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    Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
    Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
    Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
    Audiobook11 hours

    Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

    Written by James Shapiro

    Narrated by Wanda McCaddon

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    For nearly two centuries, the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays has been challenged by writers and artists as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, Malcolm X, and Sir Derek Jacobi. How could a young man from rural Warwickshire, lacking a university education, write some of the greatest works in the English language? How do we explain the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Shakespeare's life and works?

    Contested Will unravels the mystery of Shakespeare's authorship, retracing why and when doubts first arose, what's at stake in the controversy for how we value Shakespeare's achievement, and why, in the end, there can be no doubt about who wrote the plays.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 6, 2010
    ISBN9781400186488
    Author

    James Shapiro

    James Shapiro, aprofessor at Columbia University in New York, is the author of Rival Playwrights, Shakespeare and the Jews, and Oberammergau.

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    • 4/5
      A hugely important book. The silliness over allegations that other people wrote Shakespeare's plays and poems continues into the 21st century, with no good reason. The great thing about Shapiro's book is that he analyses the history of such claims, as well as the stories of the two most common claimants - Francis Bacon and Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford - from an academic point-of-view, allowing us to see the reasons why these traditions arose, and the motivations behind those who were doing it. Shapiro manages to explain that there was plenty of cause for doubt, largely owing to lack of information, and misinformation, about Shakespeare's time.

      Ultimately, the conclusion that Shapiro reaches is perfectly reasonable: the original supporters of Bacon and Oxford had their own reasons, and can at least be forgiven for inventive thinking. However, no new evidence has come to light in the last hundred years, and indeed evidence only points further to the futility of the argument, and the fact that Shakespeare is still the most likely candidate to have written his plays. (One of the most delightful ironies of the case, Shapiro points out, is that only a secret of truly shocking order - for instance, that Oxford was the lover and/or brother of Queen Elizabeth - could have caused a conspiracy so elaborate as to be almost impossible, yet such a secret would surely lead to someone doing otherwise with their life than writing luxuriously pointless comedies like "Much Ado About Nothing" and cheekily hiding obvious clues to their identity in the poems - while also having the foresight to anticipate that 20th century literary analysis would be able to pick up on them!)

      Shapiro's book is the best of its kind in elaborating on the theories of Bacon and Oxford. However, there are better books on the case FOR Shakespeare, as this section is surprisingly short, which perhaps just evidences that Shapiro spent all of his research time on the claimants. Still, that's acceptable. Shapiro touches the basics of what we now know about Shakespeare, and pulls out a number of interesting facts (such as that the 'k' and 's' of a typesetter's kit could easily become entangled if pressed together, hence why a hyphen or 'e' was often included in "Shakespeare". It's not, as some nuts would have you believe, yet another hilariously unsubtle reference from Oxford that "Shake-speare" was a pseudonym.)

      Oxfordians are probably very interesting people: they have rich imaginations, a refusal to subscribe to mainstream thought without questioning, and a love of good drama. Unfortunately, they also subscribe to a thought from over a hundred years ago that is thoroughly outdated. It's a thought that ignores the realities of playmaking, typesetting, copyright, and beliefs of the age, as well as imagining a kind of English writer's circle that could hold such a secret. (As a member of such a writing circle in another city, we ALL know each other: I doubt anyone in the theatre could fake their identity for three decades). Beyond this, their assumptions are based primarily on the idea that someone of less-than-aristocratic birth couldn't be a genius. As Shapiro notes, one of the old claims was that Shakespeare's aristocrats are so complex that they could only be written by an aristocrat. Even putting aside the simplistic retorts to that (do the murderers, teenage girls, and prostitutes of Shakespeare's plays come from another writer too?), one must wonder about the vast number of peasants and lower-born figures who are just as richly drawn.

