She believes there is plenty of evidence
Shakespeare’s plays were written by a woman and the clues are there in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, according to US author Jodi Picoult.
…
She believes there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare did not write the works – most damningly, she says, a man who did not secure education for his daughters could not possibly have written “proto-feminist” characters.
Secure education for his daughters how? Send them to Oxford?
Moreover, Picoult says Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew that he was not the real author.
On the contrary, they knew that he was. Ben Jonson had always felt rivalrous toward him, and scornful of his lack of erudition or classical education…until he read the Folio and realized how wrong he’d been.
“I think that, back then, people in theatre knew that William Shakespeare was a catch-all name for a lot of different types of authors. I think they expected it to be a joke that everyone would get. And we’ve all lost the punchline over 400 years,” she told an audience at the Hay Festival as she launched the novel, By Any Other Name.
Huh. Well I think he was really the child of Cleopatra and J. Edgar Hoover, and we’ve all laughed that off over 400 years.
English people are resistant to the theory, she added. “Shakespeare has gone beyond being a playwright – sometimes I think he’s a religion. And if you talk to people who are religious and you push hard enough, eventually the answer is, ‘Because that’s what it is!’ There is this blind faith in Shakespeare.”
There’s a reason for the status of Shakespeare. What is that reason? It’s because he was good at what he did. Really really extraordinarily good. Unusually good. Better than even very clever people routinely are. He was out of the ordinary that way. People noticed. It’s not blind faith; the evidence is right there for anyone to see.
“When he died, he was not buried in Westminster Abbey, although a lot of playwrights you don’t even know were buried in Westminster Abbey. And when he died, no other playwrights of the time seemed to mourn him publicly or talk about his legacy.
Wrong. As I said: Ben Jonson.
Also, we wouldn’t know about the mourning or the talk, because it wasn’t recorded. Very few things were recorded. It’s not clever sleuthing to decide that people weren’t saying X when we have so few records of people saying anything. There were no obits in the Times or the Guardian, no discussions on the BBC, no 500 page biographies in every Waterstones, but that doesn’t mean nobody talked about his legacy. They just didn’t tell us about it, because they didn’t have the technology or the habits that go with the technology.
Diawl! (Welsh for ‘the devil’). These people are utterly depressing, Marlovians (CM was not killed, but escaped to Italy where he sent back plays in the name of Shakespeare), Baconians, and the supporters of that poetaster the Earl of Oxford who died before a number of Shakespeare’s plays were written, and now Bassanio. But, as I have discovered, in challenging the pathetic and conspiratorial ideas of Alec Waugh who discovers ‘codes’ everywhere and is wholly dishonest & cynical, no amount of evidence (and there is quite a bit) or demonstrations that there is no ‘code’ will dissuade these people. Just don’t give the idiots space in magazines & newspapers or time on air. Alec Waugh was in it for the publicity & the money, and so, no doubt, is Jodi Picoult.
There’s plenty of evidence that Jodi Picoult is a fiction writer.
Sigh. This is getting tiresome. It’s time to set the record straight. Forget the Oxfordians, the Marlovian’s, the Stradfordians. It was I. I wrote “Shakespeare”. I forged the whole history—all those references to Shakespeare, all those supposed productions through the years, yea, even the movies. It was I, and I alone.
Well ok then. There’s no more to be said. And thank you, much appreciated.
Glad to be of service. I trust this will put all debate to an end.
My husband and I had to agree not to talk about this, because he is an Oxfordian. The way I told him is this: Scholars of Shakespeare accept that Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name. I don’t like it when amateurs ignore the settled science in my field, or think they know more than the scientists who put in the hard years of study and work; I am going to grant the same courtesy to the English scholars that I expect for myself. If there is real evidence, that might change, but none of it holds up.
Every time I’ve ever paid the slightest bit of attention to Shakespeare deniers, it always comes down to a snobbish incredulity that a mere son of a glovemaker could write the things he did. Picoult is just doing a variation on that: she likes some of Shakespeare’s female characters, and has therefore concluded that he couldn’t possibly have been sophisticated enough to write them.
Another obvious flaw in her “reasoning,” if we can call it that, is that Shakespeare’s plays were quite popular in their time. If his works were too “proto-feminist” to have been written by a man — if it’s just inconceivable that a man could have written them — then surely they would have been too “proto-feminist” for Elizabethan audiences.
People are not expressing blind faith when they respond that way, but rather exasperation. This is the natural response when someone rejects accepted fact while offering no good reason for it; worse still when the person does so with a smug or condescending manner. Fake erudition deserves exasperation.
“Secure education for his daughters how? Send them to Oxford?”
