Episode 247
Elizabeth Winkler, author of "Shakespeare Was a Woman"
Elizabeth Winkler, a renowned journalist and book critic, joins us from Washington, DC to discuss her latest book, "Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature."
This thrillingly provocative investigation delves into the Shakespeare authorship question and explores why questioning the identity of the god of English literature has become unacceptable and even considered immoral.
In her book, Winkler taps into the approach of "heresies" to make her research and writing more engaging. She highlights how the theory that Shakespeare may not have written his plays is an unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars acknowledge the lack of concrete information about the Bard's biography, yet publicly questioning his authorship is deemed blasphemous. Winkler sheds light on the forces of nationalism, empire, religion, mythmaking, gender, and class that have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare over the centuries.
Drawing on the insights of writers and thinkers like Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, and Supreme Court justices, Winkler explores the potential identities of the true author hiding behind Shakespeare's name. Could it be a forgotten woman, a disgraced aristocrat, or even a government spy? The plays themselves, with their themes of mistaken identities and concealed truths, add an intriguing layer to the mystery.
As Winkler interviews scholars and skeptics, she also delves into the larger issue of historical truth and how human imperfections shape our understanding of the past. She emphasizes that history is a story, and the narrative we construct depends on the story we seek. By examining stories like the 1964 case of Miss Evelyn May Hopkins, who left a third of her inheritance to the Francis Bacon Society to find the original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays, Winkler explores the deep-rooted beliefs and biases that influence our perception of history.
Throughout our interview, Winkler shares her inspiration and how it can benefit other writers. She discusses specific tools, exercises, and formulas she used to organize her ideas, such as the captivating story of Miss Evelyn May Hopkins and her connection to the Bacon-Shakespeare manuscripts.
Furthermore, Winkler reflects on how she has made connections and created opportunities to produce and promote her creative work. Her relentless pursuit of the Shakespeare authorship question and her ability to engage with scholars and skeptics have propelled her career as a journalist and literary critic.
Our thanks to Simon & Schuster for supporting this podcast episode.
@elizabethlaurenw on Instagram
Copyright 2024 Mark Stinson
Transcript
auto generated transcript
Mark Stinson, host: [:Elizabeth Winkler is a journalist and book critic. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and many more. Her book is: Shakespeare, was a Woman and Other Heresies, how Doubting the Bard became the biggest taboo in literature. It's just released from Simon and Schuster.
Elizabeth, welcome to the program.
Elizabeth Winkler, author: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about the book with you.
gratulations on its release. [:It's lingered throughout history, but it has, its roots in controversies about whether Shakespeare produced his own work or not. But what did you find, and what's the premise of your book?
Elizabeth Winkler, author: I really wanted to understand why this question is so hard to talk about and why it generates such emotional and often furious reactions in people.
Because on the face of things, it's just a literary historical question about the authorship of 400 year old plays, nerdy kind of academic, but people get really worked up about it. And I discovered that four years ago I published an article in The Atlantic. About one of about a new candidate for authorship, and it went viral and people were they loved it or they hated it, and I was trying to.
history. It's also a work of [:It was so much fun to do the, I guess I should explain a little bit about the author question. For those who don't know that'd be great. Yeah. A lot of thinkers and writers over the centuries have suspected that Shakespeare was a pseudonym for a concealed writer, and pseudonyms were pretty common in Renaissance England, there were a lot of reasons writers might choose to conceal their identity.
A lot of people have suspected that this was the case with. With Shakespeare. Henry James said, I'm haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world. Walt Whitman, the poet of democracy, agreed that there was some other mind behind the plays.
va never wrote a play in his [:AOV wrote a poem about the mystery saying to Shakespeare, you easily regretless, relinquish the laurels, concealing your monstrous genius beneath a mask. So it's a fascinating question. It's involved, it's drawn in, psychologists, sociologists historians, theater makers. Supreme Court Justices interestingly, have really been drawn to this subject because it has to do with evidence and how you evaluate evidence.
akespeare, Shakespeare's the [:You do not question this. You don't go there. And to me that's just fascinating, that taboo because if you look at the evidence, and I try to lay this out in the book, it's pretty clear that there's at least a question. It's at least a reasonable, it's something worth asking. So the fact that this is so touchy for people. I wanted to understand why, how did doubting Shakespeare become so taboo? And it's almost like a moral problem for people because he is this God figure it's immoral to question Shakespeare. There's actually a scholar in one of Britain's great Shakespeare scholars in Stratford upon even who I interview in the book a few years ago.
