Free Republic

William Shakespeare was a 'black Jewish woman', a new book has claimed. The real playwright is identified as the historical figure Emilia Bassano in The Real Shakespeare, by an LSE graduate and feminist historian. She was a poet with connections to the Tudor court and wrote the Shakespearean canon of plays using the pen-name 'Shakespeare', according to the book. But her work is said to have been stolen from an uneducated interloper - William Shakespeare - from Stratford-upon-Avon. The book's author Irene Coslet argues that the idea of a 'white' genius was preferred to Bassano's identity as a black female...

On a spring night in 2018, I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk with friends, reading Shakespeare aloud. We were in line to see an adaptation of Macbeth and had decided to pass the time refreshing our memories of the play’s best lines. I pulled up Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy on my iPhone. “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” I read, thrilled once again by the incantatory power of the verse. I remembered where I was when I first heard those lines: in my 10th-grade English class, startled out of my adolescent stupor by this woman...