Welcome to significant others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien. We're still working on

season two. I promise it's coming. But in the meantime, we've got another

conversation for you. And this one centers around a very dangerous question. Was

Shakespeare not really Shakespeare? Author and journalist Elizabeth Winkler

dares to explore that question and its taboo. In her new book, Shakespeare was a

woman and other heresies. And we are so lucky to have her with us here today.

Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining me to talk about this. You originally

wrote about this subject in an article for the Atlantic. Is that right? Yes. In

2019, I wrote an article for the Atlantic about a newly proposed authorship

candidate. And can you for anyone who has not had the pleasure of reading either

your article or your book, can you give us a little bit of an overview? Sure.

Well, I guess I should start by explaining a little bit about the Shakespeare

authorship question because some people have heard about it and know all the

details. And then some people have never heard about it before. You never quite

know what the case is. But I so I began with I wanted to understand why so many

great writers and thinkers over the years have doubted the authorship. Why

they suspected that the name was a pseudonym for a concealed author. And I'd

heard vaguely as a student, there was a question around Shakespeare's

authorship. I studied Shakespeare's English major then again in graduate

school. But you know, when you're studying a writer, you study their works, you

analyze the plays and poems. And there wasn't really any discussion of the

biography or the authorship question. And then later on, I wanted to figure out

...