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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

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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.

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.

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.

"The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, misunderstanding or slight discrepancy to defeat 20 pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a provable nut, as being far more credible than 10 normal witnesses on the other side; treats rumours, even questions, as the equivalent of proof; leaps from the most minuscule of discoveries to the grandest of conclusions; and insists, as the late lawyer Louis Nizer once observed, that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained."
- Vincent Bugliosi, from Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

"The problem is that nonsense can and does go by default. It wins the argument by sheer persistence, by inexhaustible re-iteration, by staying at the meeting when everyone else has gone home, by monomania, by boring people into submission and indifference."
- Theodore Dalrymple

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
- Christopher Hitchens

In this Age of Information (but not of Knowledge), the tenacious belief in grand conspiracy theories for which there is not a shred of proof is a continuing testament to human folly, paranoia, and gullibility. The fervent belief by some that 9/11 was an inside job, or that JFK was assassinated by the C.I.A., or that the moon landing was a hoax filmed on a Hollywood backlot, or that a sinister and all-powerful Illuminati are directing the policy of national governments around the globe, and others, all testify to the need of some people to see malignant forces lurking somewhere in the background, hoodwinking the masses. Conspiracy theorists view themselves as brave dissenters from the "official explanation", and express contempt for the "sheeple" that disagree with them. In this way, conspiracy theorists are able to flatter themselves while indulging their paranoia.

One can add to the motley crew of conspiracy theories the notion that William Shakespeare did not write the works that go by his name; that a mere glover's son from the rural town of Stratford couldn't possibly have written all those magnificent plays and poems, but rather someone of noble blood must have written them. Many "anti-Stratfordians" refer to a shadowy "Shakespeare Establishment" that seeks to suppress the truth, in much the same way that a run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorist invokes the Establishment when prompted for hard evidence of UFO technology at Area 51, for example. It goes without saying, of course, that every single shred of evidence that has survived supports Shakespeare of Stratford, and that history is full of people of the lower or middle classes who've achieved greatness. The evidence is examined in detail in Dr. Shapiro's book, so I see no reason to regurgitate it here. Although there are dozens of "alternative candidates" for Shakespearean authorship, each with the same body of evidence in their favor (i.e. nothing), Shapiro selects the two most "popular" for discussion, Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere. With the recent release of the film "Anonymous", it is virtually guaranteed that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, will be the leading "contender" among the Shakespearean conspiracy theory fringe for decades, which is quite amusing, for if we were to imagine for a moment that no evidence existed at all as to the identity of author of the Shakespeare canon, you'd still be hardpressed to find a candidate less likely than Edward de Vere. Some of de Vere's poetry survives, which is nothing at all like Shakespeare's; he died before many of the plays were written; Francis Meres refers to William Shakespeare and Edward de Vere as separate writers in 1598, making the assertion that they were the same person pretty ridiculous; de Vere's surviving correspondence reveals a man obsessed with moneymaking and, most of all, entering the Cornish tin market, not with the theatre. Dr. Shapiro discusses these and many other problems with the Oxford-as-Shakespeare conspiracy theory, so I'll leave it at that. It should also be mentioned that Dr. Shapiro does a wonderful job of summarizing just how much evidence we DO have for Shakespeare of Stratford's authorship, and that we should be thankful that even this much has survived the centuries.

If I have one qualification with this book, it is that Dr. Shapiro is too kind to the conspiracy theorists. I kept hoping that he would tear into the "anti-Stratfordians". When one extends the olive branch into cloud-cuckoo-land, there is the risk that a smidgen of legitimacy could be added to these unscholarly and unscrupulous charlatans and fools. This reinterpretation of history, which ignores inconvenient facts, debases intellectual inquiry and the search for truth. Ideas have consequences, even absurd ones, and it is disheartening to see how this nonsense has already become pop culture currency. If you value critical thinking, or simply want to read an interesting discussion of the Shakespeare "authorship question", I encourage you to read this book.

This is a scholarly, but very lucid and easy-to-read rejoinder to what's become the popular pastime of asserting that someone other than Shakespeare wrote "Shakespeare's" works. Shapiro is not so much interested in defending the Stratford man's claim to being the "real" Shakespeare, as he is in addressing the question of how and why finding alternate candidates for the authorship has become such a preoccupation in recent centuries.

