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Was Shakespeare a woman?
26 Plays5 years ago
Josh and M discuss the latest contender for the throne of Shakespeare, Emilia Bassano.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
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Transcript
Introduction and Lighthearted Banter
00:00:09
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Edison and hey Noni Noni, who's that sitting next to me? I was going to introduce the biscuits. Our new third host, the biscuits of the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Josh, would you like a biscuit? I will.
00:00:37
Speaker
Should I eat it noisily into my microphone? Indeed. I won't eat mine simultaneously because then all you'll get is the sound and chewing. See, it's welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
Humor in Shakespeare's Work
00:00:47
Speaker
Hey, prissy conspiracy podcast guide-o. I don't know. I'm trying to do Elizabethan. Flurry language there does make it sound as if I'm trying to do very bad fake Italian. Blow and blow and crack your cheeks.
00:01:04
Speaker
That's what I say. I mean, I'd like to say Shakespeare is classier than fart jokes, but that's not actually true at all, is it? Shakespeare is all about fart jokes. There are a lot of fart jokes in Shakespeare. Sorry, I'm eating and speaking at the same time. That's an incredible idea. And unprofessional. Rather nice vegan cookies we have here. Made of 100% vegan. So yes, we're talking about Shakespeare.
Gender Roles in Shakespeare
00:01:26
Speaker
Again, as it turns out, although it has been quite some time. Actually a lot longer.
00:01:33
Speaker
than I remember. Yeah, it seems like it was just yesterday. Just like the Elizabethan era. Exactly. Oh, those grand old days where men slept on wigs to pretend to be women on the stage. And presumably off the stage as well. And women slept on men's names and pretended to be men when they published stuff? Yep. And of course that episode of Blackadder.
00:01:59
Speaker
Well, I'm going to finish this mouthful. Unless you have anything else to get into. Oh no, I've got to do the customary pouring of a glass of whiskey. Whiskey and a biscuit. You make it sound. Sounds like a euphemism. You make it sound as if that's the most debauched thing you've ever seen. And let's face it. It is. I've led a sheltered life. Well, I'm going to keep chewing. You're going to keep supping. Let's play a chime and move on to the main content. I think we should, yeah.
Shakespeare Authorship Controversy
00:02:33
Speaker
Hey, nonny, nonny, blow winds and crack thy cheeks, poor toms are cold. That was a reading from Wilfred Shakeseen's Two and a Half Spleens. Shakeseen, considered to be a dramatist of this era, is well known to us all, but just how much do we really know of the person Bren Franklin called a writer of many misspelled words? For example, did Shakeseen wear a beard? And if he did, was it his? Or just when he rented?
00:03:02
Speaker
The mystery of Wilfred Shakespeare has vexed hardly any academics, mostly because he doesn't exist. Or does he? But one Elizabethan playwright who has fascinated actors, Supreme Court judges and writers is one William Shakespeare, the man many of you know as the author of at least six different variations of his own name.
00:03:26
Speaker
Yes, today on the podcast we travel back to a topic we covered 150 episodes ago, back in the halcyon days of 2017. That is the Shakespeare authorship controversy. I meet a new contender for the throne of Shakespeare, one Emilia Bassano. We'll ask what's the evidence, and also, how likely is it that Shakespeare really was a woman? We'll also ask if William Shakespeare was really Wilfred Shakespeare. No, we won't.
00:03:52
Speaker
What we will ask and will contemplate is why is it when it comes to questioning Shakespeare's identity the debate is largely constrained to people who aren't academic scholars of the Elizabethan age. Here's all this and more after the time.
00:04:14
Speaker
So I guess it's been long enough that we might actually need a bit of a refresher on the Shakespeare controversy for anyone who might not be familiar with it. What is the controversy around Shakespeare? So for a while now, and I say for a while, this has really only been since the 19th century. Certain people have claimed that William Shakespeare, Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon, isn't actually Shakespeare, the author of the Shakespearean canon.
00:04:41
Speaker
As I say, this came about in the 19th century. One of the descendants of Sir Francis Bacon decided that her ancestor wasn't already famous enough and suggested that there were clues in the Corpus of Shakespearean works.
