As predictably as the tides, as welcome as a pebble in your shoe, the bogus question of ‘who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays?’ is in the news again. Jodi Picoult, the writer, thinks that Emilia Bassano (aka Aemilia Lanier), the daughter of a musician, must have had a hand in them, because, she says, Juliet is 13 in Romeo and Juliet, and Bassano was forced to become a mistress at that exact age. This despite the fact that in the play Juliet isn’t forced to love Romeo, and that Bassano was in her late teens when she became Lord Hunsdon’s mistress. Not convinced? In Othello, Desdemona’s servant is called – wait for it – Emilia! I don’t know about you, but that clinches it for me. At least Picoult hasn’t found the word for bacon written backwards in Latin, which is what usually points the way to conspiracy theory.
I wonder whether all this is a symptom of cultural malaise, linked to modernism and the need to question everything
It’s strange, this obsession with Shakespeare being a fake.
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