Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Paperback – April 19, 2011

Contested Will is genial, intelligent, well-researched, entertaining, and deeply sincere. It's part history, part biography, part literary criticism and part reflective essay. It is probably the most reliable, evenhanded and up to date source available on the authorship discussion.No matter what you believe, for whatever reasons, it's a mistake to dismiss this book. First, it's one of the few generally evenhanded surveys of the issue. Second, where it is strongest, it is very very strong. Third, and this may not be a good reason, but it is obvious that Dr. Shapiro wrote this book out of love, which is probably what drove him and us to Shakespeare in the first place. Contested Will is not written out of some stubborn, petty and pathetic dogmatism. This is underscored by his delightful concessions, such as his sincere praise of Looney's Shakespeare Identified and Whittemore's The Monument, which are both remarkable. (Imagine if Freud had been here to read The Monument!)Finally, the Epilogue offers an extremely thoughtful and important cautionary discussion about the validity of the autobiographical/experiential approach to imaginative literature. Anyone sincerely interested in Shakespeare and literature and authorship in general should take the time to read, weigh and consider what Dr. Shapiro has to say in his concluding remarks.For some reason, I get the feeling that the editor or publisher may have rushed Dr. Shapiro; and the final product seems oddly incomplete. Contested Will is (probably) too detailed and scholarly for many, while not quite detailed and scholarly enough for others. But in Dr. Shapiro's defense, as he himself acknowledges, the literature on this subject is vast.(This review is coming from a reader most deeply interested in the works of Shakespeare. Without justifying why, "Who wrote Shakespeare?" is simply a fun and important question to me. So I am willing to read just about anything I can on the subject, regardless of the author's opinion. Only occasionally is a book too poorly written or researched, too obnoxious, belligerent, etc. for me to read it.)

At various times over the years debate over that question has registered on the peripheries of my literary consciousness. I recently finished a two-year project of reading most (thirty-two) of the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare, and it was one of the two most enriching reading projects of my life. I am by nature skeptical of conspiracy theories and trendy debunking of conventional wisdom, but I became curious enough about whether Shakespeare in fact wrote those works of genius that I decided to read a book about the dispute.I turned to CONTESTED WILL by James Shapiro, because I was convinced after reading two of his other books ("1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare" and "The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606") that Shapiro knows Shakespeare. Moreover, Shapiro has taught Shakespeare at Columbia University since 1985 and is one of the country's leading experts on Shakespeare and his times (though, to be sure, those facts probably do not count for much with many Shakespeare-deniers).In a sense, Shapiro's CONTESTED WILL is somewhat anti-climactic. Shapiro states early in his Prologue to the book that he believes that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. For Shapiro, the more interesting question is, why have so many people thought otherwise?And that's the subject of the first 220 pages of the book, in which Shapiro recounts in detail various efforts to prove that someone other than Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays (and poems). The two principal candidates for authorship have been Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). Among the naysayers have been Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, and John Thomas Looney (his detractors naturally thought his surname to be quite apt). For what I wanted, Shapiro's account of the history to debunk Will Shakespeare is far too detailed. Interestingly, what underlies many of the naysayers' arguments is the elitist assumption that a middle-class lad from the provinces who had not been educated at Oxbridge could not possibly have had the knowledge and intellectual apparatus to write the corpus of works that stand at the apex of Western literary culture.Shapiro summarizes what for him is the indubitable and irrefutable case for Shakespeare's authorship in the last sixty pages of the book. Much of that case, by the way, turns on known facts about playwriting, the theater, and publishing in London over the years 1590-1620 -- facts that the naysayers simply ignore (because they must). In any event, Shapiro persuades me -- beyond a reasonable doubt, to invoke a legal standard -- that the answer to the question posed as the title to this review is YES.

Almost a page turner. A fascinating look into famous and smart people who must see a conspiracy in some grand thing and who cannot be dislodged by facts, reason or common sense

Shapiro uses his considerable writing skills to bend facts in order to puff up the traditional Shakespeare.

Book arrived in the same condition it was advertised.

Williams Shakespeare I didn't know he was a black man