00:04:56
Speaker
but actually Francis Bacon was the author of the Shakespearean plays and this is basically the first authorship controversy theory and then this extended to claims that Kit Marlow wrote the plays which is slightly problematic because Kit Marlow basically dies at a young age and whoever Shakespeare was continued publishing for quite some time afterwards
00:05:20
Speaker
So the conspiracy theories about Kit Mallow as the author either claim he wrote all the plays before he died and then some kind of cartel just basically released a play every year or so or Kit Mallow faked his death a claim which is actually vaguely plausible because Kit Mallow was also a spy for the British crown at that particular time and would often go to France described as a priest but disguised as a priest which is why he was described as a priest
00:05:49
Speaker
uh to to to fry to spy on the french government i'm really more spoolering my words yes i need the whiskey to loosen the tongue and then more recently the Shakespeare author controversy has focused on the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere who people claim has the right kind of smarmy
Theories on Shakespeare's Authorship
00:06:13
Speaker
academic well-travelled background to make him the perfect fit for Shakespeare, although once again we have a problem and that Dver dies before such plays as the Tempest is written. So once again there's a question of how was Shakespeare writing plays after Shakespeare's death if Shakespeare was actually not William Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.
00:06:38
Speaker
and 150 episodes more or less ago, we covered these contenders and more. But there's a new contender for the throne of Shakespeare. Joshua, introduce the world to Amelia. Indeed. And it should be clear, everybody agrees. There was a man called William Shakespeare at the time, but it's whether or not that man is actually the author of the works that are ascribed to William Shakespeare.
00:07:06
Speaker
And yeah, I gather for a while people had been remarking, gosh, isn't it strange to think that this man who lived in Stratford-on-Avon and didn't really travel around much and was the son of a Glover and... He was the son of Julian Glover? He was the son of Donald Glover.
00:07:26
Speaker
Donald Glover and Julian Glover had a child in the past. This is astounding information. So people had said, you know, isn't it weird to think that a guy who from a seemingly limited background could write all these things about far away lands and court intrigue and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then more recently, it's been going along at least since sometime early in the century, people have suggested
00:07:54
Speaker
Now, we've been looking at these other candidates for who might have really written Shakespeare's plays. We've only been looking at men because of our bias towards male authorship and so on and so on and so forth. Could it not have been? But also the notion that it was thought that in the Elizabethan era women were forbidden from publishing. Well, indeed they were. So there was a kind of, well, it had to be a man because the only people who could write plays were men. Although we'll get to that in just a minute.
00:08:20
Speaker
And yet, if we're going to run with the idea that the real author of Shakespeare's plays published not under their own name, but under the name of William Shakespeare, possibly it could have been a woman. And some people, having looked through Shakespeare's works, have decided, yeah, maybe Shakespeare was a woman, for the reason, basically, that
00:08:44
Speaker
So many of Shakespeare's plays feature women in quite sort of strong feisty roles. There are the theme in numerous of his plays of women going in disguise to sort of to pass as a man or something like that. There are women who are sort of headstrong and reject the rules of their society, disobey their fathers, be willful and so on. The fact that
00:09:10
Speaker
Shakespeare, obviously a lot of Shakespeare's plays were based on existing stories, traditional tales and so on, but in many cases he sort of quote-unquote feminised them. He'd bring in more female characters or he'd make the female characters more prominent. Or he would change the gender of a character. So in the traditional story from, say, Patellus, it would be two men in the scene and the Shakespearean version would be a man and a woman or two women instead.
00:09:40
Speaker
Shakespeare's plays seem to be so good at writing female characters and seem to be so favorable towards them, although or not, we'll talk about that later, that possibly the reason for that is that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by a woman.
00:09:58
Speaker
And there have been a few, there have been more than one woman suggested as possibly the true author of Shakespeare's plays, but the top contender at the moment in this arena seems to be one Amelia Bassano.
Focus on Amelia Bassano
00:10:10
Speaker
Now I just want to interject here, the reason why we're doing this particular episode is because of Radio New Zealand, which is basically, it isn't our public broadcaster, but it plays the role of our public broadcaster here in Aotearoa New Zealand. When I was having
00:10:27
Speaker
Breakfast must have been a fairly late breakfast. The interview played just between 9 and 10 on Monday. Someone was being interviewed on national radio. Elizabeth Winkler. For some reason I wanted to call it Andrea Winkler. I have no idea why. So Elizabeth Winkler was being interviewed by Jimora on this very topic.
00:10:51
Speaker
So let's go through Winkler's argument for Amelia, which is the name of my new novel coming up next week. So yes, Elizabeth Winkler had an article in The Atlantic earlier this month where she puts forward the theory that Shakespeare was actually Amelia Bassano.
