Krishna
The full title is “Contested Will: Who wrote Shakespeare?”.Do you see the play on words in the title? Cute.
The prologue is really nice. The controversy about who really wrote Shakespeare started even in the eighteenth century. James Wilmot argued that everything that the plays indicate about the education, the travels (description of foreign towns) etc do not match what we know about the real William Shakespeare from history. So who really wrote it? There are dozens of suggestions but James Shapiro takes two cases and examines the case. One is Edward de Vere, who is the Earl of Oxford and the other is Francis Bacon. Both these perspectives agree that William Shakespeare did not write those plays and someone else used his name.
And then there is the title event. Shakespeare had written in his will “To my loyal wife, I bequeath my second best bed”, without any explanation! The mystery deepens.
With this plot, you would expect a killer narrative, right? The style though is pedantic. The exciting story of how, Ireland, the son of a Shakespearean scholar, found unexpected success in unearthing some important documents on the life of the bard itself and let the fame go to his head and forged several more “finds” and got exposed; how Shakespeare devotion swept the stage around that time reminding one of the Beatlemania much later have all been told in a professorial tone, marring the impact it may have had on you as a reader.
Even after proof that the papers were forgeries by Malone, who pointed out that some of the things in the documents (for instance, tea) were not available in England in Shakespeare’s lifetime, people insisting on believing that the documents were authentic.
The way Malone then took to speculation on what Shakespeare’s life must have been from his plays is criticized. Rightly so. But when the same point is made for about 15 pages, you start getting bored and urge James Shapiro to “move on” in your mind.
And it goes on and on where Malone even hid some diaries that presented contrary evidence because he was blindly convinced of the rightness of his views. But very slow, with agonizing repetitions of the same point.
And when the pious Samuel Mosheim Schmucker, offended by the research from Friedrich Strauss that argued that The New Testament could not have been real based on some scientific analysis, wrote a parody saying all the plays could not have been written by Shakespeare, this argument became the basis of serious argument about Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays by subsequent critics!
Delia Bacon argued that Francis Bacon was the real author but that was driven by no concrete evidence, and with the belief that she was somehow related to that man – without any evidence to the relationship. Till she turned insane and was admitted to an asylum and died, she persisted on irritating everyone by her alternate bouts of nagging and paranoia that someone else will steal her ideas. In spite of powerful sympathizers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, she frittered away her chance to do genuine research. Her personal scandal and ridicule in personal life only made the paranoia worse.
The main things that fueled suspicion about Shakespeare’s authorship is the fact that he was a man who was not literate enough, in people’s opinion, to have written so fine a set of plays and more importantly, there was no manuscript found in Shakespeare’s effects after his death for any of the plays! Strange.
Mark Twain was of the same opinion and in fact influenced by Delia. Now it is interesting that all through his life, Mark Twain kept getting into disastrous business ventures, losing all his money and then winning it back through new books and lectures! Another feature is that Mark Twain was the first one to think of branding himself. Today’s branding industry has him to thank. He gets convinced on some kooky ciphers that people arbitrarily see in Shakespeare’s plays (“Bacon signed his name in them in cipher”) and gets misled.
More and more on the same points. Reads like a research paper written for a doctorate thesis and is tedious to read in many places. For instance Freud was also convinced that Shakespeare did not write the plays and even used Hamlet as an inspiration to move to his now famous theories. The way it is told could not be more soporific even if you tried.
There was a group called the Church of Humanity that worshiped Shakespeare (and also others like Homer and Dante) as religious leaders and even named months after them. The month of Shakespeare was in the fall, and was between the months of Gutenberg and Descartes. Wow.
Shakespeare’s case, if you understand the realities of those times, seems unshakable when presented by the author. It is only deep seated religion-like convictions that drive the alternate theories even when, as in the case of Earl of Oxford, subsequent historical findings repudiate much of the basis for the original claim.
For instance you should have actors available to deliver the dialog, especially those in Welsh as sometimes written. Also the female parts were played by boys who had to be frequently replaced when they reached puberty and their voices broke so the current crop of actors should be able to mouth the formidable dialogs. So a person cannot write a play in isolation and get it staged.
The book picks up when it describes Shakespearean times when plays were staged and the constraints (in music, stage space etc) he faced and how the plays were written to suit those conditions – including the taste of the audience at that time. It is interesting to read that he had purely commercial motives in writing these great plays. This is similar to the shock in finding out that Alexander Dumas had written the Three Musketeers as a serial piece in the local newspaper!
And then comes a long series of hand wringing about the tendency that still prevails to read Shakespeare’s plays as autobiographical. We have seen all the arguments earlier (not that it is not valid) and so it feels like you have flipped the book backwards and are reading the sections again in a different set of words.
Why should we care who wrote Shakespeare? He has a good reason for it. Read the book, however boring most of it is, to find out why.
4/10
– – Krishna