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Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
- How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
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Publisher's summary
An “extraordinarily brilliant” and “pleasurably naughty” (André Aciman) 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.
The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.”
In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking you 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 considers the writers and thinkers—from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices—who have grappled with the riddle of the plays’ origins, she explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Hovering over the mystery are Shakespeare’s plays themselves, with their love for mistaken identities, disguises, and things never quite being what they seem.
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.
“Lively” (The Washington Post), “fascinating” (Amanda Foreman), and “intrepid” (Stacy Schiff), Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies 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.
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The Man in the Red Coat
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Saul Reichlin
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker, and man of science with a famously complicated private life....
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Pathetic narration makes this title unbearable
- By Chris Quigg on 02-27-20
By: Julian Barnes
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A Wicked Company
- The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
- By: Philipp Blom
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach’s Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach’s house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes of this exceptional group of friends.
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Excellent Book on Radical Enlightenment
- By EJJ on 02-15-15
By: Philipp Blom
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
- Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
- By: John Tresch
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. He remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.
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Know the Real Poe
- By Elliott Wolfe, M.D. on 06-28-21
By: John Tresch
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
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Emerson
- The Mind on Fire
- By: Robert D. Richardson
- Narrated by: Michael McConnohie
- Length: 26 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord.
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Finally!
- By Douglas on 08-15-14
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God’s Secretaries
- The Making of the King James Bible
- By: Adam Nicolson
- Narrated by: Clive Chafer
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment “Englishness” and the English language had come into its first passionate maturity. Boisterous, elegant, subtle, majestic, finely nuanced, sonorous, and musical, the English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own reach and scope than any before or since. It is a form of the language that drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book.
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Not what I was expecting
- By Greg on 12-29-13
By: Adam Nicolson
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The Creation of Anne Boleyn
- A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen
- By: Susan Bordo
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne’s life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really look like? Was she the flaxen-haired martyr of Romantic paintings or the raven-haired seductress of twenty-first-century portrayals? (Answer: Neither.) And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Anne’s death more than her life.
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Most Enjoyable Biography--Win!
- By Roswatheist on 03-29-14
By: Susan Bordo
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Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
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A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
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Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- By: Clive James
- Narrated by: Clive James
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
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Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
By: Clive James
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Machiavelli
- The Art of Teaching People What to Fear
- By: Patrick Boucheron
- Narrated by: Mack Sanderson
- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In a series of poignant vignettes, a preeminent historian makes a compelling case for Machiavelli as an unjustly maligned figure with valuable political insights that resonate as strongly today as they did in his time.
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Great Tester
- By Iván on 04-09-24
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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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What listeners say about Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jeanne Macdonald
- 04-10-24
The debate
As a PhD in science and engineering, I was fascinated by the different approaches players in this debate took to support and advocate for their side. I recognized many analogies in my own field, particularly when postulating new theories to recognized authorities, though not to the degrees highlighted in this book, thank goodness.
The focus on human biases and behaviors, how people were treating each other, added a dimension that I found intriguing and portions of this book have strengthened my own motivation for self examination.
I was also excited to learn about the new technologies and models that have been employed to advance the way historical interpretations can be analyzed ( though I had to laugh at the often misuse of new technologies to distort, something not uncommon to any scientific field of study, though whether out of intent or ignorance is another debate).
I also really enjoyed the narrator, her pacing and tone was on point. I do have to admit, however, that I went into the book assuming the narrator WAS the author up until the very end of the epilogue… yep, I fell into an unconscious bias with an un-investigated assumption, which also made me have to laugh.
Regardless of whether you are a devout Shakespeare lover or have a strong appreciation for the works (like me), I think there is something for everyone in this book.
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- T. L.
- 07-06-23
Eye-opening
It’s amazing how much of our reality is built upon myths, legends, and lies, and this book shines a light on all three with regards to the authorship question. While we might never know the ground truth, I think this discourse is an important reminder that great art often requires many hands to make it happen, regardless of whose name headlines the playbill.
