Book of the week: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

A Shakespearean scholar unravels the origins and surveys the theories behind the belief that William Shakespeare was a fraud.

(Simon & Schuster, 339 pages, $26)

Many have been the skeptics who suspected that William Shakespeare was a fraud, said Jeremy Noel-Tod in the London Daily Telegraph. As scholar James Shapiro writes in his new survey of the Bard’s doubters, “I can think of little else that unites Henry James and Malcolm X, Sigmund Freud and Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller and Orson Welles.” To varying degrees, each of these luminaries subscribed to the notion that Hamlet, Macbeth, and the rest of the Shakespeare canon could not have been produced by the son of a provincial glover. Shapiro believes he has discovered that the first person to air such doubts was Delia Bacon, a snobbish American who hypothesized that the real Shakespeare was a “stupid, illiterate, third-rate play-actor.” She died in an insane asylum, in 1859—two years after publishing the skeptics’ founding text.

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