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BOOK REVIEW,SHAKESPEARE:Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?By James Shapiro Faber and Faber, 367pp. £20, reviewed by DANIELLE CLARKE
COMPARED TO HIS 2006 hit, 1599, (and comparisons are inevitable) James Shapiro’s new book on Shakespeare struggles to locate its subject – the book is not really about Shakespeare at all, but about the array of fictions and mysteries woven around the black hole that is the lack of biographical or documentary evidence of the life. His intention is to analyse not the hoary authorship question in relation to Shakespeare’s plays (who wrote which bits? What if it wasn’t the son of a provincial tradesman? What if it was?) but to investigate the weird and wonderful by-ways of the controversy itself. And weird and wonderful they certainly are, proving that well-connected and important people will, if conditions are right, abandon all reason and invest time, money and reputation in schemes that are doomed to failure. There are many of these detailed in this diverting and entertaining book – my particular favourite is Orville Ward Owen, a wealthy Detroit doctor, who on the basis of messages derived from a complex cipher decided that the “manuscripts” of Shakespeare’s plays were buried in lead-lined boxes at the bottom of the River Severn. And yes, he did go and look.
