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

(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.

Pinning down the birth date of such suspicions proves to be important to the bigger story Shapiro tells, said John Carey in the London Sunday Times. Only in the early 19th century did artworks begin to be perceived as “expressions of their creator’s inner self.” This led some to wonder how the world’s greatest playwright could also have been a small-time landlord and moneylender. Delia Bacon attributed Shakespeare’s plays to Sir Francis Bacon (no relation), who she said was advancing forbidden ideas under the Shakespeare pseudonym. Freud and others later bought into the theories of one J.T. Looney, who proposed that King Lear’s true author was a 16th-century Earl of Oxford. Confusion spread when Looney’s 1920 book inspired the Francis Bacon faction to forge evidence that backdated their claim to the 1700s.

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Shapiro, a serious Shakespeare scholar, “achieves superhuman feats of politeness” just maintaining a sense of humor as he considers the appeal of the major bogus theories, said Michael Dobson in the Financial Times. He’s actually angrier, it seems, with the scholars who worship the man from Stratford yet try to read the plays as expressions of autobiography, said Hilary Mantel in the London Guardian. Those folks are fools, Shapiro makes clear. Shakespeare wasn’t trying to reveal himself: He was holding a mirror to us all, and his need to make a living was all the motivation he required. If we have trouble understanding that “a genius is also a man who needs to eat,” that’s our problem.