Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010) by James Shapiro

Who really wrote Shakespeare? It’s a question that’s been asked literally for centuries, sometimes by thoughtful intellectuals, but most often by those with a limited knowledge of literature and a strong predisposition to conspiracy theories. In this book, “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” (2020) by distinguished Columbia University literature professor James Shapiro, the author seeks to put the controversy to rest for good. Yes, he argues, William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare (at least most of them) and there is deep documentary evidence that Shakespeare, in fact, existed and no one during his own time doubted his genius and his prolific output of masterpieces. It’s only when modern conceptions of literature as an inherently autobiographical exercise did people start to question who really wrote Shakespeare.

Shapiro dedicates almost 80 percent of “Contested Will” (the first 220 pages out of 280) to describing all the theories and evidence presented over the years arguing that the plays of the Bard were really written by Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or some other obscure candidate. For this review I’ll start where Shapiro ends: providing the most compelling reasons why none other than William Shakespeare (1564-1616) himself wrote Shakespeare. To begin with, Shakespeare was overwhelmingly popular in his own time and well-known around town. By the end of the sixteenth century, when the population of London hovered at around two hundred thousand, there were perhaps fifty thousand books bearing Shakespeare’s name in print. If there were rumors or suspicions that Shakespeare was not writing his hit plays, Shapiro says, “we would have heard about it.” Moreover, stage productions were closely monitored by government officials during Elizabethan and Jacobean England. George Buc, a close acquaintance of Shakespeare’s, was Master of the Revels, the government official (i.e. censor) to whom Shakespeare’s company would submit all playscripts for approval. The prospect that Buc was either an active part of the conspiracy or duped by it seems “awfully far-fetched” to Shapiro. In short, he concludes, “This was not a world in which a dramatist could secretly arrange with a publisher to bring out a play under an assumed name.”

Shapiro has many other objections. For instance, if you were going to pick a pseudonym for your plays, why pick the name of one of the most popular and well known actors in the city? And why would that modest actor allow his name to be used for such purposes when running afoul of government censors could lead to torture or execution? Furthermore, there is nothing to the common argument that the occasional hyphenization of Shakespeare’s name (i.e. “Shakes-peare”) signals any sort of conspiracy. Spelling simply wasn’t uniform at the time; Shakespeare even spelled his own name two different ways in his own last will and testament.

We also have plenty of contemporary evidence that Shakespeare’s prowess as a playwright was widely acknowledged by London’s small and tight literary network in the early seventeenth century. He was even recognized by the leading historian of the day, William Camden, who included Shakespeare among the greatest of contemporary writers. “Are we to suppose that as reputable a historian as Camden must have been in on the conspiracy as well – and willing to lie in print?,” Shapiro asks. And then there is Shakespeare’s notable change in style in the plays he produced in his final years. Shapiro says the change is directly attributable to the venue Shakespeare was writing for. When the Globe Theater burned down in 1613 and productions were moved to the much smaller and darker indoor venue at Blackfrairs, Shakespeare accommodated the new physical constraints into his plays, such as not incorporating any elaborate fight scenes and taking advantage of the long intermissions necessary to trim the candle lights. No playwright who died in 1604, as Oxford did, could have anticipated and responded to these changes as Shakespeare did.

Shapiro is much more credulous to claims that some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays were co-authored. He says that the cases for Thomas Middleton, George Wilkins, and John Fletcher’s contributions are “irrefutable.” Moreover, the increasingly conclusive evidence of stylography is a “nightmare” for those arguing for conspiracy theories involving Bacon and Oxford, he says. To Orthodox Shakespeareans this is the so-called “jumble sale” theory: Middleton, Wilkins, and Fletcher all somehow came upon Oxford’s unfinished plays in the early seventeenth century and then filled in their parts.

