The Lewes Public Library Shakespeare Festival welcomes Elizabeth Winkler.

Join us in the library or online as we close out the Lewes Public Library Shakespeare Festival with a conversation with Elizabeth Winkler, author of Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature, a thrillingly provocative investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy…and who the Bard might really be.

In this book, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking readers from London to Stratford-upon-Avon to Washington, DC, she pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries. As she interviews scholars and skeptics, Winkler’s interest turns to the larger problem of historical truth — and of how human imperfections (bias, blindness, subjectivity) shape our construction of the past. History is a story, and the story we find may depend on the story we’re looking for. An irresistible work of literary detection, this book will forever change how you think of Shakespeare… and of how we as a society decide what’s up for debate and what’s just nonsense, just heresy.

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 essay “Was Shakespeare a Woman?”, first published in The Atlantic, was selected for The Best American Essays 2020. She lives in Washington, DC.

We invite you to support the author by purchasing a copy of their book from Browseabout Books by clicking HERE. Call-in orders are accepted at (302) 226-2665 or you can stop by the store to purchase a copy. For store hours, please visit their website. Each copy purchased comes signed. Books will be available for sale and for signing at the event.

NOTE: this session is available to attend in-person or through Zoom. You MUST REGISTER and indicate which you prefer.

If you have need assistance with registration or getting your Zoom invitation, please email us.

Basic written instructions for using Zoom may be found here and a brief video tutorial may be found here. Closed captioning is available for all our sessions. Information on enabling closed captioning in Zoom may be found here.

The Shakespeare Festival, a program of the Lewes Public Library since 2015, seeks to provide the community with experiences that foster the understanding of Shakespeare and the world in which he lived and wrote. In addition the Festival fosters the development of new works celebrating the spoken word and hosting performances of classical texts.

The Festival is partially funded by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. The Division promotes Delaware arts events on DelawareScene.com. The Festival also is supported in part by Browseabout Books and the John and Sarah Freeman Foundation.