The Elusive Bard

As an historian, I have a long-standing interest in “historical mysteries”, but in reviewing this book, it is necessary to say that I am not a “conspiracy theorist”, and am not gullible. In a book I wrote some years ago in which I discussed some notable historical mysteries, I examined the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, an event which has been the subject of wild speculation ever since, and concluded, based on the evidence, that the Warren Commission got it completely right: there was no conspiracy of any kind; JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, who in turn was fatally shot by Jack Ruby, acting alone.

This review appears in October’s Quadrant.
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It is necessary to make this clear when reviewing Elizabeth Winkler’s book, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, which has attracted a good deal of attention in America, where it was first published a few months ago, and is now available here. In Shakespeare Was a Woman—provocative, no?—she discusses possibly the oldest and perhaps most controversial of the well-known historical mysteries, that the works of William Shakespeare were written by someone else, and not by the man who was born in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564 and died there in 1616, and was, by profession, an actor in London. For about two hundred years, many well-informed and highly intelligent people have believed that the real author was someone else; there are many dozens of books published over the years which attempt to show, at the least, that someone else wrote Shakespeare’s works, or, more ambitiously, that a particular person was the real author rather than the Bard of Avon, such as, among others, Sir Francis Bacon; Edward De Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford; Sir Henry Neville, or someone else. Elizabeth Winkler also discusses the possibility that the real author was a woman, such as Mary Sidney.

Before dismissing these claims as hokum, one might consider why they are so widely believed. William Shakespeare had no education past the age of about thirteen, yet his plays contain references to around 500 other works, some in foreign languages not yet translated into English. His plays contain eyewitness descriptions of towns in Italy and elsewhere, although there is no evidence that Shakespeare ever left England. Not a single book thought to have been owned by Shakespeare has ever been traced, although he must have owned a great many. Apart from six signatures on legal documents, he left no literary manuscripts apart from what is known as “Hand D”, a portion of the play Sir Thomas More, which he apparently wrote in collaboration with four other playwrights. Shakespeare left no surviving letters, diaries or commonplace books with his thoughts or ideas, or anything else.

Many of the known facts of Shakespeare’s life simply do not fit in with the known chronology and evolution of his supposed works. For instance, all critics point to a great break in the nature of his oeuvre in 1601, when he began to write his great tragedies, starting with Hamlet in 1601 and Othello in 1602. It seems apparent that something traumatic occurred to the author at that time, perhaps relating to the Essex Rebellion of 1601, when Shakespeare’s alleged patron, the Earl of Southampton, was sent to the Tower. But nothing whatever occurred to William Shakespeare at that time which could account for the dramatic change in his outlook and writings. Speculation and unanswered questions about the meaning of the famous and mysterious Dedication page of Shake-spears Sonnets, published in April 1609, would fill a volume in itself, starting with whether its 154 sonnets were published with or without the knowledge and permission of their author, and who “Mr. W.H.”, the volume’s “onlie begetter”, might have been. The life and career of William Shakespeare are, in fact, far from straightforward and are shrouded in considerable mystery and surprisingly little direct evidence.

Elizabeth Winkler, a journalist based in Washington DC, has performed a great service in taking “anti-Stratfordianism”, as doubt about the orthodox view is known, and bringing it into mainstream public discussion via a major New York trade publisher. As a result, she has received scathing comments and reviews from the high honchos of the Bard in academic life, who overtly or covertly give proof to the claim made on the book’s front cover, that any serious discussion of this topic is “the biggest taboo in literature”.

Unfortunately but understandably, she spends more time discussing Edward De Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, today the leading candidate as the real author, but also one of the weakest of the “candidates”. Oxford was born in 1550 and died in 1604, and thus cannot have been the real author of Shakespeare’s works, which were written between about 1590 and 1613. In particular, Oxford could not have written The Tempest of 1611, which was unquestionably based in part on the so-called “Strachey Letter” of 1610, penned by the survivor of a shipwreck on the reefs of Bermuda in 1609. Most “anti-Stratfordians” have in fact been making their claims about the wrong man, although the real author is actually not too difficult to find, despite not being mentioned in speculation on this subject until about twenty years ago.

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
by Elizabeth Winkler
Simon & Schuster, 2023, 399 pages, $49.99   

William Rubinstein held Chairs of History at Deakin University and at the University of Wales, and is a frequent contributor to Quadrant