Anne Shakespeare: The beginning

Why, after 400 or more years, has no-one considered seriously that the true author behind the supposed works attributed to William Shakespeare, is his wife, Anne Shakespeare? Shakespearean scholars are too busy trying to find evidence that would fit other male contenders such as Marlowe, de Vera, Bacon, for example. All the while the real author has gone undetected. Why? Because she set out to, and achieved, her goal of ensuring that her husband would be the one immortalised through her writing. In a predominantly patriarchal society Anne found it impossible to out herself as the real author. Not only because she was a woman in a male world, but the vast majority of female writers of the time were constrained as to what they could endeavour to write. The writing of the time by female writers mainly centred on child-birth, raising a family, being a good role model for children and servants, adhering to the scriptures of the Bible, of being seen as faithful housewife's, but not heard in positions of power either at the local or state level. Paradoxically, the head of state was a woman, Elizabeth, but this did not seem to indicate that other women could be heard or seen in society (unless they were from the upper social classes and even here they were generally seen as having influence mainly through there husband's positions of class and wealth. A theme taken up by Anne in her many plays.

But a writer she was. Through her travels in Italy and the continent while she was a young woman around the age of twenty we have her Italian plays as a record of her travels and her immersion in Italian humanism.

More to come.