"Contested Will" traces some of the cultural trends that brought this sort of consideration to the fore. The book considers several historic developments that enabled the rampant speculation about "Who was the real Shakespeare?"

Shapiro points out that the question wasn't anything that could generally be entertained until the 1700s, until the thoroughly modern era brought with it a new mindset that included new assumptions about social priorities and human nature. One of these trends was the literary deification of Shakespeare, making the question of his roots, so to speak, a matter of importance. In Shakespeare's own time, and for over a hundred years after his death, he was considered a talented writer, but was generally only seen as one among a number of gifted Elizabethan-Jacobean writers. He was not elevated to the status of THE preeminent literary genius of the English language until later.

Then with this trend toward deifying, there came the contrary trend toward demythologizing. A strain of skepticism and iconoclasm wove through society, leading people to question hitherto sacred myths. Some scholars set to work questioning the divine origins of the Bible. Similarly, people started to look for the real, everyday Shakespeare who might be behind the mythic figure.

Another societal trend that has contributed to the questioning of Shakespeare as the real author of Shakespeare's works has been the trend toward seeing conspiracies everywhere. Reaching new heights with the theories about President Kennedy assassination, this trend made people ripe for crediting the existence of a vast cover-up of Shakespeare's real identity.

Shapiro gives an interesting social history surrounding all these trends. But the trend he finds most responsible for spurring the search for different Shakespeares is the modern tendency to believe that all literary effort is an intimate expression of the author's own feelings and experience. Thus, as recounted here, Freud felt the real author of Shakespeare must have been someone plagued by Oedipal conflict, a preoccupation that revealingly leaked out in the character of Hamlet. Again because of this equation of drama with personal experience, many other people, including celebrities such as Mark Twain, felt that the real author of Hamlet, the Henry plays, etc., etc., must necessarily have been an educated aristocrat, someone personally familiar with court affairs.

But Shapiro argues that Elizabethan authors did not regard their works as ways of projecting their autobiographies. Those were different times, with a different sense of what constituted individuality and the rightful province and purpose of literary work.

I'm not sure that Shapiro completely convinced me that authors in the 1500s would not have often thought in terms of using their works as vehicles for personal expression, or that readers then wouldn't have preferred authors' works to be based on some first-hand experience. I don't think Marco Polo's much earlier account of his travels would have been nearly as popular as it was, if his potential readers had known that much of the work was purely imaginative confabulation. From those early times, right down to the present day, any work that can claim to be "based on a true story," gains extra cachet. Such works promise to give insight into real people and events. By exposing themselves to such representations, people also can feel they are being given a chance to rehearse what they themselves might someday actually confront.

Still Shapiro makes a strong case for the fact that Elizabethans would not have come to Shakespeare's plays with the same expectations that modern readers do. They would not have expected to be able to read the man behind the work. Some of his most interesting arguments in this regard come at the end of the book. Even if you don't have time to read every page about the whys and wherefores of the advocacy in favor of Bacon and the Earl of Oxford as the real Shakespeares, I think you might still want to read the final sections of the book in which Shapiro presents an abbreviated case for Shakespeare being Shakespeare.

In these back pages, Shapiro also makes some telling revelations about Elizabethan life that run completely counter to what you might have previously assumed. For instance, Shapiro says that "Romeo and Juliet" are unlikely to have been based on what was commonly "real life," because, in actuality, people rarely married as teens then. The average age of marriage was twenty-five. (Although Shapiro proceeds almost immediately to undermine his own argument that Shakespeare should be read primarily as imaginative fiction rather than for any insights into the author's life, when he reminds us that Shakespeare himself atypically was married at the age of eighteen in what was obviously a shotgun wedding.)

However overall, Shapiro has produced a convincing book. Whereas much of Shakespearean scholarship can get pedantic and querulous, "Contested Will" remains informative, entertaining, and accessible. Although Shapiro is too polite to say as much, he might persuade you that every alternative presented to Shakespeare's claim to being the real Shakespeare - is "a tale told by an idiot."

Common sense is the archenemy of the anti-Stratfordian movement, and this book has tons of it. It also reveals the history of the movement, which is full of more silly ideas, dead ends, wasted time, distasteful ideologies and general wrong-headedness than its proponents ever want you to know. While I can sympathize with the conspiracy theorists' love of a good mystery, and even the narcissistic need to be the one who "cracks the case," at the end of the day, I am a big fan of logic and objective probability, and despite how exciting their wild stories may be, Shapiro shows them to be highly improbable.

