Shakespeare Was Not a Woman

For years, fantasists who peddle the fiction that Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him have failed to get Wikipedia to backdate doubts about his authorship. Wikipedia refuses to do so because scholars have demonstrated that two and a half centuries passed before this theory was first proposed, in the mid–19th century. That's a fact. You can imagine the doubters' joy when discovering that Elizabeth Winkler managed to publish this falsehood in the pages of The Atlantic, confidently assuring her readers that “doubts about whether William Shakespeare … really wrote the works attributed to him are almost as old as the writing itself.”
 
With that claim, we have entered into an alternate universe, inhabited by conspiracy theorists. They have their work cut out for them, given the body of evidence confirming that Shakespeare wrote his plays. In promoting this conspiracy theory, Winkler recycles the stale and feeble arguments all too familiar to anyone who has dealt with this fringe movement: Hey, a lot of famous people have doubted Shakespeare's authorship, so you should too! He was an actor and a moneylender, a profile that doesn't match what we like to think a real writer should be!