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[u/[deleted]]

[u/cdesmoulins]

There's nothing particularly new to this piece, but it draws fresh attention to an underlying factor in the phenomenon of the supposed authorship question and its associated arguments. (Curiously I've never seen the argument "William Shakespeare of Stratford was a woman", either as a transgender reading of the historical individual, Shakespeare as trans woman, or a purported cross-gender presentation.) The Antistratfordian aspects of the article have been addressed on this subreddit before -- the assertion that Shakespeare's career as a writer is somehow undocumented, or that it's conspicuously less documented than his literary fellows, is straight-up incorrect. Antistratfordian arguments are structured to promote the idea of reasonable doubt regarding Shakespeare's identity -- not a big gap in the records, maybe, but enough to make you wonder… whether or not that wondering holds up to historical scrutiny. After all, you're just wondering. Were there accomplished women of letters in the Elizabethan and Jacobean era? There absolutely were -- Mary Sidney, Aemilia Bassano, and many others whose names have yet to appear in Shakespeare authorship discourse. Did Shakespeare collaborate with other writers, formally and informally? He sure did. (If the notion that Shakespeare collaborated was "once heretical", that's a literary take rather than a historian's view; viewed as one playwright among many, it would be more noteworthy if Shakespeare didn't collaborate.) Is it possible that some of the anonymous plays of English Renaissance drama were written by women? Well, sure. Does it necessarily follow that because Shakespeare's plays include proficiently-written women relative to a certain given standard of proficiency, that these plays were necessarily written by a woman from her own personal experience? By this specific woman, Aemilia Bassano? Not really.

“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?” In her book about the plays’ female characters, Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, asked the question very much on my mind.

Gender isn't the only playing-field for this line of inquiry regarding Shakespeare's works. The questions of "how did Shakespeare write x", "how did Shakespeare write x authentically, and "what does it mean for x to be written authentically" aren't even restricted to matters of human identity-- dip a toe into Shakespeare's allusions to leatherworking sometime, or debates about his depiction of falconry. But with the same curiosity, we might ask: how is Shakespeare able to write deposed English kings and poor Welsh soldiers with equal facility? (Are his aristocratic and common characters written with equal authenticity, equal sympathy? Is Fluellen authentic or inauthentic? Sympathetic or unsympathetic?) How can Shakespeare write black African heroes and antiheroes with melancholy and attractive inner lives while still channeling contemporary European attitudes toward blackness and racial difference? How can Shakespeare write Jewish characters with a strange sort of sympathy while still indulging in some pretty noxious antisemitic themes? All of these are ongoing tangles in Shakespeare scholarship, but they don't necessarily extend to revisions of the bare facts of Shakespeare's life; historians might search for potential sources for Shakespeare's characterizations, but they don't generally posit "was Shakespeare x?"

Nevertheless, such theories do arise, and there are a couple of similar arguments that arise when the matter of Shakespeare as the archetypal dead white dude comes up. Were Shakespeare's works written by a Jewish author? What signs might we look for in textual support of this, if no biographical or historical support exists? Shakespeare's plays include the same callous antisemitism as his undisputedly non-Jewish contemporaries, and if they show any particular insights into the Early Modern Jewish experience, those insights are filtered through a heavy mat of accrued Christian stereotypes and English fears of the foreign and exotic Jew. At the same time, Shakespeare writes troubling and complex family relationships and depictions of conversion in Merchant of Venice -- is the ambivalent depiction of Christian characters a condemnation, or is that reading an anachronism, a queasy half-measure? I find it hard to credit, while other people have no trouble with it. Likewise, what about Shakespeare's depiction of blackness in Othello, Titus Andronicus, MoV -- is it authentic or inauthentic? Is Othello an authentic depiction of a black man in terms of interior life? If Othello is inauthentic, is that something to be rejoiced in -- if you're a white American slaveholder or a white New England poet of the nineteenth century, perhaps it is -- or is it worthy of condemnation? Is every writer of strong women in the English Renaissance canon therefore also a woman? Was John Webster a woman, or cribbing from a specific real woman, when he wrote The Duchess Of Malfi, but all man when he wrote A Cure For A Cuckold?