He said, it is immoral to question history and take credit away from William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Aen. Which is just a hilarious statement because. Moral to question, history, inquiry is the very basis of the historical discipline, isn't it? So it's a really funny topic. Surprisingly funny just because people get so, Ridiculous about it.
Yes.
efs, like you said. But it's [:I think about the court case that you referenced in 1964 of someone who died and left a third of her inheritance. To find the, to the Francis Bacon Society to find some of these manuscripts. This kind of dig deep thought process that you went through. Yeah it's
Elizabeth Winkler, author: the, it's the biggest mystery in the history of English literature, I think, who wrote the works of Shakespeare.
And so naturally people get drawn into it and they especially get drawn into it when they realize that a lot of what they've been taught about Shakespeare or what they thought about Shakespeare is pretty shaky and rests on. Imaginative conjecture over the years that scholars have built up to try to explain how these works were written.
tart scratching the surface, [:And that's part of the attraction of it. But it also is because I think it, it ends up being about bigger things even than Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare's so big. How can you say there's something bigger than Shakespeare? It's really about the problem of history, which is how we know what we think we know about the past.
It's about the problem of authority, of who has the authority to determine the truth about the past and these contesting versions of history that you get. And it's about the nature of belief. Which applies to so many topics across it
Mark Stinson, host: does, and I'm glad you brought this up because I did I was interested in this, the larger problem of historical truth, right?
of your family members says, [:And that's not how it happened at all. And there is this, bias towards subjectivity towards what one believes, really happened. And if you weren't there, then you might disagree.
Elizabeth Winkler, author: Yeah, it's the problem of arriving at objective historical truth about anything to do with the past because history is the accumulation of, little pieces of evidence that we find and put together and so much is missing.
And it's about how it's interpreted and it's interpreted differently by different people at different points in time, isn't it? So our accounts of the past change and they get rewritten as we discover more things or as new scholars come along and. Take the same evidence we've had and interpret it differently, or, bring their own perspective to the interpretation of the past.
g. It's constantly changing. [:Don't wanna say that. D n a evidence now proves that he did. And there's a whole, at Monticello, his home, there's a whole exhibition about it. This is just the nature of historical research and historical truth. It does change, but people have a really hard time letting go of the history that they first learned and the one that they believe in.
And when someone comes along and says, that might not be the case, something's wrong here. They really hold tight and try to defend. It's a, it's an interesting psychological phenomenon too, ultimately. The way people dig in and try to defend the version of history that they like and they became attached to and new ones feel threatening.
's the author of a brand new [:Did you come up with this premise of the book and then go out and find evidence? If or did you say, I have a question about this and I want to gather the bits and the stories and then see what comes out. I'm just curious as how the trail or the process worked for you.
Elizabeth Winkler, author: I had studied Shakespeare as an English literature student in college, in graduate school.
hether it's African American [:And I was really interested in, I remembered that there, there was this question about the authorship and I wanted to understand how it was possible that great mind like Henry James, mark, twin Walt Whitman, Alair Na, Supreme Court Justices. Why did they doubt Shakespeare? So I started, I just started reading about it.
And the moment you pick up, there are a lot of books on this topic. Most of them pretty academic and hard to access if you're just a general reader. But you get drawn in very quickly because, The problems with the evidence are so profound and so truly jaw-dropping that it really sucks you in.
And I just couldn't believe it. And I know this is the experience that other people have had too. When you're, it's just unbelievable. And you're shaking your head and wondering how is this not addressed in English literature or history departments? And I wrote The Atlantic article four years ago was Shakespeare Woman, which was just about a new candidate for the authorship.
was so explosive and I was, [:That's a, that's an uncomfortable experience, and your first instinct is to just shut off, the internet, Twitter, run away from it, distance yourself. And I did that for a little bit, but then I realized these reactions were so interesting, why were they so emotional? Why was a literary historical problem being framed?
