Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

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Review ------ The case for Shakespeare is made cogently and convincingly. Shapiro cites contemporaries who identified him as the author of the plays, and show that the early printing history corroborates the attribution ... Shapiro weaves together various strands of recent scholarship to make a case which is about as watertight as it can be ... Shapiro illuminatingly assimilates the authorship controversy to radical theories about the non-existence of Homer as an individual author, and about the mythic nature of the Gospels ... Shapiro is a gifted storyteller. (LRB) Authoritative, lucid and devastatingly funny, and its brief concluding statement of the case for Shakespearer is masterly. (John Carey The Sunday Times) Shapiro sprinkles his text with glinting, steely facts ... Riveting ... Shapiro does not waste words on the preous, but he does uncover the mechanism of fantasy and projection that go to make up much of the case against Shakespeare. His books lays bare, too, assumptions about the writing life that come to us from the 18th-century romantics. those who make Shakespeare a demi-god have much to answer for. (Hilary Mantel Guardian, Book of the Week) The application of Shapiro's detective skills to the piles of pseudo-scholarship from the past century and a half yields valuable results. Contested Will isn't just the most intelligent book on the topic for years, but a re-examination of the documentary evidence offered on all sides of the question ... Contested Will is a terrific read. (Financial Times) A follow-up more original that his earlier success ... [Shapiro's] imaginative enquiry never the less joins the show shelf of essential books on the subject ... Contested Will is a serious, interesting an doriginal book about how shakespeare's genius can dominate the imagination ... Illuminating. (Daily Telegraph) [Shapiro's] contribution to exposing those who still want to deny that Shakespeare was Shakespeare is deadly effective in another way: he helps us understand them better. (Evening Standard) In Contested Will, James Shapiro cooly considers and then deftly dismantles the belief that Shakespeare did not write his own plays. This irresistable book hums with all the learning and panache that made Shapir's 1599 such a treat. No one has ever expalined so well the motives and reasons for the bit lie of the the "authorship controversy" ... As his book genially but forcefully proves, the "authorship controversy" is a ghost-train. (Independent) Mr Shapiro teases our the cultural prejudices, the historical blind spots, and above all the anachronism inherent in these questions ... Contested Will is dense with lives and stories and argument. It is also entertaining ... A brilliant defence of the man from Stratford. Piece by piece, Mr Shapiro builds the case ... the Shakespeare that emerges is both simple and mysterious: a man of the theatre, who read, observed, listened and remembered. Beyond that is imagination. In essence, that's what the book is about. (Economist) Entertaining. (Sunday Express) Shapiro's approach is quite different. His interest is not so much in 'what people think' as in 'why they think it', and he often sheds powerful light on the social and religious contects in which scepticism about shakespeare has flourished. shapiro has a remarkable gift for empathy with his human subjects, and is curious and tenacious in exploring their life stories ... The study is book-ended with excellent resumes of Shakespeare scholarship. (Literary Review) Book Description ---------------- Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? is James Shapiro's investigation into who wrote Shakespeare's plays, from the bestselling author of 1599.