Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies Quotes

“If history gets distorted by tradition, it also gets distorted by assumptions that documented history is the whole history: that recorded truth is the complete truth.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“It is true, of course, that Shakespeare transcends borders and cultures, but as the scholar Michael Dobson has noted, “that Shakespeare was declared to rule world literature at the same time that Britannia was declared to rule the waves may, indeed, be more than a coincidence.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Shakespeare’s first critic was a woman. In 1664 Margaret Cavendish, the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle sometimes known as “Mad Madge,” wrote the first critical prose essay on Shakespeare, marveling at his ability to dissolve entirely into his characters—to embody them, even the women.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“It is hard to say exactly why Shakespeare became “divine,” and Jonson or Beaumont or Fletcher didn’t. Greatness is nebulous. It depends not only on the intrinsic qualities of a work but also on the extrinsic forces that sweep in to lift it up.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Scholars have protested that the engraver was merely incompetent. “Droeshout’s deficiencies are, alas, only too gross,” sighed Professor Samuel Schoenbaum. But it is hard to believe that a professionally commissioned artist would be so inept as to accidentally make two left arms, two right eyes, a huge head, and all of the other alleged deformities. The First Folio was an expensive undertaking, several years in the making. The anti-theatrical puritan William Prynne complained that “Shakespeare’s plays are printed in the best crown paper, far better than most bibles.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“The suspicion has arisen that the portrait’s deformities were, as the anonymous tailor suggested, intentional—that it is a joke portrait depicting a fool as the author. Two left arms signal left-handed writing, which in ancient tradition is associated with deception. “Writing with the left hand is to make some secret circumvention, to cunny-catch, deceive, or defame,” wrote Artemidorus in the second century AD. (His work was translated into English in 1606, and widely read and quoted.) Are the two left arms meant to suggest that the figure is a deceiver—a fake?”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Shakespeare’s First Folio. Below the title sits the famous portrait of Shakespeare known as the Droeshout portrait, after its engraver, Martin Droeshout. It is a famously awful portrait. Critics over the years have complained that the head is huge—“ much too big for the body.” The skull is of “horrible hydrocephalus development.” The mouth is too small. The ear is malformed. The hair is lopsided, like a bad wig.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“While the hyphenated name “Shake-speare” would appear frequently on title pages over the coming decades, it never appeared hyphenated in the Stratford man’s records.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Three of the signatures appear on his will; the others on a deposition, a property deed, and a mortgage deed. They are all spelled differently.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Shakespeare wrote as one at ease in the multilingual circles of the European Renaissance.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“The death of the author is the birth of the reader,” Roland Barthes declared in 1967, liberating the text from the interpretative tyranny of the author. Shakespeare’s works are the quintessentially liberated texts, limitless in their possible meanings, and Shakespeare is the deadest author—always already absent, as the theorists like to say. His death has meant, above all, the birth of the scholar.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“It is immoral to question history and to take credit away from William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.” Immoral to question history—when inquiry is the very basis of the historical discipline!”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“The Cambridge scholar Juliet Dusinberre argued that Shakespeare's drama "deserves the name feminist," for in his plays, "The struggle for women is to be human in a world which declares them only female”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the same to them. They know the difference, but they also know how to blink it. They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption log to bloom into a fact when they have the handling of it.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Nobody really gets cross about anything, really, nobody loses their temper much, unless they sense that they're on weak ground. You know, if they were that confident, there'd be absolutely no need to be rude and abusive and silly. Every one of their reactions i a sign that they know they're on weak ground.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“The Victorians invented the Birthplace, as the scholar Julia Thomas writes, inventing in the process a Shakespearean tradition that still holds power today.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“adding that the Birthplace was a sweeter shrine for the very absence of evidence—for the faith it required of its pious visitors.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“The Morning Herald worried that the Birthplace would be turned into snuffboxes by the French, pipes by the Dutch, or card cases by the Chinese. The real threat, of course, was the Americans. The Times reported that “one or two enthusiastic Jonathans have already arrived from America, determined to see what dollars can do in taking it away. The timber, it is said, are all sound, and it would be no very difficult matter to set it on wheels and make an exhibition of it.” The American showman P. T. Barnum (of Barnum & Bailey Circus) was circling the property, reportedly intent on shipping it back to the States and making it part of a traveling show.