princeton and Stanford universities, writes for the Wall Street Journal newspaper and the New Yorker magazine. While she categorises herself as a sceptic of the Stratford man (“There are so many gaps”), this is not a polemical book seeking to knock Shakespeare off his perch and push dubious evidence for an alternative.
Instead Winkler brings a journalist’s eye to the controversy, zipping between highbrow philosophical debates around the nature of knowledge – how can we be truly certain about anything? – to the more prosaic and petty squabbles of academics with skin in the game that might be plucked from a novel by Michael Frayn or David Lodge.
Her book makes three compelling arguments: tying the authorship question to the rise and fall of imperial Britain and its need for national mythmaking; exploring how Shakespeare was turned into a secular god, with theatre filling the vacuum left by the decline of the church; and challenging the basic human need to cling to belief when doubt might be the proper response.
Her central point is not the authorship question itself but the ecosystem of egos, vested interests, literary feuds and cultish bardolatry that has grown up around it. We meet Stratfordians who defend Shakespeare’s genius with religious intensity and zeal and anti-Stratfordians who respond with a contrarian ferocity worthy of atheist Richard Dawkins. This is one fight with little room for agnostics.
Winkler writes: “The authorship question is a massive game of Clue played out over the centuries. The weapon is a pen. The crime is the composition of the greatest works of literature in the English language. The suspects are numerous. The game is played in back rooms and basements, beyond the purview of the authorities.
“Now and then, reports of the game surface in the press, and the authorities (by which I mean the Shakespeare scholars) are incensed. They come in blowing their whistles and stomping their feet, waving their batons wildly.”
Winkler dived feet first into this melee four years ago with an essay in the Atlantic magazine under the headline “Was Shakespeare a Woman?”, floating the idea that Emilia Bassano Lanier, a 16th-century poet of Italian heritage, had a hand in the plays attributed to the man from Stratford. There was a fierce backlash that ran the gamut from lofty scholars to Twitter trolls.
Sitting outside the Washington national cathedral, a grand structure built in 14th-century English gothic style, Winkler tells the Guardian: “I was very quickly castigated as a conspiracy theorist and denialist – they’re invoking climate change denial or Holocaust denial, even though those things are not remotely equivalent. I was compared to anti-vaxxers and purveyors of disinformation. Very ugly comparisons. It was mortifying and shocking at first. I’d never been attacked like that as a writer.”
The extreme reactions made Winkler realise that she had touched a nerve that merited further examination in a book. “That was the story. Why are they so emotional? Why are they so furious? Why is a question about the authorship of 400-year-old plays getting people so riled up? I dug into the history and you start to see how it’s connected to British identity and imperialism and religious and social changes over the centuries,” she says.
“I wrote the book just because I thought it was interesting. Some people maybe have the impression I’m out to convince everyone, that I’m on some sort of crusade. I don’t really care. Believe whatever you want to believe.
“I don’t care what people believe about Shakespeare. That’s not the point. The psychology of belief is a big part of the book, but what interested me was that it is about these bigger issues of authority and belief and certainty and the problem of history, how we interpret and construct the past. That’s what excites me about it. The authorship question actually stands for something much larger.
“At the same time, it’s hilariously petty because it’s about people’s egos and vanity and concern for protecting their reputations and these petty squabbles that scholars are getting into. It does take on these grand-scale questions and then it’s also this very human comedy of errors. Part of what’s so funny is the goofy mistakes that scholars make in their attempt to defend their beliefs. Some of the responses to the book have just exemplified that phenomenon all over again.”
Winkler followed the detective trail to Britain to interview various Shakespeare scholars, some of whom proved evasive and unsatisfactory, and historians, who were generally more open to the authorship question. In Stratford she witnessed the Shakespeare tourism industrial complex and met Stanley Wells, former chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and a devout defender of the faith.
She recalls: “He said we have, despite the gaps, ‘enough of a structure to sustain the meaning we provide for it’. I thought that was an absolutely extraordinary phrase. I left Stratford thinking about ‘the meaning we provide for it’ because it sums it all up. It’s so religious in nature. They are the interpreters of the evidence and they will tell you what it means. It’s like priests interpreting scripture for the masses.”
Another interview in Brixton, south London, was with Mark Rylance, actor and former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, and his wife, Claire van Kampen, a director, composer and playwright. Both are highly engaged in the authorship issue.
Van Kampen talked about the gradual consolidation of Britishness over centuries. She told Winkler: “You can see this with the whole Brexit thing and how powerful people’s emotions are about having a British identity. Shakespeare is up there as embodying an idea of something like the heart of Britishness. If you take that away, what is there?”
Van Kampen told Winkler about a dinner with friends where Rylance mentioned the authorship question and two women became very upset. “One started crying, ‘I don’t want to hear about this. I’ve learnt at school that it was this. I don’t want to hear about it.’”
Winker describes how Stratford became “an English Bethlehem” as Shakespeare emerged as a unifying religious figure from centuries of turmoil between Catholics and Protestants. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington even has a painting of the baby Shakespeare in a nativity scene. “He became a Christ figure.”
