Review
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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
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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? is James
Shapiro's investigation into who wrote Shakespeare's plays, from
the bestselling author of 1599.