Review of James Shapiro’s “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare”

When Shakespeare died in 1616, it would not have occurred to anybody to claim that somebody else had written his plays.

That’s how things stood for around 250 years.

However, today we can find dozens of rival candidates including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford, and more recently, Henry Neville. Nor are those who doubt the authorship of the plays and poems of Shakespeare in entirely contemptible company since notable doubters include Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, and Derek Jacobi.

In his recently published book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? James Shapiro writes,

‘I happen to believe that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him.’

James Shapiro homes in on the question of why people began to question the authorship of the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare.

The questioning began towards the end of the 18th century.  Shapiro‘s search for the source of this controversy retraces a path littered with forged documents, concealed identity, charlatanism, deception, and a failure to grasp – or imagine – the boundless extent of the power of the human imagination.

Contested Will is a positive contribution to the “authorship question” because it takes on the notion that the plays and poems of Shakespeare are autobiographical and that they hold the key to the question of who wrote them.

It was the rise of Romanticism that heralded a change in sensibility and the emergence of a consciousness of the self which assumed that a writer’s work was a creative expression of his life experience, i.e. that it was essentially autobiographical and that a writer such as Shakespeare ‘could only write about what he had felt or done, rather than heard about, read about, borrowed… or imagined’.

From there it is a short step to start looking for the ideal person whose life seemed to fit in with the “autobiographical” events and experiences expressed in the plays.

Purchase Contested Will from The Book Depository and enjoy free shipping worldwide.

David Hurley