I also happen to be a big fan of Shakespeare...as a dramatist. Not a cryptographer, not an autobiographer, nor a crafty politician who hid political messages in his plays. He's so highly regarded because he was so skilled at putting together shows that still move audiences to this day. To imagine that all this dramatic genius was just a front for super-secret messages intended for hobbyists to decode 400 years later is beyond weird, it contradicts the whole reason we even remember the plays today.

And, of course (spoiler alert), Shapiro's main thesis is both grounding and inspiring. One needn't be nobly-born to be a fantastic writer. Nor does one need to travel the world, or get the absolute highest education available or be a tortured soul. Shapiro shows that what matters far more than these things is a fertile imagination, a hungry intellect, and passion for one's craft. I feel that I have a much deeper understanding of the man and his works after reading this book, and ultimately I find the story of the glove-maker's son from Stratford more compelling and inspiring than the corny royal soap opera the Oxfordians have written.

Pity the poor reader who trusts Shapiro as a reliable guide to the fascinating world of Shakespeare authorship debate. Despite his efforts to sound objective, Shapiro clearly had his mind made up before he examined the evidence. This might explain why he didn't bother to look into new evidence that contradicts his preconceived beliefs. He completely ignored several excellent books that show the prevalence of pseudonymous authorship in Shakespeare's day (for example, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England; Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature). He deliberately avoided examining new evidence that marginalia in Edward de Vere's Bible reveals a treasure trove of new literary sources for Shakespeare's plays and poetry. Among other things, the marked Psalms unlock the mysteries of some especially enigmatic Sonnets, that are engaged in a "conversation" with specific Psalms. Shapiro's assumptions have been further discredited by the 2011 book Anonymity in Early Modern England. For more details, see www dot oxfreudian dot com.

Richard M. Waugaman, M.D.
Reader, Folger Shakespeare Library
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Georgetown University School of Medicine

Although Contested Will is an entertaining read, Shapiro is far more interested in psychoanalyzing skeptics than in considering their arguments. He also has a policy of never corresponding with authorship doubters, so his book is a one-way conversation. In my opinion, Shapiro never shows any real understanding of the roots of skepticism. A person who sees a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat may not know how the trick works, but he or she can still feel certain that sleight of hand is involved. It is the same way with people who question whether William Shakespeare wrote the Shakespeare canon. Although authorship doubters have a wide range of opinions about Shakespeare's identity, they share a conviction that he was not the man from Stratford, however he pulled off the authorship trick. This conviction has little to do with an inability to believe that genius can arise from humble origins (obviously it can, and does all the time). Rather, it is founded on the belief that the glorious renaissance mind behind Shakespeare's works cannot be reconciled with the records of petty lawsuits, tax evasion, grain-hoarding, six shaky signatures spelled six different ways, a second best bed in a pedestrian, crabby will, and so on.

Scholars such as James Shapiro feel no need to take the authorship question seriously because all the "direct" evidence points to the Stratford actor. A problem they have neglected is that when a different question is asked, who wrote the Shakespeare Apocrypha, all the direct evidence again points to William Shakespeare. If one sets aside the assumption that the Stratford actor was a gifted poet who wrote in the Bard's style, much indirect evidence also points to William Shakespeare as the author. This poses a serious challenge to the traditional authorship belief. How could a dozen-odd apocryphal works have been printed under the Stratford actor's name, or otherwise credited to him by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries, if he didn't write them? It is a genuine mystery.

