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...