Contested Will

Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

James Shapiro

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English

Faber & Faber
19 January 2011

Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Shakespeare studies & criticism

For two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates - including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford - have been proposed as their true author. Contested Will unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays (among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, and Sir Derek Jacobi).

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro's fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity, bald-faced deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined. If Contested Will does not end the authorship question once and for all, it will nonetheless irrevocably change the nature of the debate by confronting what's really contested: are the plays and poems of Shakespeare autobiographical, and if so, do they hold the key to the question of who wrote them?

By: James Shapiro
Imprint: Faber & Faber
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 196mm, Width: 130mm, Spine: 24mm
Weight: 296g
ISBN: 9780571235773
ISBN 10: 0571235778
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 19 January 2011
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Professor James Shapiro, who teaches at Columbia University in New York, is the author of Rival Playwrights, Shakespeare and the Jews, and Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare won the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006.