Author pokes holes in Shakespeare conspiracy theories

Published 10:25 am Friday, July 2, 2010

“Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” by James Shapiro, $26

Only a few people think William Shakespeare, of Stratford-on-Avon, did not write the plays and poems on which his reputation is based. It’s a small, slapped-on-the-back fraternity/sorority of like-minded researchers, who comb the record for anything they can jam into preconceived cubbies.

Those who do subscribe to the “Shakespeare authorship controversy,” however, keep popping up. Some are well funded and organized. Anti-Shakespeare news (if there was any) packs a sensation — and newspeople are perpetually biased toward the vociferous minority. So the no-Will folks have a permanent home in public media.

James Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia University and author of the exemplary book “A Day in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599,” has now given us the wonderfully titled “Contested Will.” With lucid writing for the common reader, with sense, and with respect toward those with whom he rightly disagrees, Shapiro tells how this whole mishegas got started, and then, with unbelievable patience, shows how it has not a shred of a breath of a hope of being — anything.

I recommend it to all who want a vivid picture of how William Shakespeare worked. It’s a great, true story. The accompanying story — of how some people, including misguided luminaries such as Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud, came not to believe in his authorship — inspires weary horror.

The thing about the no-great-Shakes is this: They don’t have a thing. Not a straw, not a pebble, not a feather. Nothing there. Nothing close. They want people to “admit” there’s a “reasonable doubt.” But there isn’t.

Some tell us it’s best to read his plays and poems as works from an “indeterminate” source. Read them any way you wish; he was their main author. Why would anyone think he “could not have written” his plays? I have never read a single good reason.

Like many Renaissance scholars, I’ve read every scrap of direct documentary evidence linked to Shakespeare. New ones surface occasionally. They’re always interesting, but they never change the one thing the evidence is evidence of: Will was Will and Will wrote.

Shapiro traces the long, daffy trail of the “Shakespeare authorship question” evenly and without name-calling. Shapiro then turns to Shakespeare and his daily business life. He wrote plays, he acted in them, and he was a shareholder in a players’ company. He was an entrepreneur in a brand-new, borderline industry of mass entertainment closely watched by the totalitarian authorities of his land.

Best of all is Shapiro’s stress on Shakespeare the collaborator. Early, middle and late, he worked with other writers and players. His earliest plays — his first might have been, say, Henry VI, Part II — show a beginner apprenticing with a more experienced writer, one whose verse sometimes sounds a lot to me like Christopher Marlowe (just a guess). From there on, collaboration was part of his art.

As Shapiro gently insists, this constant, vigorous collaboration, just by itself, makes it vanishingly, crushingly unlikely that anything like the conspiracy, or misprision, or switcheroo, invoked in the supposed “controversy” ever happened.

John Timpane, media editor/writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, was a university and college Shakespeare teacher for 16 years.