Lecture Date: January 23, 2024
The Stephen and Patricia Powers Gaske Lecture
Shakespeare is the most elusive of biographical subjects. “‘Shakespeare’ is present as an absence—which is to say, as a ghost,” the Harvard professor Marjorie Garber once wrote. What haunts is the very emptiness of the authorial identity, yet this emptiness that has proven remarkably fruitful for scholars. Since the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, there have been twenty-five full-length biographies of Shakespeare. They have imagined a Protestant Shakespeare, a secret Catholic Shakespeare, a republican Shakespeare, a monarchist Shakespeare, a heterosexual Shakespeare, a bisexual Shakespeare, a Shakespeare who hated his wife (and thus left her the second-best bed), a Shakespeare who loved his wife (and thus left her the second-best bed), a Shakespeare who, before taking up the pen, must have been a roving actor or a schoolmaster or a lawyer or a soldier or a sailor. Shakespeare “could have,” “might have,” “must have,” “probably,” “surely,” “undoubtedly,” they speculate, conjuring baseless scenes and elaborating tenuous theories in an attempt to connect the man to the works. They are the very worst kinds of biography: fiction masquerading as history—or what one scholar dubbed “biographical fiction.” As long as the center remains empty, the biographies can proliferate, each scholar manufacturing his own Shakespeare. This lecture will consider the history of attempts to construct a Shakespeare biography and their enduring popular appeal despite their fundamentally fictional nature.
Speaker: Elizabeth Winkler
Elizabeth Winkler is a journalist and book critic whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Economist, among other publications. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her master’s in English literature from Stanford University. Her first book, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, was published in 2023 by Simon & Schuster.