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Stratford shipwreck

by Linda Theil

Look no further than best-selling author Jodi Picault's brand new novel for evidence that the Shakespeare author ship is leaking like a sieve.

Picault credited Elizabeth Winkler's 2019 Atlantic article "Was Shakespeare a Woman?" about Emilia Bassano as inspiration for By Any Other Name, a novel released today by Ballentine Books featuring Bassano as a pen behind the Shakespeare pseudonym.

In that same interview on Jacke Wilson's History of Literature podcast, Picault told Wilson that she believes Edward deVere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, played a role in the Shakespeare authorship. 

"I believe the earl of Oxford was the puppet master behind the works of William Shakespeare," Picault said.

The History of Literature podcast episode is titled "Meet the woman who REALLY wrote Shakespeare's plays with Jodi Picoult", broadcast today.

For centuries pressure has been building on the bulwark of Stratfordian-based authorship created by David Garrick for his fantasyland-on-Avon "Shakespeare Jubilee" in 1769; but the extraordinary publicity accompanying Roland Emmerick's 2011 film "Anonymous" created an unrelenting tide of fascination that is finally popping the oakum on the foundering Stratfordian ship.

Other recent noteworthy authorship petards:

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature by Elizabeth Winkler (Simon $ Schuster, 2023)

In Shakespeare's Shadow: A Rogue Scholar's Quest to Reveal the True Source behind the World's Greatest Plays by Michael Blanding (Hachette Books, 2022)

The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy:Knowledge, Rhetoric, Identity by Michael Dudley (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023) also available as an ebook from Google Play 

"Could Philip Sydney Be the Fair Youth of the Sonnets?" by Elizabeth Quattrocki Knight (video presentation from The Los Angeles Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable)

References

By Any Other Name (Ballentine Books, Aug 20, 2024) by Jodi Picoult, https://www.amazon.com/Any-Other-Name-Novel/dp/059349721X

History of Literature podcast with Jacke Wilson, "Meet the woman who REALLY wrote Shakespeare's Plays with Jodi Picoult" broadcast Aug. 20, 2024
https://www.historyofliterature.com/628-meet-the-woman-who-really-wrote-shakespeares-plays-with-jodi-picoult-my-last-book-with-alli/

"Was Shakespeare a Woman?" by Elizabeth Winkler, The Atlantic June 2019

What Blessed Genius?: The Jubilee That Made Shakespeare by Andrew Stott (WWNorton & Co., 2019)

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