Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare ? - Softcover

Shapiro, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571235778 ISBN 13: 9780571235773

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2011

Synopsis

For two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates – including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford – have been proposed as their true author. Contested Will unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays (among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, and Sir Derek Jacobi). Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity, bald-faced deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined. If Contested Will does not end the authorship question once and for all, it will nonetheless irrevocably change the nature of the debate by confronting what’s really contested: are the plays and poems of Shakespeare autobiographical, and if so, do they hold the key to the question of who wrote them?

About this title

Review

The case for Shakespeare is made cogently and convincingly. Shapiro cites contemporaries who identified him as the author of the plays, and show that the early printing history corroborates the attribution ... Shapiro weaves together various strands of recent scholarship to make a case which is about as watertight as it can be ... Shapiro illuminatingly assimilates the authorship controversy to radical theories about the non-existence of Homer as an individual author, and about the mythic nature of the Gospels ... Shapiro is a gifted storyteller. Source: LRB

Authoritative, lucid and devastatingly funny, and its brief concluding statement of the case for Shakespearer is masterly. Author: John Carey Source: The Sunday Times

Shapiro sprinkles his text with glinting, steely facts ... Riveting ... Shapiro does not waste words on the preposterous, but he does uncover the mechanism of fantasy and projection that go to make up much of the case against Shakespeare. His books lays bare, too, assumptions about the writing life that come to us from the 18th-century romantics. those who make Shakespeare a demi-god have much to answer for. Author: Hilary Mantel Source: Guardian, Book of the Week

The application of Shapiro's detective skills to the piles of pseudo-scholarship from the past century and a half yields valuable results. Contested Will isn't just the most intelligent book on the topic for years, but a re-examination of the documentary evidence offered on all sides of the question ... Contested Will is a terrific read. Source: Financial Times

A follow-up more original that his earlier success ... [Shapiro's] imaginative enquiry never the less joins the show shelf of essential books on the subject ... Contested Will is a serious, interesting an doriginal book about how shakespeare's genius can dominate the imagination ... Illuminating. Source: Daily Telegraph

[Shapiro's] contribution to exposing those who still want to deny that Shakespeare was Shakespeare is deadly effective in another way: he helps us understand them better. Source: Evening Standard

In Contested Will, James Shapiro cooly considers and then deftly dismantles the belief that Shakespeare did not write his own plays. This irresistable book hums with all the learning and panache that made Shapir's 1599 such a treat. No one has ever expalined so well the motives and reasons for the bit lie of the the "authorship controversy" ... As his book genially but forcefully proves, the "authorship controversy" is a ghost-train. Source: Independent

Mr Shapiro teases our the cultural prejudices, the historical blind spots, and above all the anachronism inherent in these questions ... Contested Will is dense with lives and stories and argument. It is also entertaining ... A brilliant defence of the man from Stratford. Piece by piece, Mr Shapiro builds the case ... the Shakespeare that emerges is both simple and mysterious: a man of the theatre, who read, observed, listened and remembered. Beyond that is imagination. In essence, that's what the book is about. Source: Economist

Entertaining. Source: Sunday Express

Shapiro's approach is quite different. His interest is not so much in 'what people think' as in 'why they think it', and he often sheds powerful light on the social and religious contects in which scepticism about shakespeare has flourished. shapiro has a remarkable gift for empathy with his human subjects, and is curious and tenacious in exploring their life stories ... The study is book-ended with excellent resumes of Shakespeare scholarship. Source: Literary Review

Book Description

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? is James Shapiro's investigation into who wrote Shakespeare's plays, from the bestselling author of 1599.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0571235778
• ISBN 13: 9780571235773
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384