In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies (Simon & Schuster, May), journalist Winkler surveys the debate around who wrote the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare.
What originally drew you to the Shakespeare authorship question?
I came to this from a place of love. My background is in English literature. I love Shakespeare, and I especially love Shakespeare’s women characters. There are so many scholars and writers who have written about Shakespeare’s uncanny understanding of women and the feminine sensibility in his plays as something that’s remarkable and often absent in his fellow playwrights, and I had never come across an explanation for how Shakespeare came to write feminist drama or where this uncanny understanding of women came from. That led to the question, “Is it possible that a woman had a hand somewhere in these plays? Could a woman have been involved?” In addition to that, the heatedness of the debate drew me in. Some reactions [to the author’s 2019 Atlantic article on the authorship controversy] suggested that questioning Shakespeare is comparable to denying the Holocaust or the efficacy of vaccines. English professors are supposed to teach critical thinking, and this is not an intellectual response. That fascinated me and made me want to dig deeper.
Was there a fact or argument you found particularly persuasive in questioning the orthodox view on Shakespeare?
It’s not one thing but rather the cumulative effect of all the missing pieces. You can write off one problem here or one gap there, but the accumulation of problems is harder to dismiss. How could someone who cares so much about language and words and ideas not educate their children? There’s the lack of Shakespeare’s literary or personal records, and the fact that at his death there was no acknowledgement or notice that this great poet had died. Other writers talk about their writing in letters to each other, or in diaries or journals. There are records of payment for their writing. Some left manuscripts. There are education records showing how they acquired their knowledge. For other major writers of the period some bits are missing, but for each you can find something attesting to their careers as writers. Shakespeare didn’t leave any of that.
For your money, who do you think wrote Shakespeare’s plays?
More than the question itself, I’m interested in how people react to the question and how they respond to the ambiguity around it. I didn’t write the book trying to solve “Who was Shakespeare?” The interesting thing is why this is so hard to talk about. Why do people react so emotionally to this question? I made an intentional decision not to argue for any one candidate. I’m interested in the possibility of dwelling in the space of not knowing. What if we admit that we’re not sure about this subject? What would happen then?
