Elizabeth Winkler > 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

“a world where chocolate is entirely rare — or entirely mediocre — is a dystopia the likes of which we can scarcely conceive ["An Emotional History Of Chocolate," The Millions, January 5, 2015].”
― Elizabeth Winkler

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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 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

“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

“There have been many kinds of suitors: the early scholars who pored through the archives, searching for records that would illuminate his life; the founding fathers and men of letters who made pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon, slicing “relics” from his chair and falling on their knees to kiss the sacred ground; in later centuries, Stratfordians who wrote biographies, trying to solve the mystery of how he did it, and anti-Stratfordians who saw still different authors by different names.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“The authorship question is, in the fashion of religious wars, a messy, ugly dispute. No one takes kindly to the denial of his god. Shakespeare scholars—which is to say the Shakespearean priesthood; the ordained and professionalized ranks of Stratfordians—decry the snobbery in the view that a glover’s son could not have written the works of Shakespeare. (Was not a carpenter’s son the savior of mankind?)”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Shakespeare’s knowledge of Italy appears more miraculous still, for ten of the plays are set in Italian cities, betraying familiarity with local customs, geography, and landmarks. Early scholars generally concluded that the author must have spent time in the country. It is “the most natural supposition,” wrote the nineteenth-century publisher Charles Knight.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“wanting to create a monument to Shakespeare in the US capital. “The poet is one of our best sources, one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought, our faith, and our hope,” Emily Folger explained, drawing on a strain of American literary criticism that saw Shakespeare, paradoxically, as America’s poet. He had influenced the founding fathers, who saw in his villains and tyrants the dangers of monarchy and the need for institutional checks on power. Shakespeare’s history plays heralded the “inauguration of modern democracy,” Walt Whitman wrote, for they put “on record the first full exposé—and by far the most vivid one… of the political theory and results” of a feudal system “which America has come on earth to abnegate and replace.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“The fundamental charge that anti-Stratfordians bring against scholars is that they ignore evidence inconvenient to their belief—that they have been, in fact, unscholarly. For to miss the potential meanings of “Our English Terence” or “that poet who takes a name from shaking and spear” they must read shallowly. They must stay unwaveringly on the surface of the text, refusing it the possibility of alternate or double meaning. They must ignore the historical and cultural contexts in which the author wrote. They must cover their eyes and block their ears to allusion. They must, in short, commit literary malpractice.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“The sonnets are so problematic for the traditional theory of authorship that some scholars have tried to dismiss them, arguing that they are merely poetic fictions—literary exercises through which Shakespeare could display his technical virtuosity—and not about him at all. “It is better to read the sonnets for universal values than to lose their poetry by turning them into riddles about Shakespeare’s biography,” warned the scholar C. L. Barber. But sonnets—whether John Donne’s Holy Sonnets struggling with his faith or John Milton’s meditation on his blindness—tend to be highly personal poems.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“He signed documents only with a mark, suggesting that he could not write his name. “Most plain-dealing men in early modern England used marks because the majority of the population was illiterate,” explains the historian David Cressy. “More than two-thirds of men and four-fifths of women in the seventeenth century could not write their names.” Numeracy, not literacy, was needed to conduct business in Elizabethan England, and reading and counting were taught before writing, so some could read but not write. Of the nineteen elected officials in Stratford while John Shakespeare held office, only seven could sign their names. His wife could not write her name, either.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Why, after two centuries, did so many people start questioning whether Shakespeare wrote the plays?” (One might similarly ask: Why, after so many centuries, did people start questioning whether the sun revolved around the earth?)”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Edward de Vere—far and away the favorite candidate today—the eccentric 17th Earl of Oxford, who traveled through the precise areas of northern Italy with which Shakespeare seems most familiar?”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“By the early twentieth century, however, this fantasy became impossible to maintain, as it became increasingly evident that not only had Shakespeare borrowed stories from foreign texts, but he also imported foreign words and phrases into English.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens died. Stevens was one of several justices who doubted the traditional attribution. “I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2009.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“there was no recorded notice of the celebrated writer’s passing. No elegies. No great London funeral. No burial at Westminster Abbey alongside Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and Britain’s other literary dead. On April 25, he was buried quietly at the local church in Stratford-upon-Avon. The only trace of this event is the church’s burial register, which reads simply, “Will Shakspere gent.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“When James came to the throne, he was listed as a member of the playing company, now called the King’s Men, but during the theater season of 1604, numerous records place him in Stratford: He sells malt to a Philip Rogers, lends Rogers two shillings, then sues Rogers to recover the amount plus damages. He invests in Stratford tithes. These are the years when he’s supposed to be writing his greatest plays—Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“Shortly after the registration of Venus and Adonis, the critic Gabriel Harvey boasted that he knew the identity of a masked author: “I could here dismaske such a rich mummer,” he wrote, “as would undoubtedly make this Pamphlet the vendiblest booke in London.” Harvey didn’t “dismask” the author, being “none of those, that utter all their learning at once,”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

“The dates were wrong. (The Queen’s letter was addressed to Shakespeare at the Globe—a decade before the theater was built.)”
― 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

“Theater owner Philip Henslowe, who put on early Shakespeare plays, recorded payments to twenty-seven playwrights—but never Shakespeare.”
― Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature