James Shapiro - Contested Will - Part 2 of 2

James Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. A Shakespeare scholar, his latest book is 'Contested Will'; a fascinating search for the controversial reasons why many people, including such respected figures including Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain and Orson Welles, question whether the Bard really wrote his celebrated plays. In the book, Shapiro retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity and bald-faced deception to irrevocably change the nature of the debate.

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[likebox2]

The book "contested Will" makes an impossible case. The works attributed to Shakespeare are obviously written by Marlowe, not because of suspicions of anything, but because of the obvious identity and style and phrase between Marlowe and Shakespeare. Malowe's life is not the motivation for the idea, which is entirely based on the obvious author stylistic identity between the two. The idea survived, despite the fact that it was impossible given the short documented life of Marlowe.

[kaidaigoji]

@bulldog01209 Mark Twain is a more famous writer, but has he spent a quarter century studying shakespeare? It's tempting to see someone famous as more credible, but Mark Twain has no expertise in scholarship, no expertise in Elizabethan literature whatsoever. Would you trust Mark Twain's opinion on medicine over that of your oncologist?

[bulldog01209]

Mark twain didn't believe shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him in fact he wrote a book about it and he has a hell of a lot more credibility than this guy.

[bbdupon]

I'm just reading this book...it is well documented and scholarly.