James Shapiro - Contested Will - Part 1 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.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• James
• Shapiro
• William
• Shakespeare
• Bard
• Blackwell
• Books
• Online

[amaxamon]

@bulldog01209 The entire Bible is anonymous. Some of the most important literary documents in existence are anonymous. But the First Folio isn't anonymous. The name of the author is all over it. Mystery solved!

[rockhammer85]

The Elizabethan theatre impressario Philip Henslowe kept a diary through his life where he recorded payments he made to various playwrights. At least 27 of them are mentioned in it, including Marlowe, Middleton, Chapman, Dekker and Webster. Of Shakespeare, however, there isn't a single reference. Stranger still is that several of the plays attributed to him are listed - yet without bringing his name along with them. Hmm.

It seems the 'Soul of our Age' wasn't exactly in the thick of things.

[kaidaigoji]

@bulldog01209 Really? Christopher Marlowe's biography is robust? Thomas Kyd, Thomas Dekker? Mark Twain was not an expert on Elizabethan scholarship, and he applied anachronistic reasoning to his study. Your argument assumes that because no information has survived, no information ever existed. It's a tragedy we don't have more, but on the other hand, Heminges and Condell saved the plays, so we should be eternally grateful for what we have.

[bulldog01209]

For a man who is considered to have written the most impressive literary works in western civilization his biography is pitifully meager. And in a time when records of his contemporaries were robust and well known there is no excuse to be made of the time in which he lived. The fact is if Shakespeare had written these plays his biography would explain the plays attributed to him like they explain the works of others in his time. Read Mark twains 'is shakespeare dead' book he lays it out well.