      It's a shame that an incredibly fringe theory (one that was almost obliterated until the rise of the internet, as Shapiro notes) has crept into the popular imagination of late. It does disservice to a long-dead great, makes inaccurate and ridiculous assumptions about Elizabethan life, and promotes the idea that we should all just "stay in our place". Rubbish. Read this book!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      What a fabulous book! Shapiro expertly traces the history of the authorship controversy, and explains why so many people have questioned whether the man from Stratford could have written the plays attributed to him. What does is at stake is nothing less than how we read literature. Does all writing need to be autobiographical? Or can an imaginative author give to "airy nothing a local habitation and a name". Shapiro explores why the autobiographical author Mark Twain was skeptical about a Shakespeare who want a lawyer and why the psychoanalytic Freud couldn't believe that Shakespeare didn't have a mother who hastily remarried. The research is meticulous and the applications to modern trends like our obsession with conspiracies are insightful. I also recommend Shapiro's book The Year of Lear.
    • 4/5
      A work that is simultaneously a solid work of scholarship and a compulsive read – a veritable rara avis indeed (a black swan of Avon, perhaps?) It's worth noting that the cover (of the UK hardback, at least) and the title are both a little misleading: Shapiro doesn't investigate every possible non-Stratfordian author, but (as he points out) his detailed refutation of the proponents of Bacon and Oxford function just as well to refute other claims.
    • 5/5
      So, this book has been waiting on my shelves a long while for the receptive reading moment (you know how it is when you really, really know you are going to enjoy a book but the time has to be right). I have been growing increasingly fascinated by the idea of biography (see The Stranger’s Child and any early biography of Rupert Brooke), plus the ever-shifting emphasis on interpretation of works based on lives. I was very impressed by Shapiro’s 1599 and this book, though tangential to the plays, is just as fascinating (he should stick to academia and book-writing though; he’s an unimpressive t.v. presenter with a headache-inducing voice). From the clever play on words of the title onwards, Shapiro writes refreshingly jargon-free readable prose as he presents the case for Shakespeare as the author of his plays, and describes the history of the various opposing theories and candidates. We see the growing need to identify the life with the work, to give to the Tudors modern sensibilities. Most of all, we see a refusal to accept that a glovemaker’s son could have the imagination to piece out his imperfections with his thought; a snobbish, patronising attitude that belittles the fine grammar-school education of the time and the passionate curiosity that continues lifelong self-education (indeed, one is led to think that Sir Derek et al. have had their brains abducted by aliens...and sadly, I have to include my beloved Henry James here). Shapiro describes how the Baconians and Oxfordians etc. had practically given up their ghosts in the late 50s, when, astonishingly, the anti-Wills suddenly gained academic credence and are apparently being taught in degree courses. It has also become acceptable in academic circles to read the life from the work, and i am now questioning my unquestioning acceptance of Greenblatt’s Will in the World and wonderful Michael Wood’s Shakespeare t.v. series, both of which interpreted Shakespeare in this way. Another point raised which I find uncomfortably close to home is that the obsession with literary lives stops us reading the actual works, or as Shapiro more elegantly – and topically in this year of the 50th anniversary of The Bell Jar -- puts it: ‘many literary biographies are supplanting the fictional works they are meant to illuminate, to the point where Ariel and The Bell Jar struggle to find a readership that books about Sylvia Plath’s marriage and suicide now command’. Later in the same chapter he makes another important point: ‘In the end, attempts to identify personal experiences will result only in acts of projection, revealing more about the biographer than about Shakespeare himself’.Shapiro makes telling points about our general growing scepticism and the belief in conspiracy theories leading to a readiness to imagine all sorts of bizarre ideas about various secret children of Elizabeth (if only the dates could be manipulated, as so many have been in the course of fitting Oxford and others to the playwright’s role, so that Shakespeare could have been one, farmed out to the glovemakers’ family!). An excellent, thoroughly-researched and absorbing piece of literary detective work.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      A must-read if you are at all interested in the Shakespeare authorship question (particularly if you, like Shapiro--and like me--believe that Shakespeare wrote his own plays). Covers some of the same ground as Shakespeare's Lives, but in a more readable and engaging fashion. The final section is an extremely compelling (to me) argument for Shakespeare-as-author.
    • 3/5
      A useful book if one is not a professional conspiracy enthusiast. James Shapiro is a clear writer who marshals all the arguments in favour of the author really being the guy from Stratford. I think him definitive on the question. He has also explored the question of extensive collaboration among Elizabethan Playwrights. All the other candidates have some proponents whose axes to grind are easy to explore, and deplore.
    • 5/5
      Of course the answer to the subtitle's question is that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. But this excellent work gives detailed reasons why that is so, plus reasons why the other proposed authors did not, giving one ammunition for literary conspiracy theorists.

