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A review by jasonfurman
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
5.0
An outstanding book. A joy to read from beginning to end, learned an enormous amount, all processed through the lens of the history of Shakespeare authorship controversies. In particular, the book asks why so many people have come to believe that William Shakespeare of Stratford did not write the plays attributed to him but that someone else, like Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere of Oxford, did. This view was held by people from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Mark Twain to Sigmund Freud to several Supreme Court justices today and even the New York Times has written agnostically on the subject of who wrote Shakespeare.
Shapiro traces the history of Shakespeare studies from his death through the early 19th Century, documenting the twists and turns of how little fragments of evidence about Shakespeare's life emerged, dotted with several episodes of forgery, and culminating in a number of prominent Shakespeare scholars starting in the 1700s who viewed his works through the prism of psychology, autobiography, and other similar perspectives.
Shapiro argues that it was these well meaning attempts to fill in the gaps with other disciplines that also opened up the belief that the same person who was a moneylender and a grain merchant could not have written about courts and kings and the other aspects of Shakespeare. The first set of theories focused on Bacon, and comical ideas about elaborate ciphers in Shakespeare's work. This was followed by the view that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare's works, a theory undeterred by de Vere's death in 1604, a decade before the final Shakespeare play.
Shapiro explains why these theories appealed to so many people (e.g., Twain was writing his autobiography, believed that all of his works were written directly from his own experience, and could not imagine someone else doing otherwise). And he also gives a compelling case for Shakespeare's authorship, although not one that would persuade any die-hard conspiracy theorists.
Ultimately, Shapiro writes a testament to Shakespeare's imagination and range, something that is the ultimate rebuttal of the attempt to reduce the plays to simple roman a clef's about court figures or simple ciphers.
What makes the book so interesting is not that it is worth devoting much mental evidence to the anti-Stratfordians but how much about Shakespeare's life, work, subsequent reception, and evolution of literature, is illuminated by looking at how this movement emerged and gained an increasing amount of strength.
Shapiro traces the history of Shakespeare studies from his death through the early 19th Century, documenting the twists and turns of how little fragments of evidence about Shakespeare's life emerged, dotted with several episodes of forgery, and culminating in a number of prominent Shakespeare scholars starting in the 1700s who viewed his works through the prism of psychology, autobiography, and other similar perspectives.
Shapiro argues that it was these well meaning attempts to fill in the gaps with other disciplines that also opened up the belief that the same person who was a moneylender and a grain merchant could not have written about courts and kings and the other aspects of Shakespeare. The first set of theories focused on Bacon, and comical ideas about elaborate ciphers in Shakespeare's work. This was followed by the view that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare's works, a theory undeterred by de Vere's death in 1604, a decade before the final Shakespeare play.
Shapiro explains why these theories appealed to so many people (e.g., Twain was writing his autobiography, believed that all of his works were written directly from his own experience, and could not imagine someone else doing otherwise). And he also gives a compelling case for Shakespeare's authorship, although not one that would persuade any die-hard conspiracy theorists.
Ultimately, Shapiro writes a testament to Shakespeare's imagination and range, something that is the ultimate rebuttal of the attempt to reduce the plays to simple roman a clef's about court figures or simple ciphers.
What makes the book so interesting is not that it is worth devoting much mental evidence to the anti-Stratfordians but how much about Shakespeare's life, work, subsequent reception, and evolution of literature, is illuminated by looking at how this movement emerged and gained an increasing amount of strength.