Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? is James Shapiro's investigation into who wrote Shakespeare's plays, from the bestselling author of 1599
Professor James Shapiro who teaches at Columbia University in New York, is the author of Rival Playwrights, Shakespeare and the Jews, and Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare won the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006.
Shapiro, author of the much admired A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, achieves another major success in the field of Shakespeare research by exploring why the Bard's authorship of his works has been so much challenged. Step-by step, Shapiro describes how criticism of Shakespeare frequently evolved into attacks on his literacy and character. Actual challenges to the authorship of the Shakespeare canon originated with an outright fraud perpetrated by William-Henry Ireland in the 1790s and continued through the years with an almost religious fervor. Shapiro exposes one such forgery: the earliest known document, dating from 1805, challenging Shakespeare's authorship and proposing instead Francis Bacon. Shapiro mines previously unexamined documents to probe why brilliant men and women denied Shakespeare's authorship. For Mark Twain, Shapiro finds that the notion resonated with his belief that John Milton, not John Bunyan, wrote The Pilgrim's Progress. Sigmund Freud's support of the earl of Oxford as the author of Shakespeare appears to have involved a challenge to his Oedipus theory, which was based partly on his reading of Hamlet. As Shapiro admirably demonstrates, William Shakespeare emerges with his name and reputation intact. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Apr.) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
Mark Twain quipped that Shakespeare was not written by Shakespeare but another person named Shakespeare. Shapiro (English, Columbia Univ.; Shakespeare and the Jews) concludes that Shakespeare was written by Shakespeare. That said, he argues that an examination of the controversies over Shakespeare's authorship, which only began to arise in the 18th century, is valuable. It is not merely a matter of antiquarian curiosity but impinges on may issues in modern critical practice, raising questions about texts, autobiography, collaboration, national identity, interpretation, ideology, and the "author" function. Among the many competing claims of authorship, Shapiro focuses primarily on those for Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford as representative. His primary questions are the why and the how, tracing the history of these claims from their origins, how they gained momentum, and their lack of real substantiation. Thoroughly documented, Shapiro's book is scholarly yet well paced and accessible. VERDICT Rewarding for both the Shakespeare scholar and the serious general reader.-T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah, GA Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
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