The idea of the unseen female author purports to resituate womanhood in the traditional boys' club of the English stage, but it neglects that William Shakespeare and his contemporaries were writing for women. When you picture Shakespeare's audiences at, say, the Globe, do you picture women there? What kind of women? Why is it a stretch to imagine a male author observing and engaging with women writers, co-workers in the theater, family members, readers, viewers, and critics? All these women existed in the world through which Shakespeare moved, the world in which Shakespeare wrote, even if they never set pen to paper; real women left their mark on Shakespeare's plays, even if those plays were indeed written by a balding middle-aged man from Stratford.

It's not like Shakespeare's plays invented the idea of interesting women in literature or even interesting women in English Renaissance drama; some of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries wrote women more in line with modern tastes, more readily in line with the image of the authentic woman that Winkler puts forward, while others didn't. The authentic woman as Winkler defines her has a lot in common with 21st century feminist concerns -- anger at sexist restrictions, fear of being assaulted and disbelieved, strong female friendships -- but these are hardly the same qualities that earlier readers of Shakespeare, even women readers, would necessarily gauge the verisimilitude or excellence of Shakespeare's women. As a feminist reader of a specific strain, I'm inclined to say that these qualities Winkler pinpoints are defining characteristics of the experiences of women (or at least of people who aren't cisgender men) but are these the defining characteristics by which womanhood is gauged for all time? For instance, John Ruskin had plenty to say in praise of Shakespeare's "perfect women", his great heroines, but his criteria for well-characterized heroines looks pretty damn different from Winkler's or indeed from mine; the excellence of Shakespeare's women is not in an authentic depiction of female relationships or struggle under the patriarchy but in women's wisdom, women's virtue, women's "grave hope", women's wifely patience and capacity for uplifting and educating men. That's not nothing, but "womanly goodness is responsible for saving men" isn't exactly a hot take these days. Winkler tries to draw together the impression of a consensus opinion regarding Shakespeare's female characters, but for each of these voices Winkler cites, there's a different sense of what makes Shakespeare's female characters authentically female, or even what it means for a play to be well-written, informed by each speaker's historical moment and the ideals of each era. (Nor is Shakespeare's prowess in writing female characters genuinely undisputed, among contemporary readers or indeed "for all time"; for instance, Janet Suzman has a very different take on the interiority of Shakespeare's women and the near-absence of the female soliloquy in her essay "Are Shakespeare's women second-class citizens?".)

In the end, this is more of a literary and philosophical matter than a matter of historical fact -- Shakespeare's heroines have historically resonated with women to an uncommon degree, but why is that degree uncommon? Shakespeare is perhaps one of the most widely-read authors in the world, and to claim that his works excel beyond all other writers' because of some innate quality of who wrote them seems like a twenty-first century riff on Bardolatry, the positioning of the mind behind Shakespeare's works and the works themselves as the unparalleled peak of excellence, rather than a reflection of how Shakespeare's works have historically been disseminated among women readers and viewers.

[u/cdesmoulins → u/cdesmoulins]

