Was Shakespeare Really a Black Woman?

The strongest case for the view that Shakespeare was a woman is as follows. Brace yourself. The name Shakespeare, or rather ‘Shake-speare’, is an anagram for ‘A She-Speaker’. QED. Flourish. Exeunt.

I think this is brilliant.

Shake-speare = A She-Speaker.

The notion that Shakespeare was a woman is old news. John Hudson first suggested that Shakespeare was a woman in 2009, ironically enough publishing this in The Oxfordian, one of the magazines otherwise devoted to showing that Shakespeare was, in fact, Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford. Then Elizabeth Winkler wrote a book about Shakespeare scepticism in general and entitled it Shakespeare Was a Woman, published in 2023. It was ridiculed and admired, and remains a very enjoyable book, since it is sensible throughout – contrasting the lavish lunch of Oxfordian Alexander Waugh with the solitary cup of tea of Stratfordian Sir Stanley Wells. Finally, now in 2026, someone called Irene Coslet has published a book of advocacy, entitled The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby, lacking Hudson-type experimental suggestiveness or Winkler-type exposure of the pomposity and blinkeredness of Stratfordians. This new book, which I haven’t read and will not, signals its virtue by droning on about subaltern studies and Spivak. That’s a no, not, never from me. For a review of the book, read what Terence Eden has to say. He says, in short: not very good. For instance, he tells us that Coslet makes much of the fact that Shakespeare’s name sounds like various Eastern names for the divine female presence – Shakti and watnot. Profound. But what if his name also sounds like the Arabic word for an old wise man, Sheikh?

Subaltern studies? Slave morality manifest as resentment and armoured by academic self-justification. See Edward Said, Orientalism, and all that. ‘Orientalism’ is the phrase that launched a thousand fatuous solemnities, and ‘Subaltern Studies’ is the name for making an industry out of it. Spivak? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. A famous name in subaltern studies. Indian, Brahmin caste (of course, like quite a lot of crusading postcolonial Indian academics), and eventually a very successful academic in America, after translating Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida. Derrida: disliked by Douglas Murray and Roger Scruton. Spivak: heroine of thousands of third world feminists – that is, feminists who live in the first world trying to make everyone feel bad by talking about the third world.

Perhaps you know, perhaps you don’t, that this sort of reversal of expectation – this paradox, the man-was-actually-a-woman business – was invented by Samuel Butler in the 19^th Century. Already known for his ability to stand things on their head, in Erewhon for instance (where illness was treated as if it were a crime and crime treated as if it were a disease), Butler argued in The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897, that Homer was a woman, or at least one of the Homers. (And, amusingly, against those who thought this extremely improbable, he pointed out that “it was extremely improbable that the son of a Stratford wool-stapler should write Hamlet”.) Bernard Shaw said that on listening to Butler the truth of his claim was obviously and immediately evident, since it absolutely identified the difference between the two epics. Iliad: wrathful and slaughterful, male. Odyssey: making errors about boat design, involving a nurse and a nymph, female. Shaw chaired a Fabian meeting in April 1893 at which Butler spoke about the Odyssey and the Woman Question. Shaw said there were five people in attendance; none of them was interested until Shaw stood up to say it made perfect sense. Butler also speculated about the age of Shakespeare when he wrote the sonnets. Indeed, Shaw wrote several things about Shakespeare. Neither of them ever thought that Shakespeare was a woman. And what a trick they missed. Shaw even wrote a play entitled The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, though he indulged the old Stratford myth that Shakespeare was a woodnotes-wildist, scrabbling down what he heard with a pen. Shaw, alas, did not think that Shakespeare might be a Dark Lady.

Let us treat this philosophically.

Shakespeare is Shakespeare, right?

No. People say this, and they are wrong to say it like this. Emma Smith, for instance, a standard Shakespearianist: “I begin from a position that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare”, in Emma Smith, ‘The Shakespeare Authorship Debate Revisited’, Literature Compass 5 (2008), pp.618–632, at p.619. So she is capable of tautology. Good. Let me put it correctly. We have to distinguish terms in order to open the question.

Either Shakspear/Shaxper (sp?) is Shakespeare or he is not.

If he is not, then Shakespeare is someone as yet unacknowledged.

And here we have a second choice. I mean a formal choice. We can say he is Christopher Marlowe, and then we are saying he is the same sort of thing as Shakespeare of Stratford – a jumped-up knave, but better educated. Or we can say he is Francis Bacon, and then we are saying he is far more powerful and privileged and educated. Or we can say he is a woman or a slave or an illiterate poet, in which case Shakespeare is even more odd and marvellous and impossible and, er, subaltern than we previously thought. The bristlingly interesting alternatives are:

Either Shakespeare is higher than the standard Stratford myth suggests – a lord or a king or someone who knew lords and kings and spoke with them on something like equal terms.

