Shakespeare: The Question of Authorship
By Jeremy McCarter in The New York Times
Published: April 26, 2010

CONTESTED WILL
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
By James Shapiro
Illustrated. 339 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26

SHAKESPEARE’S LOST KINGDOM
The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth
By Charles Beauclerk
Illustrated. 430 pp. Grove Press. $26

PREFACES TO SHAKESPEARE
By Tony Tanner
827 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $39.95

Shakespeare is not only peculiar in himself, but the cause of peculiarity in others. The surviving traces of his life, which the Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt describes as “abundant but thin,” depict a man whose parts aren’t entirely in sync: a provincial who grew wealthy but sued for paltry sums, a literary genius who seems never to have written a letter — or owned a book. But the alternate histories offered by people who reject Shakespeare’s authorship are far stranger, abounding in secret ciphers, baroque conspiracies and readings of the plays as fantastical as what’s in them. Barring the discovery of a ­doorstop-size autobiography or the invention of a time machine, we’ll never get a really satisfying explanation of how “Hamlet” and “Henry V” and all the rest were written, only varying degrees of ­improbability.

Five years ago, James Shapiro wrote “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599,” a meticulous study that rendered a slice of the standard history less implausible. Now, in “Contested Will,” he addresses the authorship question itself. His refreshing method is to zoom all the way out, taking an interest “not in what people think — which has been stated again and again in unambiguous terms — so much as why they think it.” Working its way back to the earliest doubters, Shapiro’s book offers both history and historiography, a mix that yields insights even for those who don’t know their “Othello” from their “Pericles.”

Shapiro, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, uses the fight over Shakespeare’s identity to show how our views of the past are shaped by the contingencies of the evidence that reaches us, and how we’re swayed by the changing spiritual weather of our own time. Though dozens of alternate authors have been proposed over the years — four more while he worked on the book, he writes — he concentrates here on what he calls the two “best-­documented and most consequential” candidacies: those of the philosopher and courtier Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. The shifts in their reputations over the last 150 years have been sufficiently extreme to think of them as the reverse of Ben Jonson’s famous praise of Shakespeare: they were not for all time, but of an age.
Read the full reviews at NYT.
And at The Independent
And in The Guardian.