“Shakespeare was a black woman” - now I’ve heard it all!

petra

Grannybags

Blimey whatever next?!

The play on radio 4 this afternoon portrays Shakespeare as gay.
He was married with children in the play.
Who knows 🤷‍♀️

I just heard a loud creaking and groaning coming from a graveyard in Stratford-upon-Avon as a certain Wm. Shakespeare turns in his grave.

""Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones".

It will cost us over 20 quid to read it .

There will always be controversial books :
I believed Peter Kurt's book ,
which claimed to have proof that Anna Anderson was Grand Duchess Anastasia.
Since discredited from DNA studies.

Then,I read Patricia Cornwell's book on Jack the Ripper in which she suggests that artist Walter Sickert was the killer infuriating ripperologists.

Now this.

It’s a fascinating country, I found it very boring in the UK when we came back here to live, Aveline. Nigerians are shrewd people, they’d probably weigh up whether there was a business opportunity to have white folk involved in their history.

Aveline

Sounds like a huge proliferation of dramatic stories and events in Nigeria SueDonim. How would they feel if token white people were inserted in them?

Yeah, just for balance and y’know….enrichment 🙄

Sounds like a huge proliferation of dramatic stories and events in Nigeria SueDonim. How would they feel if token white people were inserted in them?

Grannybags

Blimey whatever next?!

The play on radio 4 this afternoon portrays Shakespeare as gay.
He was married with children in the play.
Who knows 🤷‍♀️

Wyllow3

I just feel the theories enrich us. Some like the Emilia Lanier have a good deal of credibility there. Others, are, well, a stretch.

But firstly, no one has to read it, and secondly, different cultural takes on what we have assumed to be "Reality" or "the Truth" are always fascinating and sometimes incredibly valuable and settle into the "Accepted" variety of views on a well known piece of art or writing or cultural theory.

Reclaiming and recovering writings and art by women that were "disappeared" by male critics, or rubbished, except for the very famous like Virginia Woolf has been a fascinating and worthwhile endeavour of the last 50 or so years.

The same goes for the cultures that make up our history and our citizenship in the UK.

This tosh doesn’t enrich anything except for the author’s bank balance.

Correct""read in book clubs".

Also as in BBC R4 programmes like "Book Club" these days.

Aveline

Allira I wasn't talking about any particular book or author. I know there must be long histories stories and forms of drama passed down by people of African origin. Why are these not written about and dramatised? Why the focus on inserting black people into white dramas?

There are written and visual art works as well as the rich oral tradition.

But in answer to the "why dont we know"

They havent been funded or featured, or even recognised as Valid art/culture.

Only recently they have been published, shown in exhibitions, discussed on book programmes, read inbox clubs.

Just like whole bodies of Womens cultural input has changed beyond recognition in the last 50 years: it didnt happen without people "doing the leg work"

The different cultural inputs are at last but relatively recently being brought into mainstream art and writing funding, publicity, time on TV and Radio, into book groups, and more.

I suggest a good start is to listen to R4 "Front Row": half an hour every weekday evening - over time you get a real idea of the richness out there.

Have a read of this page to kick you off

lithub.com/multicultural-london-a-reading-list-of-displacement-diaspora-and-diversity/#:~:text=Winner%20of%20the%20Booker%20Prize,of%20his%20country's%20Indian%20minority.

Aveline

Allira I wasn't talking about any particular book or author. I know there must be long histories stories and forms of drama passed down by people of African origin. Why are these not written about and dramatised? Why the focus on inserting black people into white dramas?

Yes, I do agree (perhaps I didn't make that clear).

It seems as if any achievements by an ordinary young white man from that era must be ignored and taken over by someone who was from an ethnic minority and a female too.

Is it not enough that this woman wrote her own poetry? Why not publicise her own achievements?

There are other people from ethnic minorities who achieved in various fields over the centuries - why not make more of these?

But they are all fascinating, and keep his work alive.

It may well be that a black woman could have dramatized Taming of the Shrew or Midsummer Nights Dream, but Henry VI or Richard III probably not.
There have been many theories about Shakespeares authenticity, none gained any credibility, this one wont either.

It makes me think of the controversy about Zelda Fitzgerald and her husband, amid claims that he stole whole chunks of prose from her writing.
And that it was the two Einsteins who developed the theories and not just him.

Aveline

Allira I wasn't talking about any particular book or author. I know there must be long histories stories and forms of drama passed down by people of African origin. Why are these not written about and dramatised? Why the focus on inserting black people into white dramas?

As I understand it, some Black peoples didn’t have any form of written recording, so apart from passing it down orally, there would be no easy way to disseminate their culture such as the West had when writing and then printing press, especially, was invented.

In Nigeria, where I lived for five years, their own traditional culture continues as it did in the past, with various celebrations, gatherings and rituals and so on. There’s an event dedicated to Osun, the Yoruba goddess of fertility, a fishing festival, durbars with horses, the celebrate Islamic holidays, the yam festival, to give thanks for the harvest, and the Eyo festival, a drama performance with masked players. That’s just a few of their events.

They are spectacular events and it would be wonderful if they were more widely known to the world. It’s not for a white westerner to interpret them, of course. Maybe they prefer to keep their culture to themselves, though.

Considering White Male Supremacists have been domination (sic) the world forever, I think it's entirely possible

How do you come to this conclusion? .

Allira I wasn't talking about any particular book or author. I know there must be long histories stories and forms of drama passed down by people of African origin. Why are these not written about and dramatised? Why the focus on inserting black people into white dramas?

I think some people today just hate the fact that a fairly ordinary young man from a fairly ordinary background and from a Midlands town could actually have had the brains, wit and intellect to have written all those plays and sonnets.

It has to have been a member of the nobility, or now, more "woke", a black Jewish gentlewoman.

ClareAB

RosiesMawagain

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!

Considering White Male Supremacists have been domination the world forever, I think it's entirely possible.

As you think that White Male Supremacists have been domination the world forever then could you expand on your theory.

Could you explain who William Shakespeare was , his relationship with this woman (it is mooted that they were lovers and she was his Dark Lady) and, if she managed to have other works attributed to her, so not the plays and sonnets?

This is fascinating. Wonder if libraries will stock it?

RosiesMawagain

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!

Considering White Male Supremacists have been domination the world forever, I think it's entirely possible.

I am not frightened, I am bored. This is just more of the identity politics which is so dividing us. It is also an obsession with victimhood which is also causing great harm.

He used his imagination and a great deal of inventiveness

Like Irene Coslet?

Aveline

Why do black people want to claim our heritage and stories. There must be many many legends and stories stretching back into the countries where black people originated in the past.

Why do some people so readily believe that a boy educated at KES Grammar School in Stratford-upon-Avon could not be well educated and intelligent enough to write these plays?

Women of that era, even if well-educated by a governess, had a more restricted education than boys.

King Edward VI set up many grammar schools for boys in England and many survive today.

It's not unusual, Aveline. A sucessful white male is an anathema to some people today including, it seems, the white female author of this piece of fiction.

He used his imagination and a great deal of inventiveness, which is, after all, all many of these interpretations are doing.

The current view/interpretations of Hamlet are different from when I studied Shakespeare in 1973. All have added richness, they have not destroyed the work.

But Galaxy right through History people have interpreted work through a partiuclar lens, and for most of the time it has been a white western male one. time for a bit of variety and different POV and challenges.
Our culture is strong enough to take these challenges, some of them fascinating. I think your feelings are maybe somewhat over worried and over fearful - interpretations come and go - some "stick" and become mainstream, others fade with time.