It's painfully clear that the Left cannot create anything of its own. They sow chaos, taking beloved IPs like "Star Trek" and "The Lord of the Rings" and turning them into woke garbage rather than honoring their legacies and canon (or creating their own stories). In addition to lacking creativity, they don't have the audience for these ideas. Yes, they'll argue that injecting woke into "Star Wars" is meant to draw in the elusive "Modern Audiences," but if those audiences existed, shows like "The Acolyte" would have stellar ratings and not be canceled after one season.
This writer would argue the Left gets a weird sense of satisfaction by taking things people love and destroying them, because they'll often sneer at the fans who complain about those things, asking, "Why does this mean so much to you?!" and when those shows flop, they attack the fans and critics for being biogted.
The destruction is the point, and it didn't start with contemporary entertainment. The Left has long had its eye on destroying our historical culture too, dismissing it as "too white," "racist," "misogynistic" and whatever other DEI words they can come up with. English playwright William Shakespeare is often a target of this destruction. One of the greatest writers who ever lived, Shakespeare gifted the world with a slew of idioms and words that we use to this day, including "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" (Richard III), "Frailty, thy name is woman" (Hamlet), "It’s Greek to me" (Julius Caesar), "That way madness lies" (King Lear), and "Wild goose chase" (Romeo & Juliet).
But now a new book is claiming, falsely, that Shakespeare was really a Black, Jewish woman who was erased by "Western-centric and Eurocentric ideology”.
🎭 William Shakespeare was a “black Jewish woman” who used used the Bard's name as a pen-name, according to a new book.
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) January 24, 2026
Read the full report from @Craig_Simpson_ here ⤵️https://t.co/pyLi27hP07 pic.twitter.com/TLrIvHo6fz
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Here's more:
The author contends that the real Bard was a cosmopolitan woman with a “multicultural identity”.
This woman is identified in the new work, titled The Real Shakespeare, as the historical figure Emilia Bassano – a poet with connections to the Tudor court.
Bassano, it is claimed, used the pen-name “Shakespeare” and wrote the Shakespearean canon of plays, only for her work to be stolen by an uneducated interloper from Stratford-upon-Avon.
This interloper, whom we now know as William Shakespeare, was then revered by posterity because the idea of a “white” genius was preferred to a black female playwright, the book argues.
The book’s author, Irene Coslet, a feminist historian, told The Telegraph: “If Shakespeare was a female of colour, this would draw attention to issues of peace and justice in society.”
She added: “What if women had a pivotal role and a civilising impact in history, but they have been silenced, belittled and erased from the dominant narrative?
“What would a paradigm shift reveal about ourselves? Such a reflection challenges us to reconsider our understanding of society.”
Shakespeare’s own authorship was never questioned during his lifetime. His fierce rival Ben Jonson hailed him as a genius “for all time” in a dedication included in the First Folio.
This isn't the first time such claims have been made in an effort to retcon Shakespeare. Going back years, academics and the media have made various claims about the "true" identity of Shakespeare. In 2009, theater producer John Hudson published an article claiming that Aemilia Bassano Lanier wrote Shakespeare's works, a claim repeated in subsequent years, under slightly different names, including Emilia Bassano Willoughby or Emilia Lanier.
Irene Coslet is just the latest to try to resurrect this long-debunked attack on Shakespeare.
In 2015, even Snopes listed those claims as untrue, and shared some interesting facts:
First, Aemilia Bassano (later Emilia Lanier) was indeed a published author, not someone whose work was suppressed because of her race or gender. In fact, the Shakespearean Authorship Trust notes that Bassano became the "first woman to publish a book of original poetry" when her work Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was put into print in 1611.
...
Second, Bassano was not black. She was born to Baptista Bassano (a Venice musician at the court of Elizabeth I) and Margaret Johnson in 1569, and biographies of her note that she "was part of a family of Italian court musicians of Moroccan/Semitic ancestry who lived as clandestine Jews."
The Shakespearean Authorship Trust said there are almost 70 people who could be authors of Shakespeare's works, but even then, Bassano is on the fringes. Snopes describes the Trust as "a group seemingly determined to credit Shakespeare's work to anyone but Shakespeare himself," which tells you just how fringe this theory really is.
The Folger Shakespeare Library, the British Library, and multiple other sources all provide substantial proof — including legal documents and eyewitness testimony — of Shakespeare's identity and his authorship of the works credited to him.
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