A review by scarlettg12
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

3.0

It was hard to rate this book. I’d say it’s more like 3.5 stars. It was definitely well researched and I learned a lot. But it wasn’t exactly the subject matter I was expecting. All I knew it that it was a defense of the authorship controversy from an author who believed Shakespeare wrote his plays, which is definitely what I believe. But I feel like I learned more about Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere than I did about Shakespeare. In fact, I feel like I learned more about the people who questioned Shakespeare like Delia Bacon, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, and Sigmund Freud (and many more!), than I did about Shakespeare. Not just what they wrote and questioned about Shakespeare but their entire life and history leading up to the reasons they began to question. Now I realize that this is what the book was mainly about, but I found it an odd take on the authorship controversy. In fact, I could have just read the last 57 pages, the actual defense of Shakespeare and reasons he really wrote the plays bearing his name, and been satisfied. That’s not a great thing to say about a 280 page book. Luckily I had the audio book and that helped me get through some of the less interesting parts. Overall though it was a fascinating book and as I said very well researched. So I think 3.5 stars is fair.