DeBaytable: “A Woman Wrote Shakespeare”

That there are at least two sides to every issue is debatable, and this is as as it should be.

• A recent blog post that concerns itself with the Authorship Question and Mary Sidney is worth reading: DeBaytable.com, authored by Don Bay. Take a look and make a nice comment!

• While considering the topics of debate, exploration, wonderment and assumptions, I was recently given a copy of Tina Packer’s new book, Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays (Knopf, 2015) and it is with energetic enthusiasm that Ms. Packer explores the insights of a remarkable author in relation to what is called “the Feminine in Shakespeare’s plays” and if one can get past all the speculation, which is a major and amusing part of this fun book, much of what she writes is actually rather a wonderful support for Mary Sidney as author or main editor of the works sometimes still attributed to Shakespeare.

At one point there is this: “In order to understand better what happened to Shakespeare’s writing of women, we need a context for his life . . . I don’t know if everything is accurate in this account, but I am dealing with events in the way Shakespeare dealt with events—taking the events themselves and using them to stimulate the imagination so a story can be told.” In the section titled “The Plague Years,” there is mention of Mary Sidney and her circle at Wilton. 

Have a good time stimulating your imagination with speculative assumptions, so that stories can be told, and then reconsider those assumptions . . . they are debatable.