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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
 
 
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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

James Shapiro (Author)
3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)

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Book Description

April 6, 2010
For more than two hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, no one doubted that he had written his plays. Since then, however, dozens of candidates have been proposed for the authorship of what is generally agreed to be the finest body of work by a writer in the English language. In this remarkable book, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays. Among the doubters have been such writers and thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, and Helen Keller. It is a fascinating story, replete with forgeries, deception, false claimants, ciphers and codes, conspiracy theories—and a stunning failure to grasp the power of the imagination.

As Contested Will makes clear, much more than proper attribution of Shakespeare’s plays is at stake in this authorship controversy. Underlying the arguments over whether Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays are fundamental questions about literary genius, specifically about the relationship of life and art. Are the plays (and poems) of Shakespeare a sort of hidden autobiography? Do Hamlet, Macbeth, and the other great plays somehow reveal who wrote them?

Shapiro is the first Shakespeare scholar to examine the authorship controversy and its history in this way, explaining what it means, why it matters, and how it has persisted despite abundant evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays attributed to him. This is a brilliant historical investigation that will delight anyone interested in Shakespeare and the literary imagination.


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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Shapiro, author of the much admired A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, achieves another major success in the field of Shakespeare research by exploring why the Bard's authorship of his works has been so much challenged. Step-by step, Shapiro describes how criticism of Shakespeare frequently evolved into attacks on his literacy and character. Actual challenges to the authorship of the Shakespeare canon originated with an outright fraud perpetrated by William-Henry Ireland in the 1790s and continued through the years with an almost religious fervor. Shapiro exposes one such forgery: the earliest known document, dating from 1805, challenging Shakespeare's authorship and proposing instead Francis Bacon. Shapiro mines previously unexamined documents to probe why brilliant men and women denied Shakespeare's authorship. For Mark Twain, Shapiro finds that the notion resonated with his belief that John Milton, not John Bunyan, wrote The Pilgrim's Progress. Sigmund Freud's support of the earl of Oxford as the author of Shakespeare appears to have involved a challenge to his Oedipus theory, which was based partly on his reading of Hamlet. As Shapiro admirably demonstrates, William Shakespeare emerges with his name and reputation intact. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Apr.)
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About the Author

James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, he studied at Columbia and the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, most recently A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. He has been awarded numerous fellowships and grants from institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He has written for The New York Times, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. Mr. Shapiro lives in New York with his wife and son.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1 edition (April 6, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1416541624
  • ISBN-13: 978-1416541622
  • Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.9 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #557,529 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

61 Reviews
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116 of 169 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Why Some Think It Wasn't Shakespeare, April 4, 2010
This review is from: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (Hardcover)
I can't remember, but I think it was Woody Allen who wrote the joke: The plays of William Shakespeare were not written by Shakespeare himself, but by someone with the same name. The only reason the joke works is that for a couple of centuries there have been skeptics who have denied that Shakespeare's works were actually the works of Shakespeare. In _Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?_ (Simon and Schuster), it's not a surprise that James Shapiro answers the question in the subtitle the way he does: Shakespeare did. After all, Shapiro is a Shakespeare scholar whose most recent book was a look at one year (1599) in Shakespeare's life and how the plays he was writing were formed by the political and social environment of that time. So, yes, "He would say that, wouldn't he?" will be the response from the current skeptics, all of whom have their own candidate for the position of Bard. Shapiro's book, indeed, puts an unassailable case for Shakespeare of Stratford being the author, but that is only at the end. Everything that goes before is a history of the anti-Stratfordian movement. It is a wonderfully clear explanation of why skeptics started going wrong and have continued vehemently on their wrong paths. It is an entertaining and often hilarious tale, a path strewn, as Shapiro says, with "fabricated documents, embellished lives, concealed identity, pseudonymous authorship, contested evidence, bald-faced deception, and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined."

There is no evidence that anyone in Shakespeare's time thought that the plays came from anyone else. In fact, it was only a couple of centuries after his death that doubters started piping up. It was a response to a lack of knowledge about the man himself; we don't have his letters or a journal, so why not simply read the poems and plays to get glimpses of biography? This was in harmony with the philosophy of the Romantics. The cases against Shakespeare started with Delia Bacon, an American intellectual and lecturer who picked Francis Bacon (no relation), who may have been a polymath but whose output shows no evidence that he could write plays and poems. The idea of Bacon's authorship was taken seriously by many, including Mark Twain, who won over his friend Helen Keller into the Baconian camp. The most popular counterproposal to Bacon is Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. A schoolmaster named J. T. Looney (whose name has caused titters to non-skeptics ever since) proposed that the plays had so many details of such things as legal lore, falconry, and foreign travel that a mere actor from Stratford could not have written them. Oxford, however, knew plenty about such things, and had three daughters (just like King Lear!) and his wife married at thirteen (just like Juliette!). Looney made many converts, chief among them being Sigmund Freud, whose advocacy of Oxford got in the way of friendships and of the psychoanalysis of at least one patient who would not come around to the right way of thinking on the issue. I have written flippantly in some of the above summaries, but Shapiro is never condescending, and makes earnest attempts to understand the cracked ideas that were taken seriously. There was a slump in the Oxford camp in the twentieth century, as its members used their brand of research to expand their boy's authorship not just of Shakespeare's works, but also of those of Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser, and showed as well that he had been Queen Elizabeth's lover (you can look it up!). The Oxfordians, however, took advantage of publicity in 1987 and afterwards of show trials in which the authorship of the plays was pled before such legal minds as Supreme Court justices. Oh, Oxford didn't wind up being judged the author, but the publicity fed the idea that there was a controversy about the authorship, and also that Oxford was the chief alternate. This is despite the difficult fact that he died in 1604, and many of the plays are confidently dated as written after that. It is not coincidence, Shapiro shows, that the rise in Oxford's shares has come at a time when there is a greater willingness to believe in governmental conspiracies and cover-ups.