00:11:10
Speaker
She wasn't the first to do it. She based some of her stuff on her conversations with a guy called John Hudson, who runs an all-woman Shakespeare troupe, I think. And he's been saying since 2007 or thereabouts that he thinks Amelia Bassano could have written Shakespeare's works.
00:11:26
Speaker
So they suggest her because she's basically a good fit. She is the daughter of an Elizabethan court musician who was born in, she was born in England I believe, but he was born in Italy. Yes, so she comes from a Venetian family and that's going to be important very soon.
00:11:50
Speaker
And she was an interesting character in her own right. She was the mistress of a baron. I forget which baron, but one of them... There were a lot of barons at that time. They kept on breathing because they kept on having mistresses. Apparently lived quite a happy life as his mistress, but eventually she got pregnant, got married off to a different court musician. I've seen her referred to as minor gentry, so she was sort of not...
00:12:17
Speaker
Not one of the big knobs, but a small little knob. Kind of knob your twizzle. Exactly. And she was a poet. So she was a writer, she was a published writer. Indeed, she was the first woman to have a complete work of poetry published in English. She was only, I think, the fourth woman to have poetry published in English.
00:12:40
Speaker
ever and the first to have a complete set of works. I believe the other one sort of had published smaller pamphlets or extracts and so on. So in 1611, she published Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Hail God, King of the Jews, under her own name.
00:12:57
Speaker
She was something of a proto-feminist. Apparently, the work there is one of the poems is called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, which is about the crucifixion of Jesus, but told from a woman's point of view, the dedications in her book are all to woman. She's very apparently sort of put forward the support of the ideas of sort of womanly virtues and piety, but also
00:13:23
Speaker
societal egalitarianism and so on. So she's been credited as being quite a sort of early feminist as well.
00:13:30
Speaker
Now, in the official narrative, there is the suggestion, she knew Shakespeare, Shakespeare knew her, and there is the suggestion that she was actually the dark lady who comes up in various of Shakespeare's sonnets. I don't know a lot of Shakespeare's sonnets, but I understand he sort of contrasts what is there, it's like a fair maiden and a dark lady or something, and the fair maiden is more sort of the romantic love than the dark lady is the slightly, slightly saucier, rumpy-pumpy,
00:13:56
Speaker
The one who lives in the north across the wall, bringing winter to the world, things like that. A sinister figure, and yet also a beguiling one. Indeed. And in the official story, there are suggestions that she may have actually contributed to Shakespeare a little bit. We know a lot about her from the diaries of one, Simon Foreman.
00:14:20
Speaker
who was an astrologer, occultist and herbalist of the time. She was a patient of his and apparently in his diaries, he writes about her sort of quizzing him on occult matters, which has been taken by some as her researching information for Macbeth, which she then passed on to Shakespeare to help him write Macbeth.
00:14:39
Speaker
There had been suggestions in the past that she had been the inspiration or possibly even a collaborator in some of Shakespeare's writings, but now some people have come along and said maybe she was actually the writer of Shakespeare's works herself.
00:14:52
Speaker
Yes, so the kind of evidence that Winkler puts forward is that, for one thing, Amelia is a fairly common name in the Shakespearean canon. And this is unusual because it's a fairly rare name in English literature of the time. I think somewhere they said the statistic was that Amelia is tied with Catherine for the most common name of Shakespearean character, Shakespearean woman.
00:15:17
Speaker
Yes, so it's a name which is really found elsewhere and yet Shakespeare uses it all the time. And then you get this claim that because Shakespeare isn't attested to as a writer in writings of the time, and I'll clarify that,
00:15:35
Speaker
So Shakespeare is named on many of his plays and it's actually quite unusual for the time. Almost over, well I'll say almost over, over 50% of Elizabethan plays are unattributed because it wasn't common for writers to get credits for plays. It was the troop that got the crew credits, the the acting crew basically, or the performance team. Writers weren't particularly important. Shakespeare is unusual in that Shakespeare
00:16:05
Speaker
fairly early on in their career starts crediting their plays to them. Now William Shakespeare was a member of his acting troupe and suddenly there are all these Shakespearean plays with his names on it but there's very little writing by William Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon which basically is
00:16:30
Speaker
September 11th. Sat down and rattled off the soliloquy to Macbeth, then had lunch with Queen Elizabeth, looking forward to dinner tonight with Mary Sue. There's actually no examples of that in Shakespeare's own writings. Which are known to exist for other writers. There are diaries, there are sort of receipts for professional writing done from other writers and so on, but apparently no such thing exists for Shakespeare.
00:16:56
Speaker
Yeah, so these are kind of lacuna in the evidential record here. Shakespeare never sits down and claims to have written any of the plays. We simply have attribution and other people saying, well, Shakespeare wrote those particular plays, isn't he grand? So the fact there's none of this kind of attribution by Shakespeare in his own writing to writing the plays
00:17:18
Speaker
and the fact that the woman in his play seemed to be so realised, and Basiano basically being a prominent writer of her time, you end up going, well, women weren't allowed to be playwrights in the Elizabethan era, Amelia knows William,
00:17:43
Speaker
Maybe Shakespeare lent his name, or Shakespeare took her plays, or she insisted that the players be published under his name so her work could get out there.
00:17:57
Speaker
Although this is stymied ever so slightly by another point that Winkler made, isn't it? It's interesting that in her article, I should say at least sort of half the article is based on the idea that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare just as a general point and then sort of goes from that to Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare and Amelia Bassano did. So there's a lot of that but when it specifically comes to Bassano
00:18:22
Speaker
She does actually, it's quite odd that she specifically says that comparing the works of poetry that she published under her own name with the works attributed to William Shakespeare, their writing styles are apparently quite different. In fact, she says her writing style bears no obvious resemblance to Shakespeare's in his plays, but she claims that what they do have in common is sort of the feminist content.
00:18:49
Speaker
Which could of course have been informed by her and William Shakespeare having conversations possibly. Well who knows or they could be entirely independent of one another. Now I should say in
00:19:04
Speaker
Definitely in her interview, I don't know about the article, but in her interview Winkler, she does specifically say, look, I don't have proof that Amelia Bassano wrote Shakespeare. I think it's a compelling theory and I think it, you know, deserves to be looked into. But she isn't claiming, you know, it is 100 percent certain that this woman wrote Shakespeare, but she thinks there's an argument to be made.
00:19:24
Speaker
Yeah, see, I think in the interview for Radio New Zealand, she's much more circumspect about the possibility that Shakespeare was a woman.
Critique of Authorship Theories
00:19:35
Speaker
In the article, she's a lot more strident about the claim that Shakespeare must have been a woman. And I don't know whether that's a rhetorical device from the kind of writing she does or whether that's a reaction to the criticism she's had about that article in The Atlantic.
00:19:54
Speaker
but we'll get on to that in just a minute. Yeah, yes, I mean she has, like the, you've found out first hand, haven't you, that passions can be, can run somewhat hot when it comes to questions around Shakespeare's authorship? Indeed, I had a correspondent for several years, we'll call him Alan, for that is in fact his first name.
00:20:18
Speaker
who kept on trying to persuade me that his own particular reading of the Shakespearean sonnets showed that Edward Devere was very likely the real Shakespeare. And the fact that I wasn't particularly interested in this hypothesis, because by and large, outside of this podcast, the Shakespeare authorship controversy means absolutely nothing to me at all.
00:20:42
Speaker
meant that the emails went from being initially polite to incredibly belligerent in the space of one sentence. Yes, and so you have Orman not only questioning the idea that Shakespeare might not have been Shakespeare, but then suggesting Orman, so she sort of gets it from the Shakespearean scholars and from your sort of MRA arseholes who would leap at the chance to have a go at that.
00:21:11
Speaker
So I guess we need to evaluate what she actually says. Part of it, part of the problems are that reading through articles, some of the stuff she says about Shakespeare and about questions of his authorship just don't quite seem to be true. No. She talks about
00:21:30
Speaker
Like we've just said at the top here that people, the idea of questioning that Shakespeare might not have actually been the author of Shakespeare's plays has only been around since sort of the late 19th century. And she, I think several times in the interview and also in her article says, no, no, no, people were questioning it right from the word go.
00:21:51
Speaker
But that doesn't really seem to be true. There are contemporary remarks of people suggesting that maybe Shakespeare ripped people off or put his name on other people's works, but I don't think anyone says Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. It's more sort of bitchiness, isn't it?
