dkpw – wicked fire

Review

Rating: 8

I agreed with Shapiro at the beginning of the book and by the end…. I still agreed with him. Shakespeare wrote the works of Shakespeare, although he did collaborate with some of his contemporaries, on some of his later plays.

Shapiro makes a good case for disproving claims that either the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon or any of the other Elizabethan / Jacobite notables suggested, wrote the plays we now recognise as Shakespeare’s. He shows through motivational analysis of the originators of Shakespeare’s doubters, how and why they selected their favoured candidates and exposes them as generally misguided, unaware of the historical and literary contexts and misreading the plays and poems by projecting their assumption that there was an autobiographical base to the work, something Shapiro argues was not present in literature until after Shakespeare’s death.

Above all he argues that in denying Shakespeare authorship, they are denigrating the key component to his continued success, the expression of his imagination.