Shakespeare wasn’t a woman

The American novelist Jodi Picoult has revealed that she thinks that Shakespeare’s plays were written by a woman, telling the Hay Literary Festival, ‘I think that, back then, people in theatre knew that William Shakespeare was a catch-all name for a lot of different types of authors. I think they expected it to be a joke that everyone would get. And we’ve all lost the punchline over 400 years.’

Apparently, a male writer couldn’t have written the ‘proto-feminist’ characters in some of the plays, which is a bit like saying that they must have been written by cruel, old-fashioned dukes because they sometimes have cruel, old-fashioned dukes in them. Picoult’s chosen candidate for the true author is poet Emilia Lanier (née Bassano), because, er… Desdemona’s maid is called Emilia, and other equally shaky reasons. (Lanier has been posited in the past as the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets, slightly more credibly.