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- Anonymous User
- 05-23-23
Well researched and very engaging journalism
Must read! It validated my experience as a young woman in academia who was scoffed at for asking “unimportant questions” about women and their experiences in the Great Books. Thank you Elizabeth for standing up to academic thuggery with grace and intelligence.
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- Virgil Tracy
- 06-03-23
Excellent!
Not at all a conspiracy theory (which was my fear). It made an Oxfordian out of me!
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4 people found this helpful
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- Jimmie Hammel
- 05-28-23
Excellent
This book was wonderful. I recommended it to half a dozen people before I even finished it.
While it's primarily a book about who wrote Shakespeare, it's also a book about bias, psychology, peer pressure, and orthodoxy in academia. The historical information about Shakespeare's contemporaries was fascinating, and Elizabeth Winkler made me fall a bit in love with Edward DeVere and Christopher Marlowe.
What I found most interesting was the way that some of the academics disagreed through insults. Accusing someone of being crazy isn't an argument against their position. It's just rude. And if they are resorting to rudeness, it makes their position look weak.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Nathan S.
- 07-06-23
Excellent
Forcing me to write reviews instead of just rating stars is a stupid new audible requirement but the book was good enough to warrant a few words here and now you've read them and should go on to read the book also.
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- Maria Fordon
- 09-10-23
Fascinating
Even as someone who doesn’t know much about Shakespeare this was such a great listen.
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- shannon moore
- 12-01-23
Brilliant
Fascinating account of the Shakespeare authorship question. Winkler’s thorough investigation proves it- Shakespeare was a psuedonym. I love that she explores every candidate with an open mind and lays out their case thoroughly. I will definitely need to purchase a copy of this book for reference.
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- SleepyMom
- 04-17-24
Well researched, well rounded
I have to admit that I’d never heard of any authorship controversy until I watched Anonymous and the documentary “Last Will and Testament” (produced by the Anonymous director). I can’t say that I’m any more than someone who is much more interested in the text thanks to those two Oxfordian-slanted movies. This book includes most of those Oxfordian points but also expands past the Oxfordian theory and includes many others. It is obvious that Ms. Weaver is very knowledgeable and has researched this topic ad nauseam. I really love the analogy of Shakespeare as a god, Stratfordians as the orthodox clergy, and discussion of any other author as heresy. This is something I felt but couldn’t put words to after watching “Last Will and Testament.” Stanley Wells and Jonathon Bate seem to be going into arguments that don’t directly address the questions posed by the Anti-Stratfordians. I have always wondered if that was due to selective editing or something else. I would really like to hear their true responses to these statements. Although it’s obvious that Ms. Weaver attempted to get that, there is nothing here that directly rebuts the Anti-Stratfordians. Equating the questions about the Stratfordian man’s authorship to questioning the holocaust is just one ad hominem fallacy that just gets in the way of any real discussion. Ms. Weaver also introduces several players in both camps that I will just have read to expand my understanding more. But, for me at the end of it, I’d like to understand what the writing really means. As someone who speaks American English of the 21st century, any interpretation of what the author(s) were thinking, writing, saying helps me get past the words that, while they are written in English, are defined quite differently. The symbolism, emotion, meaning can only be enhanced by a greater understanding of the time and people at play here.
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- Lauren Thomason
- 05-14-23
Beautifully written and full of nuance
Elizabeth leads with an infectious curiosity and presents the topic with a great deal of nuance. She weaves a complex but very readable narrative that interweaves history, Elizabeth’s conversations with contemporary scholars, and a look at many factors that may have led to this subject becoming so extremely contentious in the modern era.
As a reader who approached the book without much prior knowledge and no pre-formed opinions on the subject Shakespeare authorship, I really appreciated the honesty exhibited throughout when facing ambiguity and details which may have many different possible interpretations. The book does not tell the reader what they should think. It instead challenges the reader to think for themselves about the suppositions of history as written, their consequences, and ultimately to reconsider to what degree the authorship matters, and why.
If you want a book to doggedly argue the case for a single potential author to the exclusion of all other possibility, this is not going to be that book. In my opinion, this book is far superior.
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