Books by Chris Summers
Shakespeare is a Woman:
(Anne Shakespeare’s feminism and her Sonnets)
Taylor Swift is being compared with Shakespeare. This is true. Both women, Taylor Swift and Anne Shakespeare are both very talented lyricists. As Semmler (2024) (1) notes, “Swift is, by the way, a poet. She sees herself this way and her songs bear her out.” Both are inspiring women, and while Taylor Swift has found world-wide fame through her songs, we are yet to accord the same accolades to that other great woman, Anne Shakespeare as the author of some thirty-eight plays, two major poems and her Sonnets.
In this third book on Anne Shakespeare as the true author of the works usually attributed to her husband, William Shakespeare, I take an in-depth look at Anne’s Sonnets and the relationships she has with herself, her husband (William) and the woman William was having an affair with, the dark lady.
In her Sonnets we have the only instance where Anne is speaking in the first person, and speaking of what it means to be a woman in a particular situation. Anne does this using a humanist and existential feminist approach. Semmler (2024) (2) notes that “Swift’s songs and Shakespeare’s Sonnets are meditations on deeply personal aspects of their narrators’ experiences.
And, like Taylor Swift, Anne is very much interested in how an authentic love is expressed and how to live an authentic existence having the freedom to choose. As Semmler (2024) (3) notes of Swift’s interview with Elle that “She [Swift] strives to capture moments of lived experience.” (1-3) Semmler, L. (2024). Should Taylor Swift be taught alongside Shakespeare?
Published 2023.
Available as a paperback and e-book. Available on Kindle Unlimited for $0.
Shake-speare: The Inside Story:
(The story of love, nature, humanism and free will told through Anne Shake-speare’s Sonnets)
There are two stories to be told about "Shake-speares Sonnets". The first, and traditional story, is that of William Shakespeare as author, and the sonnets detail his homoerotic affair with a young man and his heterosexual affair with a dark lady. The second story, which is a much more intriguing story, details the love affair of the real author, Anne Shakespeare, with the man she was totally devoted to for most of her life, her husband, William Shakespeare. This story is one of Anne's exploration, through her core beliefs of love, nature, free will and humanism her relationship with William from its beginnings as she woos a reluctant William to marry and produce children, through her emotional roller-coaster relationship with William from around 1582 through to the Sonnets publication in 1609. What underpins her core beliefs though, is her feminine voice: her core beliefs cannot be separated from her lived experience as a woman and thus all of her plays and poems must be seen from her feminist perspective.
This book turns its focus to exploring what are the major core beliefs that Anne uses in her Sonnets (and, again, by extension, in her plays and other major poems) which can be described as love, nature, free will and humanism and all told through her lived experience as a woman. It is through exploring these core beliefs that Anne's great achievements place her as the greatest writer of not only her own generation but also our own.
Published 2022.
Available as a paperback and e-book. Available on Kindle Unlimited for $0.
Shake-speare: The Hidden Author
Over the course of literary history there have been many instances of ghost writing between husband and wife, where the wife has been the genius while the husband takes the kudos for any success. In this book you will find the greatest instance of a wife sacrificing her literary genius in order to immortalise her husband.
The name William Shakespeare conjures up images of an uneducated man becoming the greatest writer in English history, fêted from the stages of London to his famous poems going through several reprints. After over 400 years of bardolatry, his name appears unassailable.
What if, though, the adoration and the fame afforded him has been tragically misplaced? What if, contrary to common acceptance, it was to be proven that he is not the author? What if it can be shown that the real author of Shake-speares Sonnets, and by extension, the plays and poems attributed to him have to be re-imagined as being from the pen of someone so close to him that she has been overlooked for centuries? What if, like so many other women geniuses hidden from view, the real author is none other than his wife, Anne Shakespeare?
This book presents evidence that the real author of Shake-speares Sonnets is his wife, Anne, and the young man who is the subject of them is none other than her husband, William Shakespeare.
Published 2021.
Available as a paperback and e-book.
Dreams of Australia:
The Collected Poems (1983-2017) of Dr Chris Summers
These are the collected poems I began writing in 1983 and cover off on six completed Volumes and one incomplete Volume. They have as their major focus the emotional and physical life of Australia; ranging from my youth as I was growing up in the mining town of Broken Hill in Australia through to my current dreaming on my life on my two acres an hour out of Brisbane, Australia.
I must confess that I now find poetry a dying art form but for me it gave me the imaginative freedom to put into words the images that make up my life and allow me to reflect on what was, what is and what lies ahead on this journey. Funnily enough the poems are not political, but I would class myself as deeply politically motivated for a better world through progressive action.
Available as a paperback and e-book.
Available on Kindle Unlimited for $0.