As a moral issue. And it was almost like these attacks were planting signs that said, dig here. And it made me want to investigate further and understand what is really going on here that people don't want me to look too closely at. It was a risky thing, to decide that I was going to make a book out of this.
just had to put that aside, [:It, I thought it was true and interesting and therefore worthy of a book. So that was a, it was a sort of a personal journey I suppose I had to go on as a writer to Come to that position and not worry. Of course I still worry about the feedback, but, just put that aside.
And write something because. This is a worthwhile topic and it's fascinating, and I think readers will enjoy it. So you wanna talk more about the process, my research?
Mark Stinson, host: Yeah, and I think picking up there is, there was certainly a lot of, when you think about investigative journalism, there's a lot of mundane secondary searching and, records and references and so forth.
t these schools have thought [:Elizabeth Winkler, author: Some of them were Shakespeare scholars who, I'd read their work and they were very famous in their fields and I wanted to talk to them because I didn't think I could, you can't write a book about this without taking it to the scholars I set up interviews with them.
In some cases, there's one scholar who tries to get out of meeting with me and bails on the evening before our interview. He tries to, to cancel. And so there was a lot of sort of persuasion I had to use to get some of these people to talk with me. And I said, look, If you don't like my questions, you can check your tea at me.
I won't complain. And sometimes, you use humor and just a personal touch to reach people because ultimately it was silly to say, he's, he was being a coward, essentially, trying to, it was like, come on, this is Shakespeare. No one's life is at stake. No one's losing their rights. Let's just sit down and talk about this.
e way the professors tend to [:And one thing I had to decide to do in the book was, what do I make of those rejections of the people who wouldn't talk to me? And I realized that was part of the story. That I put them in the book their obstinacy and their sort of closed. Positions on this. You and I think they thought that by refusing to talk to me, they wouldn't be implicated.
Yes. But they're in there rejections.
Mark Stinson, host: I care if don't to, you're still making the book.
Elizabeth Winkler, author: One of them left wrote correspondence, wrote letters with. The Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the Late Justice John Paul Stevens. And so even though he wouldn't, even though this professor James Shapiro wouldn't speak with me, I had access to his correspondence with a Supreme Court justice.
orld of it's like this weird [:And when you research it and you start reading books and you discover YouTube videos and conferences that they have you just get to know that community. So I just started having conversations with people, exchanging emails, reaching out to them, and eventually, I set up these interviews where, And one I go and interview Alexander Wa, who's the grandson of the great English novelist, evil in wa and he's one of the sort of leading skeptics in Britain today who believes Shakespeare was a pseudonym for another author.
And there's a whole chapter where I spend with him in his country house in in England. And it's, he is, Quite a character really funny. And he pulls no punches. He just lets loose on the scholars and what he perceives to be their total idiocy, I guess on the topic. He's pretty entertaining.
g to think what people might [:But oh, he is, I don't know, Wolf Hall. He's plays Thomas Cromwell and Wolf Hall. That might be what people most recognize. And he, he's a, he's de devoted his life to Shakespeare as an actor and a director. And he also believes the plays were written by another person or group of people.
He takes more of a collaborative view of the players that they were written collaboratively. And he was very happy to talk. And so you just shout to these people and a lot of them are excited to share their views and their theories about the authorship. And people want to have their, often, they wanna have their voices heard.
m questions and, give them a [:It was fun to go around and have all those conversations and it becomes this journey for the reader through different theories, and I let you, I introduce you to the different theories and let the reader make up their mind about who they think the author was. And I'm not, I'm actually not arguing that it was a woman or that it was this particular person or that particular person.
It's about all the heresy and the difference that have been proposed over the years. Let the reader decide what they
Mark Stinson, host: think happened. That's right. And you mentioned a minute, moment ago that most of these books are at a very academic level but you chose to take a more general reader, really try to bring in maybe the layperson the mass reader instead of only the academics.
Yeah. What did you think that the rest of us, I'll say, could benefit from reading this book and learning about these controversies?
nd I thought that was, a big [:And a lot, a lot of them are, yeah, they're written in a maybe very academic way, or not, just, not super, but the thing is, this is fundamentally a mystery. It's a detective story and so the narrative structure. That it led itself to is inherently very gripping. If you just, if you use the mystery that's already built into this question to structure a story, you have a page turner.
