Book Review: Contested Will by James Shapiro

In Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? James Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia, tackles the elephant in the room of Shakespeare studies. For about the past one hundred and fifty years, several theories have proposed that William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon did not write the plays he is credited with.

Shapiro, an eminent Shakespearean scholar, whose last book was 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, is not really asking the question “who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?” His new book reviews the evidence that Will Shakespeare did write his own plays and ought to close the case. He lists contemporaries who identified Shakespeare as the author of the plays; the evidence in early editions of the plays that the man who wrote them worked in the theater, such as confusing actor and character names; and the changing style of the plays after 1604 (when the Earl of Oxford died) that reflects the new use of indoor playhouses and the popularity of Jacobean court masques.

What Shapiro’s book is really about, he said at its NYC launch at the Schwarzman building of the New York Public Library, is “why smart people think dumb things.” To inspect why theories arose that the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon wrote the plays, Shapiro examines psychobiographically some of the early proponents of these theories, including Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Delia Bacon, and J.T. Looney. He connects their theories to contemporary fascination with hidden codes (occasioned by Samuel Morse’s invention of the Morse code) and to the Church of Humanity that actually deified Shakespeare.

Shapiro blames the rise of these theories on the willingness to read Shakespeare’s plays as reflections of his life; so the author of King Lear must really have had three daughters, and the author of Hamlet must really have had a father who died and a mother who remarried soon after. In the nineteenth century, when not much was known about Shakespeare’s life except records of business transactions, people like Bacon and Looney saw as a gap between the biography of William Shakespeare, hoarding malt and writing for commercial gain, and the rich imaginative experience reflected in his plays. They believed there was no way to reconcile the two; someone else must have written the plays.

In his epilogue, Shapiro puts the fault for this on Shakespeare’s biographers, who have sometimes looked to the plays to reflect on the man. Shapiro’s reaction is too strong; his argument sounds like mere finger wagging: “don’t do it or you might encourage the anti-Stratfordians.” This ignores the importance biography often has in scholarship and risks suggesting that the job of Shakespeare professors like Shapiro himself is only to squash incorrect theories.

Nevertheless, Contested Will is a tour de force of a subject most scholars have remained unwilling to tackle head-on. It should be required reading for anyone who doubts that William Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro is available on Amazon.