Was Shakespeare a Woman?

"One of the most prestigious academic journals devoted to Shakespearean authorship studies has just added a new candidate to the centuries-old debate about who else plausibly might have written the works we associate with the little-educated merchant and actor from Stratford-Upon-Avon.

The nominee is a complete shocker: Amelia Bassano Lanier, a converso (clandestine Jew) and the illegitimate daughter of an Italian-born, Elizabethan court musician.

Dozens of luminaries (Sigmund Freud, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain among them) over the years have joined the so-called anti-Stratfordian camp, convinced, as Henry James put it, “that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world.”

Until now, most of the proposed alternatives have been aristocrats such as William Stanley, the sixth earl of Derby, and Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford – championed by the New York-based Oxford Society, publishers of the annual journal The Oxfordian.

“When you look at the plays without preconceptions of the author,” observes the journal's newly appointed editor, Michael Egan, “we'd have to say this is a highly educated person, well travelled, with intricate knowledge of the courts and aristocratic life. Where did an obscure provincial boy gain all this information?”

The Oxfordian's current issue profiles Stanley and de Vere along with another perennial choice, playwright Christopher Marlowe. But it's the addition of the female, Jewish contender – a pioneering woman poet – that will turn heads.

The principal proponent of this theory is 55-year-old John Hudson, a British Shakespeare scholar and director of the New York theatre ensemble the Dark Lady Players. In The Oxfordian, Mr. Hudson argues that if Bassano (Lanier was her married name) did not write all of the plays, she was certainly a major collaborator.

Her name is not new to Shakespeare studies. In 1979, British historian A.L. Rowse suggested that Bassano, with her family's Mediterranean skin colouring, was the famous “dark lady of the sonnets,” Shakespeare's mistress. Ridiculed at the time, that view is now commonplace among scholars.

Mr. Hudson goes further: He maintains that Bassano wrote the sonnets about herself; as with the plays, Shakespeare was simply a front used to hide her identity..."