Cynthia Greenwood

A year before he retired from the Supreme Court in 2010, John Paul Stevens told the Wall Street Journal that the author of Shakespeare’s plays was the aristocrat Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford. Like Henry James, Sigmund Freud, and others who have doubted that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare, Stevens attempted to read the evidence connecting Shakespeare’s life and art. He found it plausible that de Vere, not a middle-class glover’s son from Warwickshire, would have dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southamption. Why? Because de Vere and Southampton were both noble wards of Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s closest advisor.

In Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? James Shapiro addresses the shaky foundations of hypotheses such as Stevens’. Shapiro is a respected scholar of early modern England and author of the acclaimed 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

Shapiro’s historical investigation is a wise and engaging reenactment of when and why people began to question Shakespeare’s authorship. “Like all good detective fiction, the Shakespeare mystery can be solved only by determining what evidence is credible, retracing steps, and avoiding false leads,” he notes in the prologue. Underlying Shapiro’s quest is a curiosity about “why this subject remains virtually taboo in academic circles” and what the “collective silence” really means. (As a serious Shakespeare enthusiast, I have found this silence bewildering.)

Shapiro reminds us that no papers have been discovered in Shakespeare’s own handwriting, which would connect him more personally to the plays attributed to him by Ben Jonson and many contemporaries. Since the late eighteenth century, plenty of men have hunted for such papers. Shapiro recounts the tale of fraud perpetrated by William-Henry Ireland in 1795, involving forged letters allegedly written to Shakespeare by the Earl of Southampton and the queen, as well as a manuscript of King Lear in the playwright’s own hand. Earlier in that century Shakespeare had gradually attained the status of a deity, especially after the famed actor David Garrick established the first Shakespeare “Jubilee” festival in the playwright’s hometown. Shapiro implies that the Ireland incident could not have happened until Shakespeare had achieved iconic status.