'Contested Will' proves Shakespeare wrote it all

Who Wrote Shakespeare?

By James Shapiro

Simon & Schuster.

352 pp. $26.

Reviewed by John Timpane

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" (a favored locution) his plays? I have never read a single good reason.