This is a book review of Contested Will by James Shapiro. It’s an argument that has been going on for four centuries about who, actually, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. The bottom line is, “Nobody really knows”.

One of the first to start bickering about it was Edmond Malone. In the late 1700’s he savaged previous suggestions that the man from Stratford wasn’t the actual author with his superior scholarship. Shapiro writes that he had a greater objective.  “That was putting in their place amateurs who thought they knew enough about Shakespeare to judge such matters.” Malone was clear about what people who question Shakespeare’s authorship can expect: “ridicule … if they express their opinions publicly.”

And the battle was joined. Down through history, great men of letters attacked each other with fusillades of dissertations. Mark Twain with his biting sarcasm and Henry James with metaphorical land mines. Shapiro isn’t shy about his own valiant charge into the thick of the battle. With the dreadnought might of massive scholarship, he has no doubt that the man from Stratford wrote the plays … or, at least, most of them.

Who knew such a thing could generate such vitriolic scholastic warfare? But even though Shapiro’s scholarship is as mighty as the Spanish Armada, I think it founders on the unforgiving sea of too little evidence coupled with too much reliance on traditional thinking. To paraphrase Shakespeare … or whoever wrote it …

There are more things in heaven and earth, Shapiro,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The problem is that we simply don’t know who wrote the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare the man. Malone’s academic enemy, Steevens, once rebutted him by writing, “All that is known with any degree of certainly concerning Shakespeare is – that he was born at Stratford upon Avon – married and had children there – went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays – returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.”

As he approaches the end of his book, Shapiro edges closer and closer to more moderate and modern conclusions and opens his literary kimono wider and wider so that the gentle reader can see the exciting view of today’s scholars.

The problem is that people for the last four centuries have been engaged in a “cult of personality” war. Both sides have usually demanded that one specific individual be given the credit. But today, there is more agreement that at least some of Shakespeare’s plays were co-authored by two, three, or even more authors. Shapiro even quotes one technical text analysis that concludes that precisely 835 lines of Pericles were written by someone else and 827 were written by Shakespeare.

We may not know much about Shakespeare the man, but the struggle has yielded quite a bit about the nature of the theater business in old London. And what little we have learned about Shakespeare the man points mainly in the direction of his superior business skill and his love of the almighty English pound. Half of the extant signatures of Shakespeare (where he never spells his name the way we do or the same way) are on legal documents connected with money. And the management skill it must have taken to produce plays in those times – there was only one copy of the play to be shared among all the actors – would have made Lord Nelson proud.

Maybe nobody wrote the bulk of the plays. Maybe a whole lot of different people wrote the actual words. Maybe “Shakespeare” was just a brand name that was attached to a series of brilliant … and some not so brilliant … plays that have come down to us through history. Shakespeare the man couldn’t profit from selling his plays because anyone could print and sell them back then. There was so little profit in it that they were never published in his lifetime. But the theater company he co-owned could produce a handsome profit and it did. Maybe it was simply more profitable, four hundred years ago, to sell plays written by somebody else but with the Shakespeare brand name on them.

To quote, ahhhh …. “Shakespeare” ….

They say, if money go before, all ways do lie open.