Contested Will — James Shapiro

Shapiro examines not Shakespeare's plays but the question of who wrote them — tracing the history of the authorship controversy from its origins in the nineteenth century and analysing why the question has proved so persistent. The book is less a defence of Shakespeare's authorship than a history of the doubters and their motivations: what it reveals about Romantic notions of literary genius, about the need to project biographical experience into works of art, and about the peculiar difficulty of knowing anything about a man who left so little personal record behind him.

'Brilliant and fascinating — a history of a historical question that illuminates the entire culture of authorship.' — James Wood, The New Yorker. 'Shapiro writes with wit and precision about one of literature's most intractable debates.' — Sunday Times