Happy Black History Month, BET fam, and welcome to your weekly installment of: The Blackest Moment of the Week! This series will explore fun, informational, silly, and or incredible revelations in the zeitgeist every week this month.

For the first installment: William Shakespeare. Shakespeare?! Yes, Shakespeare! (pronounced in the style of Regina Hall’s character “Brenda Meeks” from “Scary Movie”)

Question! Was Shakespeare a Black woman?

There are few pop culture moments more irresistible than centuries-old, cold tea getting a 21st-century makeover, and that’s exactly what happened when feminist historian Irene Coslet argued in a new book that the plays credited to Shakespeare may actually have been written by Emilia Lanier (née Aemilia Bassano), who Coslet suggests was a dark-skinned Jewish woman. The claim has blown up online and in headlines, dropping jaws left and right!

Before you file this under “hot takes,” here’s some helpful context: the idea that Shakespeare’s works might have been authored (or co-authored) by someone else is hardly new. Scholars, novelists, and critics have kicked around alternative candidates for decades, partly because questions about authorship let us ask bigger questions about who gets remembered in history and why. 

The theory has pedigree. Scholars have long noted that Lanier was one of the very first English women to publish original poetry, and her biography makes her an intriguing candidate for authorship revisionism. 

So why is this a Black History Month moment? Because the book’s major claim that a Black Jewish woman could be the genius behind the English canon forces us to imagine the past differently. It’s about challenging the default assumption that the great voices of the English language are white, male, and unable to be challenged. Whether or not Coslet’s evidence convinces the wider audience, the idea invites Black and Jewish readers to see themselves in cultural histories where they’ve been pushed to the margins. 

To be clear, many experts are still skeptical. Authorship theories often lean on interpretive readings and gaps in the historical record, which is fertile ground for bold hypotheses, but not necessarily proof. Critics warn against leaping from a provocative reading to definitive conclusions. The scholarly bunch still leans toward Shakespeare of Stratford as the primary author. 

Whether you treat Coslet’s book as revisionist history, speculative fun, or a necessary provocation, it’s doing exactly what good culture should do this Black History Month: making us reexamine the archive, argue about who gets to be the standard, and imagine fuller, more inclusive stories about our past. Read it, debate it, and if nothing else, enjoy seeing Shakespeare get served a plot twist worthy of the very stages he wrote for.

Happy Black History Month, and see you all next week for the next installment of: The Blackest Moment of the Week!