      But the real power and interest of the work is James Shapiro's tracing of why the notion that Shakespeare was not the author of his works arose, and why the advocates of other candidates -- and besides the well-known two or three, there are scores of others who've been proposed -- had vested interests, or at least thought they did, in denying Shakespeare. Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud most notably felt the bases of their own work was threatened by Shakespeare's authorship.

      And in the course of the narrative, which is always entertaining and felicitous, James Shapiro delineates a shift in literary criticism that bears much thinking about: the change from the early modern view of writers as creatively imaginative to creatively self-expressive, and the concomitant rise of autobiography as a genre.

      It's nicely illustrated, too. A lot of fun to read, and a lot of think about therein.
    • 5/5
      Well researched with credible history.Shapiro slowly eviscerates the nonfactual, often looney attempts to deny Shakespeare his authorship. Seriously, there are little chunks of Oxfordian flesh spattered in the margins.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic.
    • 3/5
      CONTESTED WILL (Who Wrote Shakespeare) by James Shapiro (Published in 2010), 317pp Shapiro, a Columbia NY Professor, is an uncontested US Shakespearean Scholar. His research in matters Shakespearean is truly outstanding. This book is appended with a 50 page appendix in addition to its 317 pages of expert discussion. The appendix is titled “Bibliographical Essay” and is truly a full academic treatment of each work cited. Having never encountered a conspiracy theory I could not readily subscribe to, I must admit that I was soon at odds with Shapiro’s side of this controversy with hints of incontestable proof to be found before one finished the book. However, I for one was hardly convinced. The book is divided into four basic chapters titled “Shakespeare”, ”Bacon”, ”Oxford” and “Shakespeare”(again) with a concluding “Epilogue”. From the early chapters I quickly perceived that Shapiro and I were at opposite extremes. I am left seeking a book that explores how Shakespeare could have possibly had sufficient insight to compose in intimate detail a plethora of topics, to include law-court behavior, Italian customs, army and nautical behavior, without Shakespeare himself ever setting foot outside of England. Moreover could he had possibly been such a prolific writer and at the same time devoting time to succeed with the stage productions themselves, not to mention his own acting itself. Some of these topics were touched on in the book but only minimally. If the actual lack of the writer’s direct experience is of no consequence, I would like to be shown wrong. I have no pre-conceived ideas of who in fact more than likely set Shakespeare up as the Patsy. I am not so much interested in who did the writing but seek a defense of why it could be only Shakespeare himself. An investigation should be conducted with a full legal type of analysis. I suggest that, the usual issues be volubly presented and then refuted or not, with a clearly prosecuted defense and/or extracted conclusion.Yes, the sequence of individual works is shrouded in mystery, but at least present the most probable time-line and sequence of works and assign a probability of authorship, work by work.So I found “Contested Will” mostly uncontested. Namely the writer should bring in details of the work and an analysis of the time required to write each play and to compare the time required to adapt each play to the whims of the players in good detail. Yes, the book does an admirable job of refuting everyone’s favorite alternative writers, namely Oxford & Bacon. But I was not convinced at all by Shapiro’s homage to the one and only Shakespeare.
    • 5/5
      "Masterpiece" is a word usually applied to works of art rather than scholarship, but would fit here. We learn so much about human folly, the creative process, real history, research methods, the changes of literary fashion, the true love of art - and human greatness.Piquant is how Shapiro points out how the fantasists' reflect and project their own lives onto the empty space of WS's life story. He deftly shows how the cases made for authorship tell more about the advocates than they do about WS or his works. Freud, who should have been "analysing" the nut-cases, fell victim himself. Shapiro also points out the quasi-religious style of the arguers: the cases are faith-based, not evidence-based, much like the creationist style. The finale demonstrates how much detail we do in fact now possess about WS's life (as his 1599 also showed.The book has deep patient humanity: no mocking of the anti-WS brigade, heartfelt and shared delight in WS and his work. The last words, on imagination, are moving, uplifting.
    • 5/5
