Does it really matter if it wasn’t William Shakespeare but another playwright—perhaps Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere (the Earl of Oxford), or Francis Bacon—who authored
Hamlet,
Macbeth,
Romeo and Juliet, and some 35 other plays from the Elizabethan age? Recently, James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar and English professor from Columbia University, broke the taboo in academic circles and decided to explore the authorship question in a new book,
Contested Will. Shapiro’s conciliatory, noncombative approach to the highly contentious issue should be good, welcome reading during the next restful days of this Holy Week. (March 31, 2010)
Read a report on James Shapiro’s Contested Will in Going Deeper into English now!
