Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (original 2010; edition 2010)

A Shakespearean scholar looks at the authorship controversy. Who wrote Shakespeare's plays? Was it Francis Bacon, as Mark Twain believed? Or the Earl of Oxford, as Sigmund Freud believed? Someone else? Or maybe it was William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford whose name appears on the title page? Shapiro treks through the history of the controversy. He goes back to the first identifiable instance of someone expressing doubts about Shakespeare's authorship, and brings it gradually forward to the 21st century. He looks predominantly at Bacon and Oxford as possible contenders, feeling that they are not only the strongest contenders, but are also representative of the arguments made against the bard of Avon. Lucid, easy to read prose (with a couple of lapses into undefined technical terms, such as enjambment - thank you, Nicholson Baker, I sort of understand that one) flows smoothly, and to give the author credit, he recognizes that it isn't enough to defeat his opponent's arguments for their favored candidates; he devotes the final chapter to presenting the argument for his own preferred candidate. I have read in the past about the controversy, primarily from the Oxfordians, and it was good to see this all pulled together so succinctly and clearly. Recommended for anyone who loves Shakespeare (or at least the plays of Shakespeare, regardless of who wrote them). Sure to offend some individuals who are absolutely set one of the candidates he argues against. ( )

I am not the greatest fan of Shakespeare -- or at least, of how rarely someone can discover his work for themselves, at their own pace. Of how he might well be the only literary figure people can think of on short notice. But I am a Stratfordian: I do believe that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote at least the plays firmly attributed to him and probably more, now orphaned or lost to us. So I wasn't sure about this book. It's not immediately clear, at a glance, what theory Shapiro subscribes to.

He seems fairly even-handed, though as I quickly discovered, he is a Stratfordian. His narration of the various 'discoveries' and 'proofs' is always sympathetic, and he refrains from too much commentary thereupon. It's a very readable book, made more so by the respect with which he treats all parties.

I actually ended up reading this in one go, and taking it rather to heart, too. The story of the Shakespeare authorship question felt like a warning, a reminder of all the pitfalls of academia. Clever ideas are no good without extensive research to back then up. ( )

For two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates have been proposed as their true author. This title unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays.

There’s quite an art to making scholarly material this accessible. Shapiro writes eloquently and with great expertise about the Shakespeare authorship debate that has raged now for centuries. I’ve been fascinated in it ever since I came across an Atlantic article written in 1991, ‘Looking for Shakespeare’, in which two Shakespeareans present opposing cases; one for Shakespeare as the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, and the other for Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Around the same time I sat in on a lecture in a Californian university by Charles Beauclerk, a visiting Englishman and descendant of de Vere, who presented a compelling range of challenges to the orthodox Strafordian position. A truly intriguing literary detective story. I was hooked.

I’m not sure I could even begin to do justice, in a short précis, to the depth and sophistication of Shapiro’s handling of the vexing (and unending) debate about authorship, so I will leave that to others more schooled in the apocryphal minutiae. There are thousands of intricate details, debated back and forth between Shakespeareans of all persuasions, and Shapiro does a fine job of condensing the most salient points of the camps of the two strongest contenders, Frances Bacon, and Oxford.

One of the central disputes concerns the author’s intimate knowledge of distant lands, and the Royal Court. It is well agreed that the man from Stratford was untraveled, a ‘commoner’, and lived a life documented in relation to his business dealings, rather than literary pursuits. This is considered a mismatch, a chasm between the life, and the works, and it has set an entire range of great thinkers in search of ‘the truth’ – among them was Freud, Henry James, and Mark Twain (and more recently, the Shakespearean actors, Derek Jacobi and Kenneth Branagh).

I should say that Shapiro makes it known by page 8 that he believes it was Shakespeare of Stratford that authored the plays. I appreciated knowing this right up front, and buckled in to find out why. Shapiro contends that our belief in literature as fundamentally underpinned by autobiography, and thinly-disguised self-revelation, is a modernist concept, and cannot be appropriately applied to the literature and authors of that time period. The epilogue is an impassioned set of counter-claims to doubters, and Shapiro goes to great lengths to convince the reader that: ‘the evidence strongly suggests that imaginative literature in general and plays in particular in Shakespeare’s day were rarely if ever a vehicle for self-revelation.’ My gut feeling, as a writer, although admittedly hampered by being a product of this age, is that I’m not so sure. Is it possible that writers of that time wrote - as he claims, virtually exclusively – from the imaginative rather than the personal? It’s an intriguing idea and I’d certainly like to read more about the evidence for this.

Shapiro is, in the end, incredibly convincing, and a fabulously readable scholar, who manages to come across as fair and unbiased throughout most of the book. The book ends with a comprehensive bibliographic essay for those who wish to follow, first-hand, Shapiro's research, and perhaps draw their own conclusions. This is a superb addition to the authorship debate and has definitely wet my appetite for more reading in this vein.
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A tour de force which examines why the authorship controversies arose, demolishes the alternative cases by being devastatingly fair minded, then demonstrates why Shakespeare had to be the author (or co-author) of the plays credited to him. Shapiro finds advocates of the alternative authors guilty of imposing modern readings, inventing conspiracies, misunderstanding Elizabethan/Jacobean life and, most seriously of all, not giving any credit to the power of the human imagination. ( )