Awards

• Commended for Audies (Nonfiction) 2024

Overview

A thrillingly provocative investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy...and who the Bard might really be.The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Writers and thinkers who've considered the evidence--from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices--have long suspected some else behind plays such as Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. And while Shakespeare professors admit that the Bard's biography is a ""black hole,"" to doubt the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) ""immoral""--a sordid conspiracy theory. Fascinated by this taboo topic as much as by the mystery, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler set out to probe the origins of this most incendiary controversy. Playfully irreverent and charmingly erudite, Shakespeare Was a Woman & Other Heresies goes on a riotous adventure through a comedy worthy of Shakespeare's pen. Whisking readers from London to Stratford-upon-Avon to Washington, DC, Winkler pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class helped create the version of the Bard we know and love today--and to explore who may have been hiding behind Shakespeare's name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Hovering over the mystery are Shakespeare's plays themselves--with their love for mistaken identities, disguises, and things never quite being what they seem. As she interviews scholars and skeptics, Winkler's subject becomes the larger question of historical truth--and of how human imperfections (bias, blindness, subjectivity) shape our construction of the past. History is a story, and the story we find may depend on the story we're looking for. An irresistible work of literary detection, Shakespeare Was a Woman & Other Heresies will forever change how you think of Shakespeare...and of how we as a society decide what's up for debate and what's just nonsense, just heresy.

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9781797158747

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Reviews

An extraordinarily brilliant and scholarly work, written with an unyielding sleuthing instinct and sparkling with pleasurably naughty moments. This page-turner is mesmerizing. -- Andre Aciman, PhD, New York Times bestselling author Probing and smart, this is sure to stir up lively debate. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Author Information

Elizabeth Winkler is a journalist and book critic whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Economist, among other publications. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her master's in English literature from Stanford University. Her essay in The Atlantic, ""Was Shakespeare a Woman?"", was selected for The Best American Essays 2020. She lives in Washington, DC. Eunice Wong is a Juilliard-trained, award-winning actor and narrator. She's recorded for Penguin Random House, Audible, Tantor, Harper, and others, and performed professionally across the US. Director Paul Ruben calls her ""an exceptionally talented, intuitive actress & storyteller [who] connects the listener to every emotional nuance in the author's words."" Born in Toronto, with parents from Hong Kong, she's ""audiobook-fluent"" in Cantonese, French, and Mandarin. She's always open to books that aren't ethnically specific. (Her Canadian accent was poonded oot of her at Juilliard, but still available on request.) She's taught poetry in a men's super-max prison, lived in Kyrgyzstan with nomads, and swum with stingrays. Eunice lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her family and two lazy greyhounds.

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