If the case for an alternative, secret author is so weak, why has it remained so powerful for so long? Perhaps the most important explanation is that contemporary readers are projecting their modern understanding of literature backward onto a culture and world to which it does not belong. In short, Shapiro says, Shakespeare is not our contemporary. In the eighteenth century the idea emerged of writing as “both an expression and exploration of the self,” Shapiro says. Ergo, Shakespeare couldn’t have written all those plays with details about places he’d never been nor the inside of royal courts he’d never seen because literature is deeply and inherently autobiographical. But this just wasn’t true in early seventeenth century England. Plays in Shakespeare’s day “were rarely if ever a vehicle for self-revelation,” Shapiro says, “autobiography as a genre and as an impulse was extremely unusual.” Incredible as it may seem today, Shakespeare simply made everything up from books he read about down or (even more likely) men he met along the wharves and in the taverns of greater London.

If the case for Shakespeare writing Shakespeare is so strong, why has there been so much controversy for so long? After all, in his own day and for 150 years thereafter, nobody questioned the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. Shapiro says that the controversy is directly related to changing attitudes and interpretations of literature and “an unbridgeable rift between the facts of Shakespeare’s life and what the plays and poems reveal about their author’s education and experience.” Doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship date back to 1785 when Oxford-educated scholar James Wilmot suggested that Sir Francis Bacon was the true playwright after he couldn’t find any books or papers indicating that Shakespeare had written anything. Shortly thereafter, in 1794, English writer William-Henry Ireland (1775–1835) produced “newly discovered” manuscripts, including love letters, legal documents, and even full plays, claiming they were Shakespeare’s lost works. It was all an elaborate hoax exposed by Irish Shakespearean scholar Edmund Malone (1741–1812), who pointed out the anachronistic language, incorrect handwriting, and historical inconsistencies found in Ireland’s documents. However, “While justly celebrated for having resolved one authorship controversy,” Shapiro writes, “Malone bears much of the blame for ushering in far more divisive ones.” 

Malone was one of the first to see in Shakespeare’s plays Elizabethan and Jacobean court allegories, which implied that only a court insider could have written them. Moreover, he presupposed that Shakespeare mined his own emotional life in transparent and, even more importantly, modern ways. When reviewing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 93 in 1780, for instance, Malone wrote: “Every author who writes on a variety of topics will have sometimes occasion to describe what he has himself felt.” While that reads like common sense to twenty-first century audiences, Shapiro says it was “a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general … literary biography had crossed a Rubicon.” Little of Shakespeare’s actual biography was then known; it was assumed that the Sonnets were “directly, intensely, painfully autobiographic.” While Malone defended Shakespeare’s authorship, his emphasis on biography and his presumption Shakespeare could only write about what he knew and felt influenced later anti-Stratfordians and ultimately set the authorship question “on a new and irreversible course,” Shapiro says. Both Ireland and Malone were committed to rewriting Shakespeare’s life – the former forged documents, the latter forged connections between the life and the works. “In retrospect,” Shapiro says, “the damage done by Malone was far greater and long-lasting.”

English Shakespearean scholar John Payne Collier (1789–1883) discovered more important archival documents about Shakespeare’s career than anyone else, before or since, Shapiro says. However, like Ireland, he is also infamous for forging a series of documents to enhance Shakespeare’s historical record and support certain interpretations of his life and works. By the mid-ninteenth century an unbearable tension had developed between “the London playwright and the Stratford haggler, between Shakespeare as Prospero and Shakespeare as Shylock … between a deified Shakespeare and a depressingly mundane one.” A tipping point had been reached, Shapiro says. People at the time started questioning whether or not Homer or even Jesus ever existed. It was a natural next step to add Shakespeare to the list.

The next principal actor in the Shakespeare authorship drama, who Shapiro says did more than anyone before or since to popularize it, was Delia Bacon (1811–1859). A female Puritan American writer, she popularized the theory (based on philosophical and literary analysis) that a group of frustrated and politically ostracized leading men, led by the English philosopher and statesmen Francis Bacon (1561–1626) (no relation to Delia), were the true source of Shakespeare’s plays. (Shapiro notes that plays and poems were about the only thing that the polymath Francis Bacon didn’t try his hand at.) In “The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded” (1857) she wrote: “Driven from one field [politics], [Bacon and his co-conconspirators] showed themselves in another [theater]. Driven from the open, they fought in secret.” By collaborating on great drama, the theory goes, Francis Bacon and his small clique of proto-republicans (“a new Round Table,” Delia called them) worked to oppose the despotism of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Shakespeare himself was nothing but a pawn – “a stupid, illiterate, third-rate-play actor” obviously incapable of writing dozens of pieces of literary genius. Only Fancis Bacon and his ilk possessed the superior education, foreign travel, good breeding, court access, and pure motives to compose such masterpieces. She was largely dismissed in her own time and spent the final years of her life in a mental institution, but her ideas went global and inspired later anti-Stratfordians. 