She adds: “At the same time, of course, this is the expansion of empire. This is the great age of British imperialism and Shakespeare becomes the national poet held up as proof of Britain’s cultural superiority, of its right to rule.”
In 1769 David Garrick, the leading Shakespearean actor of his day, organised the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford to commemorate the bicentenary of his birth and declared: “England may justly boast the honour of producing the greatest dramatic poet in the world.” In 1840 the critic Thomas Carlyle characterised Shakespeare as “the ‘Universal Church’ of the Future and of all times” and imagined him “radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence”.
Winkler says: “Then it’s during this period of height of empire, the height of religious fervour around Shakespeare, when actual attendance at traditional churches is declining because of scientific developments. People aren’t going to church in the same numbers they used to and so Shakespeare becomes the replacement god.”
The book notes a 2011 poll commissioned by the thinktank Demos that found Shakespeare is the cultural symbol of which Britons are most proud ahead of the monarchy, the armed forces, the Beatles and the union jack. While some of these symbols divide the political left and right, the Bard unites everyone from Boris Johnson to Sir Ian McKellen.
Winkler adds: “Even though Shakespeare was tied to the rise of empire, as empire has declined, I wonder if it’s made the country cling ever more fiercely to Shakespeare because it’s all they have, in a way.”
Perhaps it is no coincidence that a question that strikes at the very heart of Britain’s understanding of itself has been posed by outsiders such as Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud and supreme court justices?
“It’s certainly easier to look at the traditional story with a critical detachment as an American. But there are plenty of Brits who are sceptical of the authorship so it has to do with the kind of capacity for critical thinking, I guess, and also your personal relationship with the author. Everyone has their personal attachment to Shakespeare,” Winkler says.
Winkler recently spoke about her book to the Shakespeare Authorship Inquiries Group, which holds regular events at the Cosmos Club, nestled among international embassies in Washington. She reflects: “The anti-Stratfordians are a fascinating group. They’re the heretics banging their 95 theses against the church door.
“There’s the phenomenon of belief there as well. I tried to understand also why they care so much. When you ask Oxfordians or others, they often describe this experience of disillusionment where they realise, oh my gosh, all these things I thought I believed about Shakespeare, they’re all not true, it was really this other person. I think they feel betrayed by their professors or their teachers who weren’t upfront.
“They often experience this kind of disillusionment, which is a bit like a religious disillusionment. It’s like when people decide they don’t believe in God any more but then they of course find a new god in this instance. They become so determined to triumph in this war for the truth about the god of English literature because of the way they’re treated, because they feel they’re misrepresented, they’re attacked, they’re denigrated in all these ways.
“If that wasn’t happening, they probably wouldn’t feel quite so passionate about it. But there’s this need for justice. Justice for the author, to recognise the real author, but then also it becomes justice for themselves. But they are not conspiracy theorists. They’re not snobs. They’re not lunatics. It’s this sense of wanting to be represented accurately in the world and this deep frustration they feel.”
It could certainly be argued that they, and Winkler, have bad timing. Is it still possible, or wise, to challenge the status quo in a particular field in the era of Donald Trump, anti-vaxxers and QAnon? Elon Musk, Robert F Kennedy Jr and company have given anything-goes postmodernism a bad name. We suddenly realise that we like facts and want an expert to land the plane.
A review of Winkler’s book in the Spectator described it as “wrong-headed” and “based on an entirely irrational premise”. Another in Slate called it “pernicious” and argued that “while doubting Shakespeare’s authorship isn’t nearly as dangerous as climate change denial, or anti-vax beliefs, or questioning Obama’s citizenship, the rhetoric and strategies of all of these forms of trutherism are quite similar”.
But Winkler denies that she is anti-expert. On the contrary, it is historical experts, legal experts and French, Greek and Italian experts, not to mention actors and directors, who have come at the problem in a way that literary experts miss.
“It’s the expertise of all these different people from different disciplines who’ve looked at the plays. Actually, Shakespeare scholars are not experts on Italy and they’re not experts on French history and 16th-century French court politics or on the psychology of genius,” she says.
“In some ways, the authorship question is an interdisciplinary subject. It’s not actually a subject just for English literature scholars whose training is in literary analysis. They’re literary critics. They don’t have the same methodological training often as historians, although they would probably get mad at me for saying that.
“They certainly don’t have training in all these other fields that the author seems to be knowledgable about. There’s a sense in which the authorship question should be attacked in an interdisciplinary space, and instead because it’s seen as just the purview of Shakespeare scholars and only they are the authorities – that’s the problem.”
It is evident that, despite the online vitriol, Winkler has no regrets about storming the high temple of English culture. “I tried to storm it very politely,” she says. “I wanted to be polite about my storming. The unfortunate thing is that it becomes so antagonistic. And why does it have to be so antagonistic? I realised that they see me as the enemy at the gates.”
Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies is out now
