The claim that William Shakespeare was actually a Black Jewish woman (specifically, the Venetian-Jewish court musician's daughter Emilia Bassano, aka Emilia Lanier, reimagined with North African/Moroccan roots), comes from a recent book by feminist historian Irene Coslet. It's framed through critical theory, subaltern studies (Spivak), feminist historiography, and accusations of patriarchal/racist erasure by the "Western-centric" canon. In other words; maximum woke! The College Fix article headlines it in classic clickbait style ("Shakespeare was really a black Jewish woman") and places it in their "Buzz" section, which often spotlights what they see as absurd academia. And rightly so.
It's not outright fabricated — Coslet is a real person with an LSE background in gender/development studies, and the Emilia Bassano authorship theory has floated around for years (e.g., earlier books like John Hudson's on her as the "Dark Lady" and possible influence). But Coslet's version amps it up to full "black Jewish woman from North Africa" with heavy intersectional jargon, making it sound like peak 2020s academic fanfiction.
Here's a satirical roast in the spirit of absurd escalation, keeping the "no trans, disabled, neurodiverse, etc." rule while piling on every other imaginable PC/woke category:
Top 10 Woke Shakespeare Identity Upgrades (Certified Intersectional Edition)
1. Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman… but also Indigenous (via secret First Nations ancestry smuggled in by Moroccan traders — decolonise the Globe Theatre!).
2. Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman… who was vegan (all those references to meat in the plays? Repressed plant-based trauma from patriarchal slaughterhouses).
3. Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman… and a climate refugee (forced migration from rising Mediterranean seas due to Elizabethan fossil-fuel barbecues).
4. Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman… practicing ethical non-monogamy (the sonnets were clearly polyamorous love letters; Othello was just misunderstood compression).
5. Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman… who identified as a cat in private (hence all the feline imagery and "purr-fect" puns — furries were the real Renaissance vanguard).
6. Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman… and an anti-capitalist collective (the plays were ghost-written by a secret commune of Stratford seamstresses — smash the bourgeois printing press!).
7. Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman… with Palestinian heritage (hidden Gaza roots explain the anti-imperial themes in The Tempest — Prospero = settler-colonial oppressor).
8. Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman… who was body-positive (all those "fat" insults in the comedies? Internalised fatphobia projected onto Falstaff — body neutrality now!).
9. Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman… and a sovereign citizen (refused to pay taxes to the Crown; the " Stratford man" was just a paid front to avoid Elizabethan licensing fees).
10. Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman… who wrote everything in BIPOC font (invisible ink made from crushed goji berries — only legible under full-moon equity lighting).
In seriousness: the Bassano theory is fringe even among authorship sceptics (most scholars dismiss it for lack of hard evidence), and layering on "Black" (in the loose Elizabethan sense of "not pale") + "Jewish" + modern identity-politics framing turns it into parody bait. Outlets like The College Fix, Daily Caller, and even some UK tabloids run it straight-faced for the outrage clicks, but the backlash ("ludicrous," etc.) is predictable. It's less serious history than a symptom of how far some activist scholarship stretches to "reclaim" canons.
If this is the level of rigour we're at in 2026, next we'll discover Jane Austen was a non-binary Somali pirate!
https://www.thecollegefix.com/feminist-historian-shakespeare-was-really-a-black-jewish-woman/