First Person: Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford and Morton Smith

I recently read a fascinating new book by a longtime and well-known Columbia University Shakespeare scholar named James Shapiro. The book is titled Contested Will and traces the history of the claim that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was a glover’s son with a grammar-school education, who came to London from a little provincial town called Stratford and achieved modest fame as an actor. His three-page will makes no mention of any of his plays or their doubtless valuable manuscripts (and we have not a scrap of such manuscripts). He bequeathed to his wife Anne Hathaway nothing but his “second best” bed.

The claim that Shakespeare could not have written those plays is certainly understandable. As one early scholar put it: “There is nothing in the writings of Shakespeare that does not argue the long and early training of the schoolman, the traveler, and the associate of the great and learned. Yet there is nothing in the known life of Shakespeare that shows he had any of these qualities.” Shapiro sums up this argument: “[There is] an unbridgeable rift between the facts of Shakespeare’s life and what the plays and poems reveal about the author’s education and experience.”

Among those convinced by such arguments were Sherlock Holmes, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, as well as some highly regarded living Shakespeare scholars. Mark Twain wondered about anyone who was “ignorant enough and stupid enough to go on believing Shakespeare ever wrote a play or a poem in his life.”