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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010)

by James Shapiro(Favorite Author)

3.96 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1416541624 (ISBN13: 9781416541622)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Simon & Schuster

review 1: Who wrote the "Shakespeare Plays"? For two hundred years, people (mostly non-academic enthusiastic amateur "scholars") have argued that the "Bard of Avon's" scant biography doesn't seem adequate to the sophisticated and educated worldview of the plays. Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford emerged as the most popular contenders for alternate authors. In “Contested Will”, Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro provides an absorbing (at least to this former English Lit major) and entertaining history of the arguments along with his own counter-arguments for the man who carried the name. Ultimately, this reader found the arguments for Shakespeare as author far more compelling than those against. Read it and judge for yourself. I’d be interested to hea... morer other opinions…
review 2: I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Shakespeare authorship question. If this is your first book on the topic, it could save you a lot of time you might have wasted reading books promoting the idea that somebody other than Shakespeare wrote his works. Shapiro is a Stratfordian and his book brings us chronologically through time from Shakespeare's day to the present day, telling the stories first of falsified artifacts regarding Shakespeare's life, then to claims that somebody else must have written the works. Shapiro explores the motivations of these people, discredits their claims, and finally gives the case that Shakespeare, the glover's son from Stratford, is indeed the author of the works. A very interesting read. less

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