      If you read one book about the Shakespeare authorship controversy, make it this one! Fascinating, highly informative overview of the Shakespeare authorship controversy from its genesis (as far back as the 1700s!) to today by a noted Shakespearian scholar who knows how to spin an entertaining and compelling story. What you'll enjoy about this book (or at least what I enjoyed!):* Thorough review of what we definitely know about Shakespeare's life (he wasn't "uneducated", folks - even sons of glovemakers went to school), what we can logically infer about Shakespeare's life (for instance, evidence suggests he was a formidable businessman), and what we definitely don't know about Shakespeare's life, no matter what other so-called "scholars" may state to the contrary. (There's no evidence he had an affair with his patron, and no positive proof as to the identity of the dark lady.)* A detailed discussion of pretty much every single piece of paper or evidence unearthed over the last 500 years by Shakespeare, referencing Shakespeare, or discussing Shakespeare - what little of it there is.* Informative overview of era in which Shakespeare wrote, with emphasis on daily life, cultural/social norms, theater, and playwriting - extremely helpful in interpreting in context the information we do have.* Unbiased presentation of the two most serious contenders for the Bard's throne (Bacon & Oxford): the genesis and evolution of each claim, the main actors promoting each, the evidence cited by each camp, a detailed discussion of the pros/cons of each camp's arguments, and an update on where each contender "stands" in popular opinion today.* An in-depth exploration of other controversies that have surrounded Shakespeare's life, to include: - which plays did Shakespeare actually write? (Author presents compelling evidence that many of the plays were co-authored) - what was Shakespeare's source material? - why did he suddenly retire from playwriting and move back to the country to become moneylender and seller of malt? - why did Shakespeare leave his wife only his "second best bed"? * An entertaining exploration of Shakespeare-related forgeries, impersonations, and other frauds perpetrated over the years. (Will we ever find out who forged the Cowell manuscript?)* Perspectives on how opinions of Shakespeare and his works have evolved over time* A fascinating look into the world "Bardolotry" - how an actor and playwright from Stratford-on-Avon came to be regarded as the greatest author of all times.This is by far the best, most thorough, least biased discussion of the controversy I've ever laid hands on. Having said that, the author does definitely have a bias (though he goes to some pains in the prologue to convince us he doesn't): he believes that the bulk of the primary source material supports Shakespeare's authorship, and that Oxfordians and Baconians rely overmuch on dubious "textual evidence" and inference to make their case. But this does not appear to taint the completeness or reliability of the information he has presented here.Best of all, Shapiro presents his discussion in so organized and thorough a fashion, it didn't matter that I approached this with little background knowledge of Shakespeare studies, 16th/17th century history, or textual analysis: everything I needed to access his discussions was thoughtfully embedded in the text. Lucky for us, Shapiro's not only a scholar but an excellent communicator who knows how to present even the driest information in a way that most readers should find engaging and thought-provoking.Highly recommended - I hope others will enjoy this as much as I did!
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Good book, lacks the obvious argument: on the list of authors of Great Books, almost 100% of them were born into the upper-middle-class. Certainly from the Renaissance on, this is the case. What this amounts to is saying that the Baconian and Oxfordian theses are wrong from their very premises--that, as they say, Shakespeare could not have written it because he was poor, or grew up so. Other than in Greece (where there wasn't really a strong upper-middle-class) and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (one a slave and the other the Roman Emperor), all of them are of a kind. They were the sons of merchants (Chaucer, Spinoza, Thomas Browne), lawyers (Rabelais, Thomas More, Locke, Hume), scriveners (Milton), small landholders (Rabelais, Montaigne, Hume, Locke, Newton, Gibbon), government officials (Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, William Gilbert, William Harvey, Descartes), and tax collectors (Pascal, Adam Smith). Galileo and John Stuart Mill were sons of famous intellectuals. So over a five hundred year period virtually every last one of the authors of Great Books, across every subject, was from the upper-middle-class--not the lower-middle-class, not the poor, not the rich. The reason is pretty basic: the poor don't have access to the rich, and the