In 2019, Elizabeth Winkler, a young writer at the Wall Street Journal, published a provocative essay in the Atlantic under the headline “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” In it she examined the case for seeing the hand of Emilia Bassano Lanier, a poet of Italian heritage born in the 16th century, in the plays attributed to the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon. The theory had been in circulation for a while – in 2018, the Globe theatre staged Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s sellout play Emilia, which dramatised a similar argument – but Winkler was unprepared for the scale of the backlash. Within 48 hours of the article’s publication, “I was besieged by a (mostly male) army of Twitter trolls,” she writes in this riposte to her detractors. The professional scholars were hardly more civilised: older, male academics and critics called her a conspiracy theorist, comparing her to Holocaust deniers, Obama birthers and anti-vaxxers; others declared her to be “in the grip of “neurotic fantasies”. Alarmed by the “ferocity of the internet reaction”, the Atlantic commissioned a series of responses to the piece, including a rebuttal by the eminent Shakespearean Prof James Shapiro, and altered some of Winkler’s assertions in the original in deference to his objections. “The professor said so, it must be true,” she remarks drily.
Far from being cowed by the condescension (Shapiro invited her to attend a performance of Shakespeare in New York, “as though I had never read or seen a Shakespeare play before”), Winkler – who is no upstart, holding English literature degrees from Princeton and Stanford – was spurred to greater curiosity by the vitriol. “Scepticism is usually a virtue in the scholarly world, but when it comes to Shakespeare, scepticism is a sin,” she writes. “There can be no recognition of ambiguities or uncertainties in our construction of the past. There is only adherence to the belief, which operates like a kind of religious fundamentalism… Anything else is a ‘conspiracy theory’.” She began to wonder: “Why were they so emotional?”
