Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature by Elizabeth Winkler

Author:Elizabeth Winkler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Except, of course, that it hadn’t. Shakespeare scholars were no more willing to accept the Oxfordian heresy than they had been to accept the Baconian one. Looney’s book was “a sad waste of print and paper,” Alfred Pollard wrote in the Times Literary Supplement in March 1920, setting the tone for the academic dismissal of the Oxfordian theory. “Almost any man’s life could be illustrated from Shakespeare’s plays,” insisted Pollard, a professor at the University of London. (If that is so, Looney responded in a letter, please explain why “it has been impossible to do anything of the kind for either William Shakespere or Francis Bacon.”) Critics made the predictable jibes about Looney’s surname (What a looney!), attacked skeptics as snobs, dismissed the biographical parallels to Oxford’s life as mere coincidences, and maintained that Shakespeare’s works were the product of his miraculous imagination.

Their main argument was that Oxford’s death in 1604 ruled out his authorship, based on the assumption that the plays were written between roughly 1590 and 1612. But the dating was originally suggested to fit the life span of the man from Stratford. As the scholar E. K. Chambers wrote, it is “a hypothesis which… is consistent with itself and with the known events of Shakespeare’s external life.” No one knows exactly when the plays were written, only when they were published and sometimes when they were performed. Scholars disagree among themselves about dates of composition. Sidney Lee gave All’s Well That Ends Well a composition date of 1595; others placed it earlier, around 1590–92, and still others as late as 1602—a twelve-year span. Scholars see jokes about “equivocation” in Macbeth as a reference to a series of trials in 1606, which rules out Oxford, but the term equivocation was already in use in trials in 1581 and 1595. As Nicholas Brooke, who edited the Oxford University Press edition of Macbeth, writes, “There is no evidence to contradict 1606, but there is also very little to support it.” The Tempest, which features a shipwreck on an island, is dated to 1610–11 based on a 1609 letter describing a real-life shipwreck on the island of Bermuda. But there were many accounts of shipwrecks that could have inspired the play—and the 1609 letter wasn’t published until 1625 anyway, making it an unlikely source. (Oxfordians argue that the play was more likely based on Decades of the New World, a series of reports published in 1511 about voyages to the Americas.) If scholars don’t know exactly when the plays were written, how can they be certain Oxford’s death ruled him out?

Coverage of Looney’s book was wildly uneven. While English professors trashed it, reviewers outside of academia praised it. “This is a remarkable book,” the Bookman Journal reported. “It is to be hoped that those who have preconceived opinions will attempt to put them aside and judge the work without prejudice.” The Halifax Evening Courier wrote that Looney “makes a far stronger case for Oxford than has ever been made out for Bacon.

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