Contested Will

James Shapiro, Contested Will (Faber)

It's slightly unfortunate that this book, which might have gone some way to putting the Shakespeare authorship claims of non-Stratfordian candidates to bed, should appear just when a popular director is making a film on the subject of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, being the author of the works attributed to Shakespeare. You might think that the worthy academic work in Shapiro's book is likely to attract considerably less public attention than Anonymous by Roland Emmerich but it was possibly ever thus and it was a big ask for one book to put an end to all the speculation once and for all.

Shapiro's project is to examine the reasons why the authorship question has occupied so many people for such a long time. The issue didn't appear to any noticeable degree until the mid C19th, when Delia Bacon became convinced that, no-relation, Francis Bacon was the author of the work attributed to Shakespeare.
Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud and Henry James were among celebrated names that found the theories persuasive but each sceptic has their own motivations for their scepticism and they have a choice of several candidates with which to replace the Stratford man.

The main starting point for doubt comes when readers can't see the money-lending, commodity- investing property owner that contemporary records show Shakespeare to have been also having written the finest works in the literary canon. There isn't sufficient evidence of a provincial, non-University man writing works of such genius and so they look for a likely-looking genius to award them to.

The case for Francis Bacon was already in decline by the 1920's, the extraordinary lengths that his supporters went to in uncovering ciphers in the plays left by Bacon for future generations to discover being admirable in their inventiveness but also ostensibly the work of obsessives who could prove anything to themselves if they tried hard enough.

The more enduring candidate, Oxford, still has supporters and his cachet has in fact risen again in recent decades, not necessarily due to the unforensic evidence provided by Percy Allen who engaged a medium to contact Bacon, Oxford and Shakespeare who happily told them the whole story, said it had been nice to see them when they'd visited the Shakespeare grave in Stratford and Oxford even accommodated them by knocking out a few more sonnets.

The problem for Oxfordians has always been his death in 1604, several years before the last plays were produced, but they are always ready to explain away such inconvenient details (in the same way that Marlowe's supporters are not put off by his murder in 1593) and imagine Oxford stockpiling plays for posthomous release. However, Shapiro dispatches this explanation by showing that the language in the late plays- more difficult, less in rhyme and strict metre but similar to plays by other authors writing after 1610 -has nothing comparable pre-1604 to relate it to.

Shapiro readily goes into detail about collaboration, both early in Shakespeare's career and late, with John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton amongst others which turns one of the Oxfordian arguments in on itself. When they say that the plays must be the work of a nobleman and not a commoner, it is even less likely that a nobleman would work so closely with common theatre people, one of who, Wilkins, who wrote half of Pericles, was not only an innkeeper but probably a brothel-keeper, too.

A further interesting point is made to refute the suggestion that Shakespeare was a pseudonym and that variant spellings and a hyphen are evidence of this. Shakespeare's will is signed with two different spellings by the man himself and so spelling is not an exact science for him but Shakspere, as it commonly was spelt, was made Shakespeare or Shake-speare by typesetters when the usual spelling was liable to fall apart in the presses due to the size of the letters.

In the early chapters on the forgeries of Ireland and the undoing of him by Malone, Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives provides greater detail but Shapiro's theme is off in a more specific direction and comes into its own in the later sections where, having finished describing the arguments of the anti-Stratfordians, he takes on the more difficult challenge of defending Shakespeare's claim to the work that has always carried his name and he does that more convincingly than it's been done before.

So, it would be useful if this finely-argued book could get as much attention as the forthcoming film but when it doesn't it can of course be produced to offer to new converts to the Oxfordian cause, persuaded by a less well-researched entertainment.