Shakespeare actually a woman? For almost 400 years now, Shakespeare experts haven't tired of making a mesmerizing enigma of his identity and the authorship of his many plays and sonnets. Alternatively they have contended that he was in real life the philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon, the playwright-poet Christopher Marlowe, or the Elizabethan-era courtier Edward de Vere.
ARTWORK IN THEATLANTIC.COM BY STEPHEN DOYLEBut now a
Wall Street Journal reporter, Elizabeth Winkler, marshals persuasive facts and circumstantial evidence that William Shakespeare was more likely the woman Emilia Bassano, his contemporary who wrote notable poetry at very same period that the Shakespeare name first appeared in print.
In an advocacy feature for a female Shakespeare in the June 2019 issue of
TheAtlantic.com, Winkler recounts how she was greatly intrigued by the overwhelming preponderance in the Shakespeare canon of women characters raging at the limitations of their sex, affecting the swagger of masculine confidence to escape those limitations, or arguing for women’s equality with their husbands for the simple reason that "(t)heir wives have sense like them.”
Winkler observes that when Shakespeare's plays lean on historical sources like Plutarch, they feminize those sources by portraying legendary male figures through the eyes of mothers, wives, and lovers. She wonders: “Why was Shakespeare able to see the woman’s position, write entirely as if he were a woman, in a way that none of the other playwrights of the age were able to?”
And then Winkler asserts: “(Emilia) Bassano’s life sheds possible light, too, on another outsider theme: the (Shakespeare) plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages... her misery reflected in (Shakespeare's)
Sonnet 29:
“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, /And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, /And look upon myself and curse my fate.” Read Elizabeth Winkler's “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” in the June 2019 issue of TheAtlantic.com now!
