Last weekend the Atlantic magazine published a long article that I initially assumed must be a similarly imaginative parody of misplaced literary ingenuity. The piece, titled "Was Shakespeare a Woman?", suggests that the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford may have been written by a woman. The author, Elizabeth Winkler, maintains: "Doubts about whether William Shakespeare ... really wrote the works attributed to him are almost as old as the writings themselves."
She accuses what she calls orthodox Shakespeare scholars of "a dogmatism of their own" on the issue, whereby "even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover's son." Armed with this tendentious premise, along with the less contentious one that Shakespeare depicts female characters with unrivalled sympathy and insight, Winkler spins a hypothesis that Emilia Bassano, born in London in 1569 to Venetian immigrants, is a viable candidate for the true author.
Even as I read Winkler's piece, I expected a denouement that it was all a piece of fiction, analogous to the enjoyable 2009 caper St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold, which ends with buried treasure under the Globe Theatre and the discovery of Shakespeare's true identity. It never came. The article was presented as a serious contribution to a debate in which Winkler has made a potentially historic discovery...
Price is neither meticulous nor a scholar (she designates herself "an independent scholar," which should have caused Winkler greater wariness). As Alan Nelson of Berkeley University has put it, Price knows how to put a sentence together but she doesn't know how to put an argument together...
Yet it turns out that I was mistaken in thinking that Winkler was guilty of mere inattention and incuriosity. In the storm of social media comment over the past few days, one post stands out. Diana Henderson of MIT, whose scholarly expertise includes Shakespeare, early modern poetry and drama, and gender studies, wrote on Twitter: "[Winkler] contacted me almost a year ago, & although I gave lengthy email replies, doesn't acknowledge the fact that many of us who are most interested in women writers & know their dramatic as well as poetic works find this fanciful. EW seeking only to find what she wanted."
Conspiracism at the Atlantic | Oliver Kamm | May 16, 2019 | Quillette
If she wants herself and more women to be published, she really shouldn’t start with the Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare crap.