Education is not a direct quotation; the closest seems to be:
“The man who wrote those characters would have taught his girls how to read.”
@Screechy Monkey, #7
And if any audience is going to have proto-femisim be too much, it’s an audience with the Queen of England.
…Then, didn’t his [sic] works lose favour after the first Elizabethean era…and resurge in the second? It all fits!
I am sorry, Holms, but you seem to be saying the opposite of what you seem to be saying. Could you explain whose is the ‘fake erudition’? There is a great deal of evidence for Shakespeare’s writing the plays. It is not difficult to come by.
And Deep Thinking: girls, unless they were from an aristocratic or wealthy family, often did not receive much of an education in those days (the grammar schools were for boys), and Stratford was in those days a small market town. Shakespeare was mostly in London, working, and not in Stratford, so he would not have been able to teach his daughters himself. It is quite possible that both Susanna (who was married to a literate doctor and has left a fairly decent signature) and Judith were both able to read to an extent, but not to write — this was not uncommon.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘the second Elizabethean (sic) era’. Shakespeare’s plays were seldom performed after his death, since the custom was to put on new plays (by such as Middleton and Massinger), and then came the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth during which the performance of plays was mostly banned, and the Restoration, which brought French fashions to Britain. The staging of Shakespeare’s plays began again in the late18th century.
#10 Tim
I think you mistook me. The fake erudition is on the part of the writer of the words I quoted, Jodi Picoult. She complains in that excerpt that people eventually revert to ‘it just is’, which she interprets as blind faith; I assert instead that it is justified exasperation at her boring schtick.
Oh, sorry, Deep Thinking. Obviously you mean by the second Elizabethan era the reign of Elizabeth II. But the resurgence in the staging of Shakespeare’s plays began in the 18th century, not in the 20th, though people like William Poel & Harley Granville Barker rightly brought in staging that was closer to Elizabethan & Jacobean practice, and avoided the savage cuts that had to be made to plays in order to allow for lengthy and unnecessary changes of scene.
Sorry, Holms. got it! My mind doesn’t seem to be working at its best today.
Most of Shakespeare’s life was under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who was a wildly successful monarch. While she wasn’t a feminist, one of the best rulers in English history happened to be a woman. That obviously would have influenced the way playwrights saw women at the time of her rule.
Also, the Taming of the sodding Shrew? Othello? MacBeth? Feminist?
There are enough talented female authors in the real world (many of whom were suppressed by the patriarchy) without the need to pretend William Shakespeare was a lady.
Enheduanna of Babylon, for instance. She was writing poetry almost two thousand years before Homer, Pindar, Virgil or Lucretius:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221025-enheduanna-the-worlds-first-named-author
Then there’s Sappho, Corinna and Praxilla from Ancient Greece; Sulpicia I and Sulpicia II from Ancient Rome;
Lady Murasaki Shikibu from Heian-era Japan; Christine de Pizan from Medieval France, Aphra Behn from Restoration England; then on to Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot…
Bruce – oh, Othello, yes – or proto-feminist or whatever you like to call it. Othello is wrong and what he does is wrong. Same sitch all over again with The Winter’s Tale. In both plays the wronged woman has a fierce woman upbraiding the hateful suspicious man and defending the maligned woman. I’ve read quite a bit of Shakespeare commentary and I haven’t seen this pattern discussed much, despite trying. It’s especially interesting because the normal pattern was the “bitch betrays good man” one. Shaky was doing an odd thing in flipping the pattern.
One could see Lady MacBeth as feminist in a way – she’s evil but she’s not a vapid non-entity. Rosalind and Viola basically carry their respective plays. Beatrice is Benedick’s match. Etc.
It’s literally the plot of her new novel! It’s as if, when “The Prague Cemetery” was released, Umberto Eco had given interviews declaring that he had cracked the mystery of the origin of The Protocols. Talk about “high on your own supply” …
I’ve read, in the distant past, an argument that even Taming of the Shrew is proto-feminist work, in a subversive and satiric way, in that the framing of the play often seems to put the audience’s sympathies more with Katherine than with Petruchio. Not sure if I still buy that, but it’s obvious Shakespeare’s views on gender roles were at least somewhat advanced compared to his peers’.
Given that all female parts in those days were necessarily played by young men, and that Shakespeare wrote really good parts for even the minor characters, methinks the lady protests ‘feminism’ from a twenty-first century mindset. The characters behaved like full human beings because they were played by people whom Shakespeare regarded as full human beings.
If that were the reason then all Elizabethan and Jacobean plays would have had female characters who behaved like full human beings, but alas they didn’t. Shakespeare was downright weird that way.