"Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?"

A new book on the authorship debate asks why some people refuse to accept "the Stratford man"

-- by Laura Miller

"It bristles with difficulties," observed Henry James about the "authorship controversy," the 200-year-old argument over who wrote the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare. You can count James (along with Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Helen Keller and such notable actors as John Gielgud and Derek Jacobi) among the anti-Stratfordians, those who question the conventional view. The majority of experts may feel confident that the author "Shakespeare" was none other than the man Shakespeare and not some aristocrat or intellectual using the celebrated Elizabethan actor as a front, but those who disagree — a small but vocal minority of academics, independent scholars and outright cranks — will not be deterred.

James Shapiro's penetrating new consideration of the debate, "Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?" is misleadingly subtitled; Shapiro, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of the acclaimed history "1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare," does not doubt the Stratfordian view himself. But he does differ from his colleagues in insisting that the quarrel ought to be publicly addressed. Until now, most Shakespeare experts have treated the anti-Stratfordians much as the mainstream of science has handled the proponents of intelligent design theory: that is, as a crackpot fringe who will only be encouraged and legitimized by any response. And we all know how well that strategy has worked out.

Read more at Salon.com.