Or Shakespeare is lower, or, let’s say, even more radical than the Stratford myth suggests: that is, even more proletarian, even more marginalised – a woman, or, even better, a black woman.

As I say, let us consider this philosophically. Forget about evidence.

(‘Evidence’ is one of the most boring words of the 21^st Century. Why does no one yet acknowledge what everyone has known since Hume and Kant, or since Kuhn and someone else whose name begins with H from the 1960s, that one can always find evidence for one’s favoured hypothesis? If you doubt this, consider COVID-19. Read the Bell and Mordue/Mushet pieces recently published in the Daily Sceptic.)

Instead of evidence, let us ask about formal status. Was he a great man, a mediocre man, or a complete outsider – possibly a woman, possibly black?

I have my own view about this. I am a sceptical Oxfordian. And why? Because my reading of Shakespeare has become more vivid. You may be happy with a boring Shakespeare – a sort of genius about whom almost nothing can be said, the pin-up for grammar school boys, a non sequitur in world history. But try something else instead: say, a woman Shakespeare. Is this not extremely stimulating?

One must not fall into the Telegraph trap of simply condemning Coslet’s book. Do not hastily condemn the suggestion that Shakespeare was a black woman. The suggestion is obviously a reductio ad absurdum, but it is not, in principle, absurd. What do we gain by suggesting that Shakespeare was someone else? We read more attentively. We see things when armed with a hypothesis that we do not see when unarmed. We humans are a simple species: we search for patterns, and we need thinkable assumptions to support those patterns. If we say “Shakespeare was a woman” we read Shakespeare more vividly; it is like imposing a new filter on the literature. Whether this is good or bad or trivial is in the reading. (The justification is that there is no such thing as an unfiltered reading.) I myself have a prejudice against subaltern studies. I have no intention of reading this book. I have read the summary on the LSE website and it is almost embarrassingly badly written, before we get to anything else. Take a look. (“The lack of agency of women and black people in historiography is not an authentic representation, but rather a gendered and racialised construction.” Etc.) But if you want to consider the hypothesis, read this by John Hudson, and think again about why there are so many cross-dressing women in Shakespeare, and why he knew so much about Jews.

One last thing. When I was young and occasionally read about the classics, I heard about a book called Black Athena. Remember it? It was a successful book. I did not read it; I was put off by the silliness of the word ‘black’. It claimed, or more likely implied, that classical Greek civilisation was of African origin – not black, exactly, but Egyptian. Now we learn from Hudson that the word ‘black’, in Elizabethan England, meant anyone not almost entirely pallid. To an Elizabethan, Donald Trump would have been ‘red’, not ‘orange’, and anyone even slightly Mediterranean would have been ‘black’. No one knows what colour Othello is meant to be. He was probably not as Al Jolson-esque as Laurence Olivier made him. The Bassanos, Venetian Jews, were called ‘black’. But this does not mean they were black in the sense of Black Lives Matter. They were not sub-Saharan Africans. A Moor was a Berber, and probably had old Mediterranean blood – not that different from Carthaginians or, indeed, many Romans. I know all too well that the inhabitants of Asia Minor can range from the most Nordic blues and blondes, and even Celtic reds, to Egyptian browns and blacks, with some further hues from the Asiatic east. In Black Athena Martin Bernal argued that Greek civilisation was African. The serious part of the argument was Egypt. Solon goes to Egypt. Plato knows about Egypt. So does Herodotus. Manetho, etc. Discuss. Consider. Toss a coin. But the silly part of the argument was implying that Egypt was black, and then selling this book to guilty, mostly white academics in North America. Silly, stupid, opportunist, grifting Martin Bernal. And I worry that Irene Coslet is on the same grift.

Isn’t it significant that William Shakspear (sp.?) of Stratford became a partner of Blackfriars Theatre in 1608? No. Or that in 2 Henry VI Gloucester’s “face is black and full of blood”? No. Or that humanists disliked blackletter print? No. Or that in Timon gold is a “yellow slave” that changes everything: it “will make/Black white, foul fair, wrong right/Base noble, old young, coward valiant”? No, not really. Black, black, black. But don’t forget the gold: it can turn Shakespeare into a woman and back again.

Shakespeare is like love. Almost anything you say about him, including that he is a her, is true. Read Donald Neil Fraser, ‘William Shakespeare, Conservative’, Shakespeare Quarterly 20 (1969), pp.165–178, and you’ll find that Shakespeare is on the Right. Read Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and you’ll find that he is on the Left. Read Shakespeare for yourself instead and admit that we are all vexed:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex’d;
Bear with my weakness; my brain is troubled:
Be not disturb’d with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk,
To still my beating mind.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.