Disinviting Shakespeare from his own birthday-- My fav plot twist

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Okay so because I am trash and cannot remember the guest speaker's name, I am going to call her the kind guest speaker/professor from KU. (my bad please forgive me)
Anyway, the speaker shook up Shakespeare's birthday by disregarding him and calling attention to multiple female authors of the same time period. I found this a wonderful way to shine a light on those who were overshadowed because of their gender, and not because of lacking abilities. Our speaker did a really cool grounding exercise where she had us call out names of Shakespeare's plays, major and minor characters from any, then proceed to do the same with any other female playwrights we could think of. The results were poignant and obvious-- we all know about the famous white man, and his plays sprinkled with a little racism and sexism here and there, but as a whole we have learned little of other magnificent writers of the time.
Aemilia Lanyer. This presentation is where I first learned about her book of poetry with famous stories told from relative women's perspectives. How cool and badass. "Her sin was small, to what you do commit. Then let us have our liberty again. You came not in the world without our pain, make that bar against your cruelty." Reading this quote and understanding her position of supporting Eve instead of berating her for her sin made me start to think of all the possibilities for insightful conversations we could have in secondary schooling. Reading works like Shakespeare and contrasting them with these female authors of the time would open so many different perspectives and develop new lenses in which to view literature. There are so many great inspired conversations waiting to happen, and I'm super thankful our speaker chose Shakespeare's birthday to ignite these ideas for us.

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