00:22:08
Speaker
Yes, there's a lot of making fun of Shakespeare, so it is true that many of the playwrights operating in the outer bound of London, because they've got this wonderful geographical puritanical thing, that all the playhouses were kind of on the border or the outside of the city of London because you weren't allowed to have playhouses in the actual city centre because of Puritans and the like. So it is true that many of the playwrights were highly educated
00:22:38
Speaker
upper-crust nobility. And Shakespeare wasn't lower class. Shakespeare was very, very middle class. But in a class-based society, we have class divides. Being middle class and coming from a good family doesn't mean diddly-squat. So there's a fair number of criticisms by the nobility about Shakespeare as a kind of upstart crow.
00:23:05
Speaker
and you've also got situations where people are making fun of his education because once again he's not going to the right schools and of course you've got jealous playwrights who are annoyed because Shakespeare becomes very famous very quickly and other playwrights get annoyed because of that so they can't start casting aspersions and of course it's now taken to be the case that Shakespeare probably did co-write many of his plays many of his earlier works
00:23:35
Speaker
stylistically, seemed to have at least two hands involved. So there's a lot of work going into working out who these other playwrights were, and yet these players were credited towards Shakespeare, so there was a concern that he was stealing other people's words to a certain extent. But there's no real evidence that people doubted Shakespeare's authorship at the time.
00:24:00
Speaker
Instead what you've got are the struggles of playwrights in London and also the class struggle being reported by people reacting to Shakespeare being the upstart crop. And so this point actually, her article in The Atlantic does actually have a few corrections at the bottom and the first one is that her article originally said that
00:24:23
Speaker
Doubts about whether Shakespeare really wrote the works attributed to him are almost as old as the writing itself, and they actually ended up amending that to say, well, there were people casting aspersions at the time, but the doubts didn't really show up until the late 1800s.
00:24:40
Speaker
There are all these claims about the masterful thing Shakespeare wrote that he couldn't possibly have had the knowledge to write. And in a lot of the cases, it kind of comes down to people actually overselling Shakespeare.
00:24:55
Speaker
They'll claim he couldn't have, you know, he must have been nobility because he writes so much about court and people. So actually, when he talks about sort of court affairs, he doesn't actually always get it right. Yeah, or they say he must have had a military background because he describes all of these battle scenes with absolute might. And then Elizabethan age scholars go,
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah, not only does Shakespeare get the date of battles wrongs, he gets the constitutions of armies wrong, and he gets the way that warfare is actually undertaken in those time periods. So if he's got a military background, he's very much a modern, major general. The very model of one. Precisely. And also the Venetian thing. The Venetian thing, yeah.
00:25:45
Speaker
Amelia's parents were Venetian. That's from Venus, not from the planet Venus. We should be very clear there. Right, I have to revise what I'm about to say, but it still makes sense. Glad I caught that. So I was going to talk about the merchant of Venus, but obviously we won't talk about that particular plan. But in the merchant of Venus, a play set in Venus,
00:26:10
Speaker
There's one very notable factor about Venice which is missing in the play, and that is any description of canals.
00:26:19
Speaker
Mmm, which you'd think it would be hard to write a play about Venice and not mention canals if you knew anything about Venice at all. Yes, so if your family came from Venice or you'd done a grand tour of Europe and been to Venice, you would probably note there are canals everywhere and yet Venice is presented in a merchant of Venice as a standard city by the sea.
00:26:44
Speaker
And there are also other things, so people talk about Shakespeare's masterful use of language, and yet people who have studied the use of non-English and Shakespearean plays have gone
00:26:59
Speaker
Every single phrase in a Shakespearean play, with few exceptions, come from phrasebooks that were available in Elizabethan shops at the time because English people went overseas all the time. They needed a phrasebook to say, my nipples are exploding in delight. So my hovercraft is full of eels. Precisely. Very, very, very useful references. So
00:27:26
Speaker
you would buy a phrase book and almost all of Shakespearean's French and Italian comes from books of that particular type. Yeah, so the claim that Shakespeare, for a man like William Shakespeare, did he ever leave England? He's not known for being well-traveled. We don't know that he ever left England. It's possible he did, but there's no evidence he did.
00:27:51
Speaker
for a man who's seemingly not particularly well-traveled at all, to be setting his plays in exotic countries all around Europe, it sort of seems unbelievable the number of plays sort of set in around Italy. Surely you'd need to have close ties to Italy to have written about them, but maybe that doesn't seem to... And indeed, I'm told most of his Italian plays come from one particular volume of Italian
00:28:18
Speaker
folk tales that he adapted. So I think even there we kind of know where they came from. So a lot of the whole Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because he wasn't noble slash educated slash well-traveled enough
00:28:35
Speaker
don't really seem to stack up and the whole Shakespeare must have been a woman because William Shakespeare wasn't feminist enough, knowledgeable enough about women to have written such good female characters, also a little bit doubtful especially if we actually look at how some of the women appear in his plays.
00:28:51
Speaker
Yes, so a lot of women in the Shakespearean canon are conniving and have fairly disastrous fates because of it. And then, of course, you've got what is taken to be one of the most sexist plays of the Elizabethan
00:29:10
Speaker
era and I say this because there were contemporary reports at the time of people being astounded by how sexist this play was and that is the taming of the show. Where an independent woman who doesn't want to get married is Brel Beeson into marrying someone she doesn't even like and that's the entire joke of the play. Is brainwashing.
00:29:37
Speaker
If you haven't seen the taming of the shrew, the way she is tamed is that Petruchio doesn't let her eat or sleep essentially for days at a time until she's completely ragged and only sort of relents once she starts giving in to him.
00:29:57
Speaker
I actually saw it just earlier this year at the Pop-Up Globe. They put on a production of it, which was actually very good. And they tried to sort of end it with the two of them kind of as equals. The play ends basically. The three characters have gotten married and they sort of have a bit of a wager to see whose wife will be the most obedient. And all three of them summon their wives. And the other two characters' wives say, no bugger off, I'm busy. Whereas Catherine, Kate,
00:30:24
Speaker
Petruchio's wife comes and delivers this big speech, rebuking her other wives and saying how everybody should be, all women should be good and nice and dutiful and subservient to their husbands. In the play, in the staging with it, I saw she sort of delivers this whole speech and then sort of kneels right down and sort of abases herself before her husband, who then sort of looks stunned and does the exact same thing, kneels down and lies in front of her. And it's actually quite a nice moment. But
00:30:50
Speaker
I don't know that that's generally the way the play usually ends and certainly doesn't fully mitigate his treatment of her beforehand. No, in fact the only decent version of Taming of the Shrew was the version they did on moonlighting. I never saw it.
00:31:05
Speaker
Season 2, well worth a watch. Moonlighting is a wonderfully weird show, and when they do the Taming of the Shrew, they just do it as the Taming of the Shrew set in Italy, with the two manes now playing the two manes of the Shakespearean play. And it does have a slightly different ending. Good. So yeah, I mean, so a lot of the claims
00:31:30
Speaker
Some of the claims in Winkler's original article seem to be flat out wrong, and others seem to be a little bit dubious, and people have picked up on this. She's received a lot of nasty criticism and a lot of abuse, but she's also received sort of literary criticism of her articles. So Noah Millman in The Week,
Comparison to Other Skepticisms
00:31:52
Speaker
wrote an article about it where he basically just sort of says it's the same as all the others. Your other authorship controversy ones are basically, oh, Shakespeare couldn't have written it because he wasn't nobly educated, well-traveled enough, and this is the same territory. Shakespeare couldn't have been a woman because he wouldn't have been able to write female characters well enough. He sort of says it's of the same species as the other arguments and has the same flaws as them.
00:32:20
Speaker
and points out that there's a lot of, I mean, the arguments kind of against Shakespeare and for Bassana are all pretty circumstantial. There's a lot of absence of proof isn't proof of absence. Okay, there's no evidence that, you know, we don't have documentary evidence of William Shakespeare sitting down and saying, I am writing this play right now.
00:32:43
Speaker
Alison John, who I wrote today's hit, I'm off to have lunch with Freddy Krueger. He has lunch with Freddy Krueger all the time. Indeed. And sort of, you know, says that Winkler's floor is kind of making the data fit the theory rather than the other way around, I think. Yes, yes. So basically,
00:33:04
Speaker
She claims that people who advocate that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare selectively cherry-pick evidence to show that there's no controversy, and yet she does exactly the same thing. Also, her entire theory is consistent
00:33:20
Speaker
with the two of them knowing each other and Shakespeare being informed by her. Yes, yeah, she could certainly have been an influence on Shakespeare. The dark lady. She was the dark lady, yeah.
00:33:37
Speaker
Yeah, she does things like, she puts a lot of stock in Shakespeare's will, apparently, where in which he, there's no mention of any of the sorts of things you might expect a writer to leave people in his will. There's no mention of books at all of him leaving any books that he had. She takes this to say, you know, you look at this and it's not not the portrait of a great writer, but
00:34:03
Speaker
It doesn't really prove anything either way. It's all kind of a new window. I can't remember which famous literary figure also has the same issue. I think it actually might even be good old Ben Johnson, who apparently criticized Shakespeare during his life, but then praised him as the greatest playwright of all time after he died for the first folio. And I think Johnson's will
00:34:27
Speaker
also was remarkably light on bequeathing books to anyone and given that Ben Johnson basically wrote the first English dictionary you'd kind of think he'd have a lot of books but it seems like they weren't the kind of thing you would necessarily note in a will because they actually were the kind of thing that really wasn't considered to be worth a lot.
00:34:53
Speaker
And then that Noah Millman article linked to another one by Oliver Cam at Colette. Now I'm not familiar with Colette, I gather they're a less than savoury website at times. They're run by Claire Lehman, she keeps on trying to introduce people to the intellectual dark web.
00:35:11
Speaker
They've engaged in crypto alt-rightism. Some would say they engage in crypto fascism. They've engaged in a fair amount of transphobia. They are a trash website and that's my guarantee.
00:35:26
Speaker
So that could explain why the tone of his, it goes more from strongly worded to being a bit of a dick about it, quite frankly. But before he gets too dickish, he does again make the same sorts of points that she's been cherry picking her data and her sources as well.
00:35:47
Speaker
One thing we haven't talked of is that a lot of the sources she appeals to tend not to be sort of literary scholars specialising in the Elizabethan era. Well I mean let's go back to that point that we made in the introduction. So she makes a list of people who
00:36:06
Speaker
think that Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare. So she makes a list of authorship controversy members, and the list goes like this. Academics, actors, in brackets, Derek Jacobi and Mark Relant, or perhaps the best known, writers, teachers, lawyers, a few Supreme Court justices, in brackets, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens,
00:36:31
Speaker
So she makes this list and she gives us some names. It is interesting she gives us no academic names. What she gives us are actors and let's say best legal scholars, but no actual academics who are engaged in trying to uncover the real Shakespeare.
00:36:52
Speaker
Yeah, so the Oliver Camm article points to some of the stuff that went around Twitter at the time. He refers to Diana Henderson of MIT, who claims that Elizabeth Winkler contacted her
00:37:09
Speaker
and didn't seem interested in hearing that Henderson and a lot of her colleagues find the... Oh, sorry, I should say she's MRT professor, co-ed of Shakespeare Studies, former SAA president, I don't know what SAA is, but anyway... She's a Shakespearean... She is actually a Shakespearean scholar and claims that having spoken with Winkler, Winkler only seemed to want
00:37:37
Speaker
Her exact tweet was, although I gave lengthy email replies, she doesn't acknowledge the fact that many of us who are most interested in woman writers and know their dramatic as well as poetic works find this fanciful. She was seeking only to find what she wanted. So Winklia has basically been accused of a fair bit of cherry picking to come up with the story that she comes up with. And indeed, one of the things which is a really big factor of the original essay she wrote for The Atlantic,
00:38:04
Speaker
is this claim that Shakespearean scholars are dogmatic, that Shakespeare is Shakespeare, so William Shakespeare, the author of the play is the same person as William Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon, and so she produces it, this is dogmatism, and yet
00:38:22
Speaker
Unless there's really compelling evidence to say that Weller tested to author William Shakespeare, and say Weller tested to buy his contemporaries, isn't actually William Shakespeare the playwright. It's not really dogmatism,
00:38:39
Speaker
it's going look we're waiting for proof that you've got a really compelling theory otherwise we're just going to stick with the orthodox histories that everybody at the time agreed was factual. So yeah a couple of these articles compared this this sort of Shakespeare authorship things to like climate change denial or possibly anti-vaxxers that
00:39:02
Speaker
It's not an even thing. The vast weight of evidence is on one side and it's not theirs. And so you kind of need to produce fairly extreme evidence if you actually want to make a plan. And the thing is, actually, proving your own authorship of a work, other than having it attributed to you in some kind of legal setting or people acknowledging they saw you work on it, is quite difficult.
00:39:32
Speaker
I actually I do tweet about writing all the time so I'm a bad example so let me use friend of the show Lee Basham as an example. Lee Basham is a philosopher at South Texas College who allegedly has written a whole bunch of articles on conspiracy theory and I say allegedly because I haven't seen a diary where he's ever written down. Today I started writing and joining the conspiracy and not just that
00:40:00
Speaker
but he sent me a draft of one of his articles and the track changes was actually, the reference is all from his partner. So I put it to you that Lee Basham may not have written any of his works and instead is a cover name or pseudonym for his partner and not just that. I've met someone and traveled with someone who claims to be Lee Basham
00:40:30
Speaker
But how do I even know that that's real? Now, I'm not denying that Lee Basham, the professor at South Texas College, is also the author of a variety of different articles under the name Lee Basham, but actually it turns out it's really easy to cast doubt on authorship.
00:40:50
Speaker
in situations where you are lacking a certain amount of evidence whether or not that evidence actually exists. You can cast doubt with absolute ease by going here until such time I see a diary by Lee Basham in Lee Basham's handwriting which has a first draft version of joining the conspiracy. I have to assume that maybe someone else wrote that instead.
00:41:15
Speaker
In the Radio New Zealand interview, Winkler does get quite close to the I'm just asking questions mode where she's saying that this deserves more investigation and why haven't we looked into the idea that a woman could have been Shakespeare just because William of Shakespeare was a man and everybody said he was Shakespeare. William of Shakespeare, yes. That's exactly what I meant.
00:41:45
Speaker
Which is, yeah, it starts looking a little spurious. I mean, now we should say that, like I said, especially that Oliver Camm article does swerve into fairly dickish territory towards the end where he goes from comparing this sort of Shakespeare authorship thing to the likes of climate denial to going to talk about how
00:42:06
Speaker
certain people who have in the past advocated for the idea that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, who then went on to become Nazis and express violent anti-Muslim views as if to draw some sort of parallel between those two things, which is frankly a dick move.
00:42:23
Speaker
And unfortunately, because Winkler has received a lot of quite undeserved vitriol from Twitter and around the traps, that kind of has allowed her to play the victim card a little bit and sort of say, you know, look, it just proves, proves they can't, they can't answer, you know, they can't challenge the argument that I'm making of all they can do is make head homonym attacks. And call me an answer. When in fact, there are, do actually appear to be fairly, fairly reasoned arguments against her claim.
Appreciation for Amelia Bassano
00:42:50
Speaker
But I think we should say, regardless of whether or not she actually is William Shakespeare, Amelia Bassano does seem to be a truly fascinating individual. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the point that Diana Henderson of MIT makes, which is, I don't say where, academics who study Elizabethan era writing and plays are very much aware of this person and do think she needs to be celebrated a lot more.
00:43:18
Speaker
But we don't need to do that by suggesting she's Shakespeare. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's that's kind of where she's at. If Amelia Bassano wrote Taming of the Shrew, her feminist credentials take a bit of a hit. Yeah, just I mean, it's a little bit like what happened to, in my in my view, my estimation of Josh Weeden after I watched Dollhouse. Buffy was taken to be a feminist masterpiece.
00:43:47
Speaker
dollhouse objectified woman up the wizard it did yes no there was one episode in particular where Eliza Dushku seemed to spend pretty much the entire time getting punched in the face yeah it was yeah anyway so yes Amelia Bassano good and a woman you should know more about really the argument that Amelia Bassano actually wrote the works of Shakespeare
00:44:11
Speaker
A lot more shaky. The argument that Amelia Bassano contributed to the works of Shakespeare or influenced them in some ways
Conclusion and Promotion
00:44:17
Speaker
seems plausible. Probably quite a good case. But yeah, not taken that far. So I think that's all we have to say on the matter. Unless you're a
00:44:26
Speaker
patron. Unless you're a patron, precisely. Because patrons get to hear about actual Nazis, so we'll talk about how two of our media organisations actually interviewed an Austrian Nazi about the March 15 events of this year.
00:44:42
Speaker
We'll then move on to talking about why the National Party doesn't appear to be backing away from that UN Compact on Migration conspiracy theory, and we'll give a bit of an update on good old Madeleine McCarme.
00:44:57
Speaker
which there have been two updates in the last week and then if we've got time we might even talk a little about the course I'm about to start teaching at the University of Waikato which is going to feature a bit of discussion of conspiracy theory. Indeed.
00:45:13
Speaker
But if you're not a patron, you'll miss out on that. But that's okay because you just got to listen to a whole episode of this. Indeed. Which we are grateful for your listenership. But if you want to sling us a dollar a month, you'll get access to those patron episodes as well. Right, so to our beloved patrons, we'll see you shortly. To everybody else, we'll probably see you in about a week. To the pit! Goodbye.
00:45:40
Speaker
you
00:45:47
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:46:48
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.