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

4.0

Enjoyable and interesting, looking at the attitudes which have led people to assume Shakespeare couldn't have been Shakespeare. I'm firmly of the Stratford camp, but found some interesting material here. One doubt - Shapiro referred to the Victorian interest in codes and more or less stated that E A Poe was a contemporary of Samuel Morse and of late Victorian codebreakers. He was dead before 1850, which suggests Shapiro's grasp of later chronology is either shaky or overly flexible. Like Greenblatt he has been known to adapt evidence to suit his ends, so it does leave a little question open about other facts where one has to take him on trust.