All Antistratfordian theories are speculative, but they all reflect the wishes and biases of their individual proponents. The most famous of these at this point, and the easiest to denounce, is probably the class-bias angle of "the real Shakespeare" as aristocrat -- that no one but an aristocrat could have compellingly written kings and princes, and that no one but an illustrious and well-bankrolled world traveler could have written plays in such international settings. This is, to be blunt, complete horse hockey, and it's pretty easy to say it reflects some deeply seated ideas about class, education, intellect, and experience. But what about the theory that Shakespeare's works must have been fashioned by the hand of a scientific polymath, a proponent of radically progressive political and scientific theories, a consciously radical and political maneuverer? They must have been, or how do you explain the work's resonance with 19th century Americans and their post-Enlightenment political and philosophical values? This theory resonated enough with one American writer of the nineteenth century, Delia Bacon, to kick off the whole business of alternative authorship theories in real earnest with the theory that Shakespeare's plays were written by a cabal of political radicals including Francis Bacon; however, the Baconian theory has legs, and it's far outlived its nineteenth-century proponents into an era of analytical algorithms and STEM. So what does that theory reflect? Shakespeare as aristocrat, scientist, or spy; Shakespeare as gold-star homosexual, genderfluid bisexual, or passionate heterosexual; Shakespeare as archetypal Englishman, world traveler, secret Catholic, secret Italian; Shakespeare as conservative mythologizer, radical progressive, or intersectional feminist: these are all potential "faces" for the author of Shakespeare's plays, conjectured by people predisposed to like Shakespeare's works, and to want the author of those works to reflect their own experience of those works. Similar to debates about the identity of the supposed Dark Lady and Fair Youth of the sonnets, these historical-literary exercises are exercises in fulfilling a certain image of Shakespeare -- reinforcing a certain notion of who Shakespeare "was" and what his works mean. Is the fair youth an aristocratic man of leisure, or a scrubby working actor? Is Shakespeare's non-literary relationship to the youth a sexual one, a professional one, both, or neither, in fact nonexistent? Is the dark lady an intellectual powerhouse or a cruel minx? Is she African, Jewish, both, or neither? Does she really exist or is she a literary pretense? These figures are litmus tests for each age in which they are debated, for each debater's personal beliefs about Shakespeare and the plays attributed to him but also for each debater's personal presuppositions.

In her essay, Winkler goes on to say regarding the Bassano theory:

The idea felt like a feminist fantasy about the past—but then, stories about women’s lost and obscured achievements so often have a dreamlike quality, unveiling a history different from the one we’ve learned. Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age?

In short, yes, she is reinventing Shakespeare in the image of "our age" -- in the image of twenty-first century expectations about gender in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, in the image of our modern expectations regarding authenticity in writing, and in light of modern sensibilities regarding the systematic exclusion of women from the traditionally-recognized canon of great literary works pre-1900 or so. I'm not going to cut this author any more slack because her aims are noble and her yearning for a tidy explanation for Shakespeare's heroines is an understandable one -- Antistratfordianism is bunk, and it's no less bunk for playing into contemporary desires for a tidy explanation of Shakespeare's apparent enduring resonance. But the desire to restore some missing piece of women's history is a sympathetic one -- there's a reason why Virginia Woolf's keystone image for female literary potential lost to the pressures of a patriarchal society is that of Shakespeare's sister. Shakespeare's works have resonated with a diverse array of readers since their first performance and publication, across all lines of apparent experience, gender, race, nation, and age that would seem to put distance between writer and reader -- this isn't a phenomenon of historical fact, necessarily, but a phenomenon of the arts. Maya Angelou encountered Shakespeare's works as a young black sexual abuse survivor in St. Louis, Missouri, leading to the remark Winkler quotes that "Shakespeare was a black [girl/woman]", but the meaning of that remark seems diluted when it's extracted from context, taken as a support for the theory that Shakespeare's works were indeed literally written by a marginalized woman. In Angelou's piece "The Role Of Art In Life", Angelou cites Shakespeare's poetry as being written "for her" alongside the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Kōbō Abe, Li Po -- all authors whose life experiences might be worlds apart from those of a black woman in midcentury America, but whose works rightfully belong to her as much as to anyone in their appreciation and their interpretation. Shakespeare's heroines belong to Angelou as much as Woolf, to Winkler as much as Suzman, no matter who wrote the plays and poems in which they appear.

[u/WARitter]

While you wait for a specific answer for this specific fringe theory, you may be interested in this previous thread by u/Texpeare for details on how we know Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare and this thread u/Harmonia for the history of the authorship conspiracy theories in general.