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A leading literary institution has been accused of promoting an “anti-intellectual conspiracy theory” with an event exploring claims that Shakespeare may have been a woman.

A debate has “long raged” over whether Britain’s greatest playwright wrote all 38 plays attributed to him, with comedy troupe Monty Python once joking that “a 1970s suburban husband and wife team authored several of them”, said The Times.  

But the London Library, “one of the country’s bastions of intellectualism”, has triggered a fresh row by giving a platform to a US writer who argues the Bard may have been female, said the paper. 

‘Hiding’ behind Shakespeare’s name

The 19th-century literary institution is holding a panel discussion with Elizabeth Winkler, the author of a controversial book titled “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies”, which “explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his name”. 

The event is billed as an exploration of “how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries”. 

An advert for the event said that Winkler would discuss who may have been “hiding” behind Shakespeare’s name, while also looking at “the larger problem of historical truth – and of how human imperfections (bias, blindness, subjectivity) shape our construction of the past”.

Theory is ‘baseless’

The event has sparked criticism from some of the London Library’s “biggest supporters”, said The Telegraph.

Journalist and author Oliver Kamm has written to chairman Simon Goodwin about his concerns over “this great institution’s promotion of a baseless and anti-intellectual conspiracy theory”.

In his letter, Kamm told Godwin that it was “wildly inappropriate for the library to be hosting such an event and thereby promoting the hoary conspiracy theory that William Shakespeare was an allonym for some concealed author”. 

Wrinkler put forward her theory in an article for The Atlantic in 2019, suggesting that the “true” author of Shakespeare’s plays may have been Emilia Bassano, the daughter of a Venetian court musician and the first published female poet in Renaissance-era England.

But critics have said the scholarship behind the claim is weak, with no evidence to suggest a link to Bassano. Other alternative authorship claims have also been widely debunked.

Shutting down debate ‘obviously anti-intellectual’

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Winkler said her book and the London Library discussion were “not suggesting Shakespeare was female”.

The book “is about the theories that have been put forward over the centuries”, she said. “It does not argue for any one of them in particular.” She said that shutting down the debate over the subject was “obviously anti-intellectual”.

Kamm has called for the debate to be cancelled, telling The Times that the suggestion that Shakespeare was a woman is not “some harmless caprice”. Such theories, he said, “have costs, identifiable in the coarsening of public debate and the atrophy of a culture of critical inquiry”.

He said that the London Library “does not promote equivalent nostrums such as anti-vaccine activism, geocentrism or the proposition that the moon landings were faked. I see no reason why it should be pushing Shakespeare denialism.”