Contested Will
James Shapiro on why skeptics believe someone other than William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
Written by Filed under Arts & Entertainment, History
Who wrote Shakespeare? That is the question asked and answered in James Shapiro’s new book “Contested Will” (Simon & Schuster), which addresses the centuries-old authorship controversy from a unique perspective, focusing not on what Shakespeare doubters believe, but why they believe it. Of course, there’s abundant evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and the rest of the plays and poems attributed to him, but that hasn’t stopped the likes of Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia from joining the ranks of the skeptics. For their part, the doubters seem unable to consider the evidence from anything but a modern perspective, and cannot accept that a part-time actor with minimal formal education produced such literary masterpieces—“a stunning failure to grasp the power of the imagination,” writes Shapiro.
With all of the above in mind, I questioned Shapiro about the authorship controversy, the skeptics and their beliefs, and why he’s absolutely certain that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
When and why did the authorship controversy arise?
Until I began researching the book the answer I would have given—based on the standard authorities, who agree on this—was 1785, when James Wilmot first claimed that Francis Bacon was the author of the plays. But I discovered that the document on which this claim was based is a forgery, so can say with some confidence that the controversy is more recent, dating back no further than the 1840s.
Why did it take more than two centuries before people began questioning Shakespeare’s authorship?
It took 200 years before an unbridgeable gap emerged between the mundane facts of Shakespeare’s life and the over-the-top deification of him. The gap made it impossible for some to believe that a man of modest origins and education could have written such divine works.
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