It is a relief to come to the end of the book and see what a case can be made for Shakespeare himself. Shapiro demonstrates that only a long-term partner deeply involved in the joint workings of the stage could have written in such a fashion, not an aristocrat working solitarily in a room and delivering the plays anonymously to the actors. There are contemporary witnesses, there are clues from printing houses, there are many details that point to the conclusion that Shakespeare was, after all, merely Shakespeare. In addition, genuine Shakespeare scholarship is coming to understand that many of the plays are joint productions; the Stratfordians are not loath to accept that their man could partner with other writers, collaborations that the skeptics do not tolerate for their candidates. The claims for other candidates is based on snobbery; a hick from Stratford, son of a glove-maker, could not have had the knowledge or the life experience to write such plays. If Shakespeare the actor could imagine himself into plenty of roles, Shapiro argues, why could not his powerful imagination bring forth the roles in his own plays and sonnets? Shapiro's book is capped with this advocacy, but all that has gone before is a sympathetic understanding of why and how we subject the Bard (as we do no other author) to authorship disputes. _Contested Will_ is less a broadside in the Stratfordian's defense than it is a humane examination of an idiosyncratic bit of literary history.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Caveat lector, December 1, 2011
Ostensibly a considered review of the Authorship Question, this book is a thoroughly disingenuous bag of intellectual dirty tricks. Obfuscation is rife, for example: on p. 64 he introduces evidence which would seem to cement the case for Shakespeare of Stratford's authorship. On p. 65 these are referred to as "Collier's many discoveries". Only on p. 66 are those readers who have not yet closed the book told that "most" of the "finds" were fabricated.
Adopting an intellectual pose, Shapiro claims to be interested in why people believe that someone other than the "obvious" candidate might have written the works. This pose conveniently relieves him from the arduous task of actually addressing any of the substantive arguments. Instead he drones on about the psychology of Delia Bacon, Looney and Freud.
Shapiro thinks it is a mistake to look for connections between the life of the author and his works (sure, such connections always turn out to be illusory, right?). His alternative is a vacuous appeal to "imagination": "What I find most disheartening about the claim that Shakespeare of Stratford lacked the life experience to have written the plays is that it diminishes the very thing that makes him so exceptional: his imagination." (p. 277) According to this view Shakespeare "imagined" his Italian settings for example (curiously there is no entry in the index for Italy, Venice, Padua or Verona). Yet everything down to the parish churches named in the Italian plays is in the right place in the right town, as Richard Paul Roe shows in The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels. And if the writer's imagination were so exceptional, why does he lift virtually every plot from previous "sources" (many of which were not available in English)?
At the end, perhaps tiring of the perverse task he has set himself, Shapiro loses his reason entirely (ironically the fate of Delia Bacon). Pooh-poohing the idea that other writers completed unfinished plays after Oxford's death in 1604, he notes that in The Two Noble Kinsmen "Fletcher wasn't adequately aware of what Shakespeare was up to in the previous scene" (p.259) that. As any freshman could have pointed out, such inconsistencies are exactly what we would expect if lesser writers such as Fletcher were completing manuscripts after the death of the author.
Shapiro's sophistry merits perhaps two stars, one of which is for eschewing the customary joke about the name of J.T.Looney.
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24 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Behind the Authorship Controversy, June 30, 2010
By 
Anson Cassel Mills (Lake Santeetlah, NC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (Hardcover)
Usually a book's subtitle clarifies its title, especially if it's a pun. In this case, the subtitle misleads by implying that Shapiro will describe (perhaps seriatim) the leading candidates in what is often grandly called the "Authorship Controversy."

That's not quite what Shapiro has in mind. His purpose is to discuss not the candidates themselves but the reasons why proponents of their authorship have advanced their claims. Shapiro makes a number of cogent arguments in the explication. One is that during the nineteenth century, Romantics came to believe that art must of necessity be an expression of the creator's inner self rather than simply an exercise of imagination.

Even more importantly, Shapiro delineates the connection between the Authorship Controversy and the rise of higher criticism, especially of the sort that challenged previously accepted truths of the Bible. As Shapiro correctly notes, the shock waves of higher criticism "threatened that lesser deity Shakespeare, for his biography too rested precariously on the unstable foundation of posthumous reports and more than a fair share of myths." (74-74)

Several of the major players in contesting Shakespeare's authorship, notably Delia Bacon and Mark Twain, were reared as orthodox Christians and were in simultaneous revolt against both the Bible and Shakespeare. With a bit of squinting and tweaking, one could (though Shapiro does not) also develop plausible religious theories for the rejection of Shakespeare's authorship by, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Helen Keller, and John Thomas Looney.

Shapiro writes sprightly prose and has a gift for illustrating his general themes with specific, often ironic, examples. When, in the second half of the book, he seems to tire of following the vagaries of Shakespeare deniers, Shapiro presents many cogent reasons why the Bard should be identified as the man from Avon. Contested Will is a worthy book, but its potential readers should first ask themselves if they are willing to engage for so long with so many permutations of folly.
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