For People Who Devour Books

Apr 2010

Literary life, Literature and Literary Criticism, Theatre, William Shakespeare

Katherine Duncan-Jones

Of Plagues & Players

As You Like Him

The Stratford Wife

Bawdier Than The Bard

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Katherine Duncan-Jones

Much Ado About Nothing

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

By James Shapiro

Faber and Faber 367pp £20

I approached this book with a heavy heart. Why should such an able scholar as James Shapiro devote a whole book to the non-question of who wrote Shakespeare? Didn’t Samuel Schoenbaum cover the Baconians et al in great detail in his Shakespeare’s Lives (1970)? And in the end, how much does ‘authorship’ matter?

I am delighted to confess that my instinct was wrong. The self-contradictory subtitle ‘Who Wrote Shakespeare?’ turns out to be a line spoken by a foolish character in a play called High Life Below Stairs, written as long ago as 1759. Schoenbaum’s book is indeed weighty and, in