Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies is a thrilling investigation into the origins of literature's greatest taboo: the question of whether William Shakespeare wrote his plays. Writers and thinkers-from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices-have harbored doubts across the centimes. Scholars admit that the Bards biography is a "black hole," yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even "immoral." Elizabeth Winkler explores how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our beliefs about Shakespeare, and she considers who may have been hiding behind his name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Whisking readers from London to Stratford-upon-Avon to Washington, DC, to interview scholars and skeptics, Winkler turns to the larger problem of historical truth-and of how human imperfections shape our construction of the past. History is a story, and the story we find may depend on the story we're looking for.