Four years ago the American journalist Elizabeth Winkler wrote a viral essay in The Atlantic proposing that the works attributed to William Shakespeare might have been written by a woman. Now she has published a book, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies (Simon & Schuster), exploring the world of “anti-Stratfordianism” — the belief, first proposed by a Victorian lady called Delia Bacon, that the glovemaker’s son from Warwickshire could not possibly have written such amazing plays. As a historian of the theatre, for years I have been bombarded by messages from amateur sleuths claiming that they alone have cracked the code of the biggest cover-up in literary history and revealed the true identity of the greatest author of all time. Sometimes they are motivated
BOOKS | THEATRE
Who really was Shakespeare? Our expert separates the fact from the fiction
Was the Bard a woman, an aristocratic tourist or Christopher Marlowe? Jonathan Bate weighs up the plausibility of conspiracy theories about Britain’s greatest playwright
Kenneth Branagh as William Shakespeare in All Is True
ALAMY
The Times