So I think people just ha you people just haven't found the right. Format per perhaps, or structure. The biggest thing for me with this book was figuring out how to structure the narrative. Because it is a lot of information. It's about a lot of history and, literary discussion and going over several centuries and it's a massive information, but I put myself in the narrative.
nd interview people and as I [:Narrative voice. And I, I use the techniques, a little bit of thrillers, not, I don't know if I should say thrillers, but, suspense techniques where I let the reader know that this interview is coming up and they are excited about it. And then I move back into history for a little bit.
You have to eat your vegetables first before you come back to the fun stuff. Yes. Cause they have to know, they have to know this information to fully appreciate what's happening in the interview. And then I bring them back, so it's weaving things back and forth and playing with the reader and keeping them wanting more.
terviewed, you're doing your [:How does it feel to be on the other side of the microphone and notebook?
Elizabeth Winkler, author: It feels very odd indeed. I have to, I like being in control of an interview and being the one asking questions, it's also helpful to understand, you know the dynamics of an interview then, and you know what to be wary of.
But I hope it was fun to talk about the book. It's fun to
Mark Stinson, host: share it with people. Yes, indeed. And what's next for you? Is there anything else that you're beginning to formulate or think about? Even beyond the Shakespeare book
Elizabeth Winkler, author: right now I'll be doing book events and here in la, New York, DC and, various interviews, sharing the book, talking about it.
What's next? I'll probably continue writing essays and articles for now. I'll go back to something a little bit more low keyed. It's, it's an intense experience to work on a book for a couple years, so I look forward to stepping back from that for a little bit. But I. I do want to write another book because it was such an amazing thing at experience.
ker and a writer when you're [:My favorite journalist is Janet Malcolm, and I really. Used her as a sort of guiding light, but no one can tell you how to write your book. Even your editors can't tell you. So you really are on your own and you have a lot of dark periods that you go through and you just have to trust that you're, you, you are going to get through them.
much about the book writing [:Mark Stinson, host: again. Yeah. Fantastic. And leave us with some inspiration or encouragement for the writers who were out there in the audience working on a book like yours, where they've been putting all the pieces and all the, evidence and all the references and interviews together and say, wow, this seems a little overwhelming.
Yeah. How do we get over that hump and still get the workout into the world? It
Elizabeth Winkler, author: is so overwhelming when you compile all that information. There's so many stages of organization. You have a chapter outlined to begin with, and you have some, a sort of structure to organize all the research you've done.
But inevitably, at least in my case, I found the structure changes. The chapters get moved around as you're working on it, and that's okay. That's just what happens. You, as you're doing it, you realize this needs to go here, that needs to go there, and it keeps evolving and shifting and that can be stressful, but that's just part of the process.
m the screen when I'm stuck, [:You don't know what's wrong and you keep going over and over it and you won't, don't wanna let yourself get up from your chair until you've got it right. But then I would get up, I would go for a walk or go for a run, do something totally mindless. And somehow it's this amazing thing that when your body moves, your mind starts moving too in a different way.
And psychologists have actually done studies of this, why so many writers are walkers because something about moving your body just helps, like your mind shift gears and I would somehow, the problems would work itself out in my head as soon as I just got away from my desk and did something else.
And it's really it was almost miraculous. I love that, that I can rely out on it. I know that if I just take a breather, Walk away, do something active, do, get out of your head and be in your body again, because you get so detached sometimes from your physical world when you're writing.
And [:Mark Stinson, host: think. Yeah. Thanks for sharing your experience. We really appreciate it. Congrats again on the book. And listeners, you can follow Elizabeth and her work at Journalist Winkler.
Dot com and she's got a terrific Instagram account. You'll wanna sign up. I'll put all these links in the show notes, Elizabeth, so people can find you and of course get the book. And I think it's great that it's online, but I love seeing a book at the book seller. There's nothing like seeing it live, right?
Yes. Today. Go
Elizabeth Winkler, author: get
Mark Stinson, host: it. Yeah. Very good. I guess it's been Elizabeth Winkler, a journalist and a book critic, and now an author of a book. Shakespeare was a woman and other heresies. It's just released from Simon and Schuster. Listeners, come back again next time. We're gonna continue these round the world travels.
ve journeys and stamping our [:So until next time, I'm Mark Stinson and we're unlocking your world of creativity. Bye for now.
