Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
A thrillingly provocative investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy… and who the Bard might really be.
“Elizabeth Winkler is blessed with the clear-eyed wit of a heroine in a Shakespearean comedy. Her undoing of the fools in the forest of the authorship question is iconoclasm As You Like It—joy to behold, lesson for us all.”
—Lewis Lapham, founder of Lapham’s Quarterly
How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature
“An extraordinarily brilliant and scholarly work written with an unyielding sleuthing instinct, this page-turner is mesmerizing. Sparkling with pleasurably naughty moments, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies exposes the myopia of established scholars and leaves no stone unturned.”
—André Aciman, PhD, professor of comparative literature and New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name
“Deeply researched and fearlessly reported, this book explores the ‘literary malpractice’ and mob mentality of elite Shakespeare scholars invested in maintaining comfortable yet deeply problematic narratives. Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies is, at heart, an impassioned call to re-examine history and evidence (and lack thereof)—and to pursue scholarly truth even in the face of vicious opposition.”
—Lesley Blume, literary historian and New York Times bestselling author of Everybody Behaves Badly
Elizabeth Winkler is a journalist and book critic based in Washington, DC. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Economist, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her master's in English literature from Stanford University. Her essay in The Atlantic, "Was Shakespeare A Woman?" was selected for The Best American Essays 2020.
Write to her at zwinkler89@gmail.com.
@elizwinkler on Twitter
@elizabethlaurenw on Instagram