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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
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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