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“The relics were eventually exposed in an article in Bentley’s Miscellany, a literary magazine, which observed that four different chairs, each purporting to be “Shakespeare’s chair,” had been sold over the years, each made by a well-known local craftsman. “As long as this was confined to chairs, tables, jugs, and walking-sticks, and the pious fraud benefited poor people at the expense of rich credulity, there was no great harm done.” The real fraud, the article suggested, was the Birthplace itself.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“wandered through Stratford, waiting to hear back. The main downtown area was small and pedestrian, centered on the local tourist industry. Most of the buildings were in the half-timbered Tudor style, lending an air of Renaissance authenticity to the town. Quaint street signs helpfully funneled bumbling tourists toward the attractions: “Shakespeare’s Birthplace” or “Holy Trinity Church and Shakespeare’s Grave.” On High Street, I passed the Hathaway Tea Rooms and a pub called the Garrick Inn. Farther along, a greasy-looking cafe called the Food of Love, a cutesy name taken from Twelfth Night (“ If music be the food of love, play on”). The town was Elizabethan kitsch—plus souvenir shops, a Subway, a Starbucks, a cluster of high-end boutiques catering to moneyed out-of-towners, more souvenir shops. Shakespeare’s face was everywhere, staring down from signs and storefronts like a benevolent big brother. The entrance to the “Old Bank estab. 1810” was gilded ornately with an image of Shakespeare holding a quill, as though he functioned as a guarantee of the bank’s credibility. Confusingly, there were several Harry Potter–themed shops (House of Spells, the Creaky Cauldron, Magic Alley). You could almost feel the poor locals scheming how best to squeeze a few more dollars out of the tourists. Stratford and Hogwarts, quills and wands, poems and spells. Then again, maybe the confusion was apt: Wasn’t Shakespeare the quintessential boy wizard, magically endowed with inexplicable powers?”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Reverend Edmondson’s chapter, which began ominously: “Shakespeare has enemies. Wherever one starts from, the questions and discussions about authorship are basically antagonistic.” Edmondson went on at length against “anti-Shakespearians,” deeming them “parasitic.” He deplored the assumption that it is “always acceptable to challenge or contradict a knowledgeable and expert authority. It is not,” he wrote. Questioning the authorship is “ultimately a dangerous phenomenon.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“I pulled out my dog-eared copy of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, which Stanley Wells had coedited with Reverend Dr. Paul Edmondson, a priest of the Church of England and the Birthplace’s “head of knowledge.” The cover featured an image of the actor Joseph Fiennes from the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love. He looked pensive and brooding, in a loose linen shirt with a quill balanced between ink-stained fingers. A fictional Shakespeare seemed an odd choice for a scholarly book that claimed to present “evidence,” though, if you saw the matter from an anti-Stratfordian perspective, as a book presenting a fictional author, it was perfect.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“For the truly devout, there is a waymarked footpath between London and Stratford, “Shakespeare’s Way,” intended to approximate the route he might have taken to and from his hometown.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“June 2021 the papers were cackling over Boris Johnson’s much anticipated biography Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius, which had been announced with some fanfare in 2015 and slated for publication in 2016 to mark the four-hundred-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s death but which, five years later, had yet to materialize.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Professor Wells. Despite having written several books on the authorship question, he apparently did not like to discuss the topic.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Bard Blood at the Palace,” the Daily Mail announced, reporting that Professor Wells had “crossed swords” with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Wells had apparently asked the queen’s consort if he was a heretic. Philip, never one to tread lightly, responded, “All the more so after reading your book.” Meanwhile, Prince Charles had written to Professor Jonathan Bate, then at Oxford, asking for a list of arguments backing Shakespeare. Was the Prince of Wales plagued by a faltering faith? If he had doubts, it would not be wise to let on—not as president of the Royal Shakespeare Company and not, certainly, as he approached his throne.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Bard Blood at the Palace,” the Daily Mail announced, reporting that Professor Wells had “crossed swords” with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Wells had apparently asked the queen’s consort if he was a heretic. Philip, never one to tread lightly, responded, “All the more so after reading your book.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Wells denigrates skeptics as “anti-Shakespearian,” a clever rhetorical move, making anyone who doubts the authorship “against” Shakespeare, though all the doubters I know love Shakespeare. It is their love that made them look too closely.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“stating that those who doubt Shakespeare’s authorship suffer from a “psychological aberration,” exploiting prejudices against the mentally ill to discredit anyone who questioned his view. Challenged to validate his claims with empirical evidence, Wells removed the statement.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Sir Stanley Wells. Wells is Britain’s leading Shakespeare authority, the one who declared it “immoral” to question history and “take credit away” from Shakespeare. For many years, he was professor of Shakespeare studies and director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, as well as chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the organization that oversees the Birthplace.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature