Join us for an in-person event with journalist and book critic, Elizabeth Winkler, for a discussion of her new book, Shakespeare Was A Woman and Other Heresies.
Can't make the event? Purchase a signed copy of Shakespeare Was A Woman And Other Heresies here.
Joining Elizabeth in cross-disciplinary reflections on the book are Gina Luria Walker, Professor of Women's Studies and Founder/Director of The New Historia; Nancy Kendrick, Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College; and Namita Luthra, Women’s Rights Lawyer.
Discussion will be followed by audience questions
SCHEDULE
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7:30 PM-9:00 PM Panel and audience Q&A
9:00 PM-9:30 PM Book signing (books will be available for purchase)
ABOUT THE BOOK
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An “extraordinarily brilliant” and “pleasurably naughty” (André Aciman) investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy…and who the Bard might really be.
The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.”
In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking you from London to Stratford-Upon-Avon to Washington, DC, she pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries. As she considers the writers and thinkers—from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices—who have grappled with the riddle of the plays’ origins, she explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Hovering over the mystery are Shakespeare’s plays themselves, with their love for mistaken identities, disguises, and things never quite being what they seem.
As she interviews scholars and skeptics, Winkler’s interest turns to the larger problem of historical truth—and of how human imperfections (bias, blindness, subjectivity) shape our construction of the past. History is a story, and the story we find may depend on the story we’re looking for. “Lively” (The Washington Post), “fascinating” (Amanda Foreman), and “intrepid” (Stacy Schiff), Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies will forever change how you think of Shakespeare…and of how we as a society decide what’s up for debate and what’s just nonsense, just heresy.
REVIEWS
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“An extraordinarily brilliant and scholarly work, written with an unyielding sleuthing instinct and sparkling with pleasurably naughty moments. This page-turner is mesmerizing.”
—André Aciman, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name
“Elizabeth Winkler is blessed with the clear-eyed wit of a heroine in a Shakespearean comedy. Her undoing of the fools in the forest of the authorship question is iconoclasm As You Like It—joy to behold, lesson for us all.” —Lewis Lapham, founder of Lapham’s Quarterly
“Lively…. Winkler is a crackerjack researcher, deftly laying out the myriad questions, arguments and mysteries swirling around Shakespeare.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“A fascinating detective story… whose irreverence is part of its appeal."—The Guardian
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Gina Luria Walker is Professor of Women's Studies at The New School and Founder/Director of The New Historia, a global knowledge and action network. She is a leader in the unheralded sixty years of feminist historical recovery which discovers and documents the experiences of earlier women on whose shoulders we stand today. The New Historia seeks to create a more accurate, inclusive, and optimistic story of the human past than conventional History and for the first time incorporates a female dimension.
Elizabeth Winkler is a journalist and book critic whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Economist, among other publications. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her master’s in English literature from Stanford University. Her essay “Was Shakespeare a Woman?”, first published in The Atlantic, was selected for The Best American Essays 2020.
Namita Luthra is a women’s rights advocate on the Board of Directors of Monumental Women, the President’s Council of the New York Hall of Science, and the Advisory Boards of The New Historia and LexSeeHer. She also served on the Board of Directors of Sakhi for South Asian Women. At the UN Foundation Girl Up summit, she spoke on the power of storytelling to further advocacy. She was a senior staff attorney at ACLU Women’s Rights Project, co-authoring The Rights of Women and litigating gender discrimination jury trials. Prior, she was a staff attorney at the Office of the Appellate Defender and an ACLU National Legal Department Fellow.
Nancy Kendrick is Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College in Norton, MA, and Philosopher-in-Residence for the New Historia. She teaches and writes on women philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, including Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). She is co-authoring with Jessica Gordon-Roth a study of epistemic injustice theories in the early modern period called Unheeded: Epistemic Harms Against Women, Then and Now.
