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A review by librarianonparade
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
4.0
This is a book about the Shakespeare authorship controversy - but it's more about the history of that controversy, and how and why people came to believe that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays, than it is a book weighing the merits of those various claims. Shapiro states right from the outset that he is a Stratfordian, that is, someone who believes William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays and no-one else.
Whilst there are quite literally dozens of potential claimants this book focuses on the two main contenders, Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Without going into all the details, Shapiro's argument is that no-one really thought to question the authorship of the Shakespeare plays until the rise of autobiography in the eighteenth century. That was the point when critics and scholars started believing that all fiction, all poetry and novels and plays, necessarily drew on the author's own experiences, that you could understand an author's mind and life by reading between the lines of his work. And using that argument, how could Shakespeare, a rural glover's son with a grammar school education, possibly write about kings and queens, about shipwrecks and far away countries, about love and heartbreak and murder and betrayal? The facts of his life, the argument goes, don't fit. How could someone from Shakespeare's background display such knowledge of falconry, the Court, the law, geography, languages? Only someone from a more exalted background, someone who mixed with the very finest in the land, with all the resources and experiences money could buy, could possibly have known such things intimately enough to write about them. Someone like Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, for example.
I, like Shapiro, don't buy it. It smacks of elitism, to me, this idea that because Shakespeare wasn't rich or noble, because he didn't travel or live in a fine house or hunt or joust, that he couldn't write about such things as if he knew them. To me it seems to reject the power of imagination, of genius. Authors don't have to have experienced something to write about it. That's what the imagination is for, to so powerfully evoke things unseen and unknown. That's why Shakespeare is such a genius. The arguments against Shakespeare seem so strained to me and so tenuous. Just because we don't have all the facts about Shakespeare that we would wish is not evidence that he wasn't who we believe him to be. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. As the man himself, whoever he may have been, once said, 'the play's the thing'. The plays are what is important, that we have them, that they've lasted, that they have as much impact today as they did 400 years ago. It would be wonderful to know about the man who wrote them, but we shouldn't let that obscure the really important thing, the legacy of his genius.
Whilst there are quite literally dozens of potential claimants this book focuses on the two main contenders, Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Without going into all the details, Shapiro's argument is that no-one really thought to question the authorship of the Shakespeare plays until the rise of autobiography in the eighteenth century. That was the point when critics and scholars started believing that all fiction, all poetry and novels and plays, necessarily drew on the author's own experiences, that you could understand an author's mind and life by reading between the lines of his work. And using that argument, how could Shakespeare, a rural glover's son with a grammar school education, possibly write about kings and queens, about shipwrecks and far away countries, about love and heartbreak and murder and betrayal? The facts of his life, the argument goes, don't fit. How could someone from Shakespeare's background display such knowledge of falconry, the Court, the law, geography, languages? Only someone from a more exalted background, someone who mixed with the very finest in the land, with all the resources and experiences money could buy, could possibly have known such things intimately enough to write about them. Someone like Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, for example.
I, like Shapiro, don't buy it. It smacks of elitism, to me, this idea that because Shakespeare wasn't rich or noble, because he didn't travel or live in a fine house or hunt or joust, that he couldn't write about such things as if he knew them. To me it seems to reject the power of imagination, of genius. Authors don't have to have experienced something to write about it. That's what the imagination is for, to so powerfully evoke things unseen and unknown. That's why Shakespeare is such a genius. The arguments against Shakespeare seem so strained to me and so tenuous. Just because we don't have all the facts about Shakespeare that we would wish is not evidence that he wasn't who we believe him to be. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. As the man himself, whoever he may have been, once said, 'the play's the thing'. The plays are what is important, that we have them, that they've lasted, that they have as much impact today as they did 400 years ago. It would be wonderful to know about the man who wrote them, but we shouldn't let that obscure the really important thing, the legacy of his genius.