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Anyone else being bitten overnight?
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From today’s newspaper
William Shakespeare was a “black Jewish woman”, according to a new book
It claims that the truth of Shakespearean authorship has been hidden by centuries of “Western-centric and Eurocentric ideology”
The author contends that the real Bard was a cosmopolitan woman with a “multicultural identity
This woman is identified in the new work, titled The Real Shakespeare, as the historical figure Emilia Bassano – a poet with connections to the Tudor court
Bassano, it is claimed, used the pen-name “Shakespeare” and wrote the Shakespearean canon of plays, only for her work to be stolen by an uneducated interloper from Stratford-upon-Avon.
This interloper, whom we now know as William Shakespeare, was then revered by posterity because the idea of a “white” genius was preferred to a black female playwright, the book argues
I think I’ll give this one a miss!
I loved doing Romeo and Juliet at school, it's one of his plays that can transpose time and lends itself to umpteen different settings such as the one used in West Side Story in that it's very relatable to teens I think. My husband got tickets for a performance of it at the Royal Shakespeare, Stratford quite a few birthdays ago.
We also did Henry IV Part 2 at school, during which I practically lost the will to live, completely lost. When o/h told me he'd got tickets for a Shakespeare play from my school days. I had a nano second of panic, please not Henry 1V part 2, I'll never survive it
The timing for the release of this book is 'fortuitous', what with Hamnet out now and a new Hamlet coming in February 
.
There was a book in 2010 or so that suggested that the dark lady was a brothel-keeper, 'Black Lucy' with whom Shakespeare spent nights when he was in London. Who knows? He was a young man away from home - it's possible. I think that is far more likely than that Shakespeare was a black woman, but I don't know if it is the case either. It's all interesting to read, if you are a Shakespeare fan, but no more than that, IMO.
As I often say, worrying about 'the facts' hundreds of years after events is pointless. We don't know the facts about other people's personal lives - we only know what is written, usually by others, and nobody can see inside the minds of other people, yet there are many who think they can, and that their opinions are 'facts'. Even today, we don't know what happened at the Beckham wedding - despite the existence of tiny recording devices, social media, and global interest in their brand - yet people are arguing about who is to blame, and what their motives must be. People love to take sides, whether the arguments have anything to do with them or not.
When it comes to Shakespeare, there are few facts. We know where he was born, where he went to school and where his Stratford on Avon bases were. We know he married Anne, but not where (there is no record of the wedding, although there is some evidence that the banns were not read at Holy Trinity (their parish church). This might be because Anne was pregnant at the time, but again, that is superimposing modern views on a very different time. We know where he was buried, although there are those who believe that the man lying next to Anne and Susannah in the chancel of Holy Trinity is not the playwright, but a random Stratfordian who somehow has been mistaken for a brilliant poet and playwright. We know that his signature (as written at various points in his life) is very unclear and apparently unpractised, which seems odd, given that he spent so much time writing. We know that he left the Midlands to work in London, and that he came back again when he 'retired', and that he lived with his family, when he could easily have afforded to set up home somewhere else had he separated from them.
Otherwise, not much is known for sure. He left SoA not long after his twins were baptised, and was not heard of again until about 7 years later, when the 'upstart crow' reference was made by Greene. There have been various attempts to plug that gap in his biography - he was a teacher, a poacher, a soldier, he went around the world with Francis Drake (!) and more.
The facts we have can be put together in various ways to tell various stories, which change depending on the times. It used to be thought that his marriage was forced, and that he was away so much to get away from his family, but now there is a shift to a very different view. All supposition. For reasons I don't understand, people get very hung up on defending the views they were taught, which are no more likely to be true than the ones being put forward now. History evolves - it wouldn't exist otherwise. Without evolution there would be a need for only one definitive account of the world and events, and historians wouldn't exist. Outside of dry records of births, marriages and deaths, and partisan accounts of battles and revolutions it is all a series of 'What ifs'. New information can come along, but that is rare. More often than not, though, History is reinterpreting what is already there.
I doubt I'll read the new book, but I will be interested to see whether the ideas in it take hold.
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