There can be no real doubt that William Shakespeare was widely accepted by his peers--and even some of his literary contemporaries--as the author of the Shakespeare canon. Skeptics who wish to argue that another man wrote the Bard's works must postulate a deliberate authorship deception known only to an exclusive circle, despite its apparent implausibility, or there are too many unresolvable contradictions in the records. The problem with the standard authorship theory is that it's only good at explaining the big picture. It does a poor job of accommodating dozens of smaller puzzle pieces that must somehow be fit into the margins. It doesn't provide a satisfying explanation for why Robert Greene attacked William Shakespeare from his deathbed as an incompetent playwright and wholesale plagiarist, for instance. It ignores the existence of mediocre 'apocryphal' plays containing wholesale plagiarism from the works of Christopher Marlowe, Greene, and others that were attributed to William Shakespeare, either directly or indirectly. It discounts the substantial evidence including direct title page testimony that William Shakespeare wrote many works now assigned to the Shakespeare Apocrypha. It overlooks stylistic similarities among the apocryphal works which suggest they shared a common author or co-author, and fails to explain why the Stratford actor was satirized by some of his contemporaries as an ignorant or incompetent writer. It ignores the existence of a major hidden poet at court who was revered by members of the Elizabethan literati. Finally, it fails to meaningfully connect William Shakespeare's life with the Bard's writings. As a result, William Shakespeare remains a cipher. His apparent rich knowledge of specialized topics such as the law, Italy and the Italian language, aristocratic sports, and Elizabethan court life continues to surprise; his cold, businesslike will continues to disappoint; his daughters' apparent illiteracy continues to shock.

Sabrina Feldman, author of The Apocryphal William Shakespeare (...)

The evidence Shapiro adduces, in his last chapter, for authorship by Shakespeare of Stratford, was almost totally unknown to me, and I suspect to nearly every other layman who loves the works and wonders who wrote them.

It is so persuasive that I can explain why men who should have known better, like Twain and Freud, bought into the conspiracy because they were otherwise totally ignorant of the time and place, the operations of Elizabethan playhouses, the practices of Jacobean printers, the ubiquity and accessibility of printed source material then, and many contemporaneous events, all of which are the business of experts like Shapiro.

(To say nothing of the point that many facts in scant supply about Shakespeare -- his education, the books he owned -- are equally lacking with his fellow playwrights; yet who suggests Dekker didn't write Dekker's plays, or Marlowe Marlowe's, and more than I can name here, many of which exhibit greater erudition than Shakespeare's? Also, Shakespeare's much-criticized attitudes about money were no different from his fellow playwrights or property owners.)

Freud's business was covert motives, which he applies to this mystery; Twain's, exposing frauds and humbugs, which he liked to believe he came upon here. They and their converts made Procrustean beds for the Warwickshire glover, and with such rancor, at times, I can only shake my head. The conspiracy-hunters reveal more about themselves than about anyone in olde Englande.

I only wish Shapiro gave more space to the tantalizing suggestions of Christopher Marlowe's clandestine authorship (my former pet theory, not strongly held), if only to refute it with something stronger than the claim of its being far-fetched.

That said, I enjoyed Shapiro's style and erudition and I thank him for reinvigorating my appreciation for the sheer imaginative artistry of the works.

To credit time served in academia, the compulsive self-exposure of aristocrats, or anything but sheer talent and the love of language, is to rob the lower classes of more than honor. My wife was reminded of Jaime Escalante's East Los Angeles Latino students scoring way above their demographic average in math and being made, degradingly, to take their SATs over again (see the film "Stand and Deliver").

As to what anyone imagines is at stake in knocking Shakespeare off some pedestal of divinity he never sought, I recall a job interview I had at Frito-Lay: "Hey, no matter what goes wrong, we gotta remember: this is only about potato chips."

Let us enjoy the work. We watched Kenneth Branagh's HBO production of As You Like It today, and I was moved to tears by the sheer beauty of its many felicitous joins of word and voice and image and music...

It should be obvious that the low-star reviews on this masterful book are by people who disagree with Shapiro's conclusion that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. These critics are not rating the book; they are rating Shapiro's adherence to their views, and they find him wanting.

They should actually be rating the book higher, since this book is the most sympathetic and serious analysis of their views they are likely ever to receive from a legitimate scholar who does not agree with them.

After you've looked at both sides of this argument carefully, your likely decision will come down to these questions:

Do you believe that historical documents usually refer to actual historic events, or are they essentially untrustworthy and were created to hide secrets for which there is no direct documentation?

Do you believe that creative writers can imagine things they haven't lived and also that they can do research to find out facts they can use in their creations, or do you believe that creative writers are essentially dressing up their autobiographies for whatever reason and cannot write about anything they have not directly experienced?

That pretty much sums it up, because if you don't believe in hundreds of written documents, and you don't believe in imagination, you can't believe in Shakespeare. Or Stephen King for that matter, who is, as the perceptive readers all know, a front for the Queen of England's autobiographical writings.