Prove True, Imagination
On Questioning the Authorial Voice in the English-Language Literary Canon
Written by Eve Smith
Photography by Misia
I am in class near Madrid and we are reading Twelfth Night. Maria, one of the supporting women, has just left a letter for Malvolio to find. In it, her wordplay and ego-stroking mock him, but he is so convinced of his own exceptionalism that he sees only what he wants to see. Be not afraid of greatness. He reads. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em. When the teacher asks what we make of this, the boy to my right shoots his hand up. I find this quote particularly motivating. And just like that, four hundred years later and a thousand kilometres away from Shakespeare’s place of birth, the literature came alive. Malvolio wasn’t a dated Jacobean fiction. He was sitting right next to me.
British people are born with an acceptance that they will be led by two unshakeable gods: Queueing, and Shakespeare. The bard is afforded a cultural weight in our education system that makes riling against his excellence almost a right of passage. How can the musings of an obscure Stratford-upon-Avon man possibly still be relevant? But far from home, for the first time, I started to enjoy his work. I learned to appreciate his wit and his sensitivity to the permanence of loss. In short, I fell in love with his ability to tell a story that was effortlessly juicy. But the more time I spent with his plays and their stories of men pretending to be women and women pretending to be men, female characters challenging male hubris and in which nothing is as it seems, the clearer it seemed to me. There was no way a man could have written this.
This is not to say that I don’t think men can be sensitive and funny and a whole host of brilliant things, but merely to say Julia Fox could have written The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald could never have written Down the Drain. In our contemporary world where everyone is their own brand, to separate art from the lived experience of the artist is to cut off their right hand, but it doesn’t take much exposure to the male-penned classics to take stock that women, by and large, exist in these texts exclusively in relation to the men around them. Women write a story and it’s termed an exploration of the female experience. Men do the exact same thing and it’s a universal treaty on what it means to be alive. When the canon’s most prominent female authors wrote under male pseudonyms as they birthed the modern novel, for the longest time, to exist as a woman in literature meant: to be silent.
It was into this that Elizabeth Winkler spoke her provocative 2023 book Shakespeare Was A Woman, and Other Heresies into existence. Brought out on the anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, her exploration of the Shakespearean authorship question was a relatively novel attempt to redress traditional academia’s refusal to entertain the potential that we could be at all wrong about what we know about the great playwright.
She was by no means the first to question his identity – doubts had been raised by authors like Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov, and queries first emerged in the 18th century when it was discovered there was no direct paper trail tying the life of the man to his much-famed work – but previous theories devolved into classist assumptions that the son of a glovemaker with minimal schooling couldn’t have written the most important text in the English-language canon. It must have been the Earl of Oxford. Or Christopher Marlowe. Or Francis Bacon. But what was certain? A man would be standing behind it, and to raise the question at all was the fastest way to get yourself laughed out of a university English department.
But sitting in my wood-beamed Spanish attic, reading about everything Shakespeare somehow knew about law and music and the monarchy and foreign countries (“So specific and accurate are his references to it that it is reasonable to assume he had seen it himself,” writes Roger Prior) that had previously been written off by appealing to his genius, and how in the only recorded instances of his signature he doesn’t even seem to have been comfortable holding a pen, I became obsessed with pinning the uncertainty down. “The authorship question,” Winkler writes, “is a massive game of clue played out over the centuries”.
There is an affinity to womanhood in Shakespeare’s work that is undeniable. His texts were in part so impressive because the female characters come alive. They are wilful and complicated and smart, and we see their friendships with each other independent of men. She cites Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt who says, “It is striking how many of Shakespeare’s women are shown reading”, as well as the first female fellow at New College in Oxford, Anne Barton, who says “Shakespeare’s sympathy with and almost uncanny understanding of women characters is one of the distinguishing features of his comedy”. Women often overshadow the men to positive effect. “In other words,” Winkler says. “When things end happily—in a more humane, understanding world—it is often because the heroines win.”
By tracing the trajectory of 1970s feminist readings of the play in the face of the hostile predominantly male establishment, Winkler entertains the idea that here, the opposite of Harold Bloom’s ‘dead white man’ theory might be true. “Women’s struggle to be human is not,” she writes, “historically, a subject that has held much interest for men except, perhaps, insofar as they have opposed it.” In a literary world where women were hardly even people, how do we explain the aberration of Shakespeare’s written treatment of them?
Although sympathy with the plight of the other is not enough to draw any meaningful conclusions about who an author is, Winkler makes room to acknowledge that doggedly refusing to engage with questions about his identity is as politicised a choice as any. Between 1475 and 1640, more than eight hundred authors are known to have published anonymously and the Renaissance was full of writers taking on alternate names so that they could speak more freely. She writes about the 1964 trial held after the Francis Bacon Society was left with money to uncover the truth about the manuscripts, where scholars considered the strange fact that Shakespeare left clear instructions for the distribution of his assets in his will but made no mention of any writing. Judge Wilberforce ruled that while Bacon was categorically not the works’ original author, there were facts about the case that were undeniably difficult to reconcile. Professor Trevor-Roper says that the case for Shakespeare “rests on a narrow balance of evidence”, and new material could easily upset it. The certainty of who Shakespeare was, was not beyond reasonable doubt. In other words, the authorship question was not closed.
There is something so deliciously tantalising about imagining a world where the man whose works form the very basis of the modern English language could be turfed up. In our desire to see marginalised voices represented in the status quo, there is a danger of losing ourselves in the freefall fantasy. Like the classist scepticism of Shakespeare that arose in tandem with the emergence of the middle class, as we reckon with years of what women were once denied, we run the risk of the only thing our interpretations of the past revealing being how we live now.
Although Winkler makes a convincing case for who the namesake heretic woman might be – a female musician with ties to Italy, Denmark and the high court – she doesn’t distort her presentation of the facts by trying to reach for any resounding conclusions. Her book isn’t a dishy who-dun-it, but a delightful meditation on the importance of questioning what we know, and allowing ourselves to sit in the uncertainty that follows. So much of society’s ills were once taken to be the accepted norm, and if the scholarship refuses to engage with the irrefutable holes in the Shakespeare story, it cannot call itself rigorous. Considering the potential veracity of alternate authorship then, does not equate to calling for Hilary Clinton to check her mail or letting doubt spread like wood rot until reality itself is put into question, it merely stresses the importance of letting the light in on what we know as the status quo. Dismissing all of the biographical inconsistencies in the argument that Shakespeare was just a male genius just doesn’t cut it.
Twelfth Night has a happy ending, that is, for everyone except the unself-aware and stuck-in-his-ways Malvolio. Like the playwright's repeatedly duplicitous tales and the boy in my class, Winkler makes the point that the authorship question is inherently Shakespearean. In the end, she concludes that no matter where you are, nothing good will come of refusing to allow for the fact that you might be wrong.