rich don't let the poor near them, so some (large) segment of humanity is out of their respective purviews. The richer the family, the less the chances of the son becoming a great writer; even the higher end of the upper-middle-classes produced fewer great writers than the mid-and-low-range-upper-middle-class. Those in the upper-middle-class, however, have access to everyone, and therefore can access a greater range of insights and feelings and can use it to leverage an already superb imagination. The exceptions to this rule are those who were brought up by poor nurses at the insistence of their fathers--Montesquieu, Montaigne--and not those who were brought up as ward's of the Queen--de Vere. Shakespeare's father, a burgess of the Stratford corporation, a bailiff who filled other municipal officers, and an entrepreneur, fits squarely in these categories. Oxford does not, and while Bacon does, it is obvious to the naked eye and half-functioning brain that Bacon's style could not be reconciled with that of the plays in question.
    • 4/5
      This was quite enjoyable, although it made me wonder if there's some special reason there seem to be a lot of non-academic Shakespeare books out in the past year or two, or if there always are and it just happened that I picked up a bunch in a row, or what ...This is a look at the authorship issue - the idea that Dude from Stratford didn't have it in him to write the works of Shakespeare, and that the real author is someone else, usually someone famous. The focus is not so much on the specific arguments for the typical candidates put forward, but more of a look at the social and academic historical context when the various theories arose. There is a lot of fun Shakespeare trivia and information about famous forgeries and scams as well as the serious advocacies for Bacon and Oxford. (Also, best pun for a title I have seen in quite a while.)One thing I learned from this book is that Mark Twain was a supporter of the Bacon theory, and it cracks me up to think of what would happen if the ghost of Mark Twain observed a whole bunch of people doubting that he wrote the works of Mark Twain. I was ... a young teenager, maybe, when GAMES Magazine did a piece on Shakespeare's authorship and the various "clues" that can be used to bolster a claim for Oxford, and man, that was a good read and has stuck in my head for YEARS. It is SUCH a much more interesting and satisfying story than boring old William Shakespeare writing Shakespeare, that much is for certain. If life were a book, that is definitely how it would turn out.
    • 4/5
      I used to be what I guess you could call a casual Baconian. Without having read into the authorship debate in the slightest it was quite easy to pick up on casual references in the media. It was also a good flight of fancy to imagine the man who essentially invented the scientific method could also be the genuine source of what is the jewel in England's cultural crown. However, thanks to James Shapiro's book I am now pretty firmly of the belief that the glovers' son from Stratford was the true author of the plays.In the book Shapiro examines the arguments for two of the leading candidates in the authorship debate, Francis Bacon and Edward De Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Only when you study the arguments for these guys do you realise how nonsensical they are. Arguments that William Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him (authorship which had not been challenged until the late Eighteenth Century) are based on the assumption that to have written the plays the author must have been a nobleman, familiar with the law and life in the Elizabethan court, with a university education, attributes, from what the documentary evidence indicates, that certainly cannot be applied to the glovers' son from Stratford. This would only be true if in the writing the plays the author was being autobiographical and wrote from experience never mind the fact that Elizabethan autobiography essential didn't exist outside ecclesiastical writings.Finally Shapiro makes the argument for Shakespeare himself, detailing references to Shakespeare by contemporary authors such as Ben Jonson and recent textual studies into co-authorship, including five of Shakespeare's last ten plays, which strongly undermines the Oxfordian case. When asked why the authorship question is important, because no matter who wrote them we still have the plays Shapiro makes the interesting point that it does matter because by searching for a more suitable author we do great injustice to Shakespeare's most powerful tool, his imagination.This is the second book by Shapiro I've read, the first was the Samuel Johnson award winning '1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare' and as with this book the concept was really interesting but the execution was just a little bit too academic for popular appeal and it took me quite a while to get through this rather slim book. That said, the subject matter really is interesting and if you've every wondered about the Shakespeare authorship question then this is probably as balanced and even-handed a take on it as you'll ever find especially now that the Oxfordian movement goes from strength to strength.
