Aurore Evain's performance of Mary Sidney alias Shakespeare in Paris

An actress and writer in France has been working on a performance of her show, Mary Sidney alias Shakespeare. It was recently performed in Paris and reviewed in the New York Times! The author of the NYT article, Laura Cappelle, asks, “How would the plays be tackled if a woman’s name were attached to them?”

Cappelle admits, “Yet over the course of two hours, with just two lecterns and a few projections, Evain, who is also a theater historian, presented such a wide range of circumstantial evidence drawn from Williams’s Sweet Swan of Avon — as well as potential rebuttals, with vivid help from the actress Fanny Zeller — that I started questioning my own beliefs.”

Aurore tells me in an email, “The more I dive into the story of Mary Sidney, the more I reread Shakespeare's plays in a different way (and the more I want to stage them again, under the name of Mary Sidney!).”

The screenshot above is one frame from a confidential link on YouTube. Thank you, Ms. Evain and Ms. Cappelle!