By the late nineteenth century, the once crackpot theories of Delia Bacon had gone viral thanks to the perceived support of credible figures like Mark Twain (1835-1910) and Hellen Keller (1880-1968), who also believed that literature was ultimately confessional. In 1886 Mark Twain confessed “my books are simply autobiographies. I do not know that there is any incident in them which sets itself forth as having occurred in my personal experience which did not occur.” Later he wrote: “a man can’t handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he had not personally served [in Shakespeare’s case the legal profession].” A successful writer holding such a perspective found it easy to believe that the historical William Shakespeare – the son of a country bumpkin glovemaker who spent his final years in a small village chasing down delinquent real estate loans and hoarding malt – could not have possibly written the literary canon of the playwright known as Shakespeare. (For the record, Twain also publicly doubted that John Bunyan wrote “The Pilgrim’s Promise” (1678) and believed that Queen Elizabeth was a he/him.) However, according to Shapiro, “This was no parlor game for Twain, nor was his interest in Shakespeare and the authorship question a passing fancy.” A new generation of Shakespeare skeptics took to cipher hunting to prove once and for all that Francis Bacon and his circle were the true authors. Enthusiasts searched for hidden acrostics, alternating font types, and string ciphers among the classic works of Shakespeare. Twain published “Is Shakespeare Dead?” in 1909, just one year before his death. Shapiro says it coincided with the death knell of Baconianism.

Prospero as Bacon had outlived its moment, Shapiro says. The great man was simply “Too aloof, bookish, and a bit cold” to have written Shakespeare. The race was on to identify a new candidate. It didn’t take long for the nobleman, courtier and poet Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604 or twelve years before the death of William Shakespeare), to emerge. One of the most prominent Oxfordians was famed psychologist Sigmud Freud (1856-1939), who became convinced that Edward de Vere was the true author after reading J. Thomas Looney’s 1920 book “‘Shakespeare’ Identified,” the foundational text for the Oxfordian theory, which even the unapologetically Shakespearean Shapiro calls a “tour de force” and “yet to be surpassed” as the most compelling book on the authorship controversy. Positivism, the nineteenth century philosophical movement associated with Auguste Comte, played a key role in shaping Looney’s methodology and approach in his search for the “true” author of Shakespeare’s works. Looney argued that the author of Shakespeare’s plays was clearly an anti-materialistic, anti-democratic aristocrat, as Oxford was, and not a commoner who shamelessly chased shillings as the historical William Shakespeare of Stratford indisputably had.

Freud essentially melded the autobiographical school of the Baconians with his own theories of psychoanalysis with a tip of the hat to Lonney’s positivism. His deep interest in the play Hamlet played a pivotal role in his conversion to Oxfordianism. Freud believed that Hamlet’s Oedipal conflicts were directly connected to Oxford’s rumored life experiences. Shapiro says that Freud ultimately embraced Hamlet as a “canonical psychoanalytic text.” He believed that the character of Hamlet reflected Oxford’s personal struggles, particularly in relation to Queen Elizabeth I, whom some Oxfordians theorized was Oxford’s secret mother or lover, whose illegitimate son was the Earl of Southampton, the so-called Prince Tudor theory among conspiracy theorists. The Oxfordian case was even tried in a highly publicized moot court case in 1987 with three sitting US Supreme Court justices presiding. The Oxfordians lost the case, but just barely. James Shapiro is hoping that “Contested Will” will settle the case once and for all.

In closing, “as much as we might want Shakespeare to have been like us, he wasn’t,” Shapiro says, and we’ll never truly understand him. Analyzing the Bard and his great literary works in modern terms is essentially like trying to plant cut flowers. It has been our modern conceptions of literature as inherently autobiographical that has led us astray on the Shakespeare question.