The woke tide may be receding in the popular culture, but far-left fantasists are still everywhere, endlessly devising new ways to sow confusion, resentment, and self-hatred among Americans and Westerners in general. And so now comes the news that the greatest writer in the English language, the touchstone of everything literature can and should be, the world’s premier dead white male of all dead white males, was not white or male at all. Or at least leftists want you to think he wasn’t.
According to a new book that is getting adulatory reviews from leftists, William Shakespeare was really a black woman, and really, what else could he possibly have been? The only drawback, as far as today’s leftists are concerned, is that the supposedly real Shakespeare, Emilia Bassano Willoughby, was Jewish, which for twenty-first century leftists means that she may have participated in the oppression of the Palestinians. They needn’t worry, however; there were no Palestinians in the sixteenth century, when Emilia Bassano Willoughby and William Shakespeare flourished, as the KGB didn’t create the Palestinian nationality until the 1960s.
The creator and popularizers of this claim actually have bigger problems to worry about anyway. For one thing, although it is being universally reported these days that this new you-go-girl Shakespeare was black, she really wasn’t, any more than Richard III or Anne Boleyn, both of whom contemporary TV series turned black, were anything but white English people.
For even though she wasn’t Shakespeare, Emilia Bassano Willoughby was a real person, and she wasn’t black. One X user explained: “I’ve seen the absolutely hilarious claim that William Shakespeare stole all of his writings from a black woman… My favourite bit about this ‘black woman’ is that Emilia Bossano Lanier is literally less black than I am. I’ve seen the paintings of her looking white… Her dad was Italian and her Mother was English. Yet people are claiming she’s BLACK. The weirdos who claim Emilia was black are making this claim on the SPECULATION that she has some potential Moroccan heritage somewhere in her father’s ancestry, though this speculation has not been backed up with any evidence.”
And so it’s clear that in this entire claim, we’re not dealing with anything close to a serious historical inquiry. Instead, all we’re getting is modern-day leftist fantasy and wish fulfillment.
The publicity material for this preposterous book claims that Coslet “conclusively demonstrates that Shakespeare was not a man, but a woman: a dark-skinned lady, of Jewish origin, born into a family of Court musicians from Venice, and the mother of the English-speaking world. Her name was Emilia Bassano.” Coslet bases this on a “re-examination of often-overlooked historical documents, shrewd, chilling, and profound, this volume offers extensive evidence that Emilia was the author of the canon.”
That is good advertising writing, for it makes the whole idea less ridiculous than it actually is. According to one reviewer, Terence Eden, The Real Shakespeare is extraordinarily ridiculous. Coslet “conclusively demonstrates” that Emilia Bassano Willoughby wrote Shakespeare’s works based on, Eden says, several main arguments:
- Shakespeare’s name is an anagram of “A-She-Speaker”.
- Beatrice from Much Ado shares the same Myers-Briggs type as Emilia Bassano.
- The names “Emilia” and “Bassano” pop up in several plays.
- If you fold the portrait of Shakespeare in a certain way, it looks like a portrait of Emilia.
Yes, really.
In a certain sense, none of this is new. Shakespeare’s work is so full of human insight and linguistic mastery, and the man himself is so obscure, that there has been persistent speculation that he must really have been someone else, someone better-connected or of noble birth. Back in the 1990s, the paleoconservative pundit Joseph Sobran wrote a book purporting to demonstrate that Edward deVere, the Earl of Oxford, was really the author of Shakespeare’s works. This stemmed from the elitist assumption that a common actor (as Shakespeare was) at a time when actors ranked low on the social scale couldn’t have come up with such profundity.
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Coslet’s new Shakespeare likewise tells us more about the people who cooked up this theory than it does about Shakespeare himself. The book description says that “this is not just a book about the authorship debate: it is about the condition of women at the time Shakespeare was writing. It explains that feminism already existed in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It reveals not only that Shakespeare was a woman, but also that she defended women. It reintegrates Emilia in the context of the time, for example, by exploring the relationship between Emilia and Queen Elizabeth I. The reader will leave this book with a sense of wonder, transformation, and will experience a paradigm shift. Be prepared to meet the next feminist icon.”
Ah, of course. Because we don’t have enough of those already. The heroes of the past must be erased and replaced with the heroes of the present. History must be rewritten to suit present-day sensibilities, so that people grow accustomed to thinking that reality itself is malleable, and is whatever our authoritarian superiors tell us it is. That, ultimately, is what this absurd new claim about Shakespeare is all about.
For the left, erasing our history is part of controlling the present and future. At PJ Media, we’re watching that front as well. Become a VIP member today — you’ll get all the content and none of the ads. Use code FIGHT for 60% off.
