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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (Hardback)
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Short Description for Contested WillFor two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates have been proposed as their true author. This title unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays.
Full description- Publisher: Faber and Faber
- Published: 01 April 2010
- Format: Hardback 384 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Literary Studies: General | Shakespeare Studies & Criticism
- ISBN 13: 9780571235766 ISBN 10: 057123576X
- Sales rank: 66,086
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Full description for Contested Will
For two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates - including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford - have been proposed as their true author. "Contested Will" unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays (among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, and Sir Derek Jacobi). Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro's fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity, bald-faced deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined. If "Contested Will" does not end the authorship question once and for all, it will nonetheless irrevocably change the nature of the debate by confronting what's really contested: are the plays and poems of Shakespeare autobiographical, and if so, do they hold the key to the question of who wrote them?