    • 4/5
      This is a book about the various attempts to unseat William Shakespeare as the author of Shakespeare’s plays, by a serious Shakespeare scholar. Shapiro argues that people—other authors—started expressing uncertainty at the historical point at which autobiography became ascendant, and when writing became understood as predominantly the expression of the artist’s own experiences. It’s the alleged poverty of Shakespeare’s experiences and education that made it hard for skeptics to accept that he could have written the plays. Shapiro suggests that Francis Bacon was first proposed as the bearer of sufficient erudition and nobility, while the Earl of Oxford became popular as psychological accounts of meaning became more popular than political ones. In the end, Shapiro argues, though Shakespeare often collaborated, the contemporary evidence is quite convincing that he wrote the plays attributed to him, and those who argue otherwise ignore the power of the imagination: Shakespeare didn’t have to be a king or a wizard or a murderer or anyone else in his plays to conceive of what they would be like. Side note: the Amazon reviews of the book are hilarious, because so many of the reviewers are arguing about who wrote Shakespeare rather than about Shapiro’s argument about the meaning of contesting authorship.
    • 5/5
      A reasoned take-down of the authorship controversies, incidentally tackling the problems with their being a conspiracy at all, but mostly illuminating why and how people felt the need to deny Shakespeare authorship.
    • 5/5
      An outstanding book. A joy to read from beginning to end, learned an enormous amount, all processed through the lens of the history of Shakespeare authorship controversies. In particular, the book asks why so many people have come to believe that William Shakespeare of Stratford did not write the plays attributed to him but that someone else, like Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere of Oxford, did. This view was held by people from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Mark Twain to Sigmund Freud to several Supreme Court justices today and even the New York Times has written agnostically on the subject of who wrote Shakespeare.Shapiro traces the history of Shakespeare studies from his death through the early 19th Century, documenting the twists and turns of how little fragments of evidence about Shakespeare's life emerged, dotted with several episodes of forgery, and culminating in a number of prominent Shakespeare scholars starting in the 1700s who viewed his works through the prism of psychology, autobiography, and other similar perspectives.Shapiro argues that it was these well meaning attempts to fill in the gaps with other disciplines that also opened up the belief that the same person who was a moneylender and a grain merchant could not have written about courts and kings and the other aspects of Shakespeare. The first set of theories focused on Bacon, and comical ideas about elaborate ciphers in Shakespeare's work. This was followed by the view that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare's works, a theory undeterred by de Vere's death in 1604, a decade before the final Shakespeare play.Shapiro explains why these theories appealed to so many people (e.g., Twain was writing his autobiography, believed that all of his works were written directly from his own experience, and could not imagine someone else doing otherwise). And he also gives a compelling case for Shakespeare's authorship, although not one that would persuade any die-hard conspiracy theorists.Ultimately, Shapiro writes a testament to Shakespeare's imagination and range, something that is the ultimate rebuttal of the attempt to reduce the plays to simple roman a clef's about court figures or simple ciphers.What makes the book so interesting is not that it is worth devoting much mental evidence to the anti-Stratfordians but how much about Shakespeare's life, work, subsequent reception, and evolution of literature, is illuminated by looking at how this movement emerged and gained an increasing amount of strength.
    • 5/5
      As a 30 year veteran of teaching Shakespeare, I find Shapiro's book in the top ten written about Shakespeare during my career. It is fair, even sympathetic, to those who believe Sir Francis Bacon or Lord Oxford wrote the plays but Shapiro refutes each--plus many other contenders--directly and throughly. I only wish I had had this book while I was teaching so I could say "read this" when the inevitable question would come "Who wrote Shakespeare?" The glover's son, of course.