
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 & the Earl of Oxford
- have been proposed as their true author. Contested Will unravels the mystery of when & why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays (among them such leading writers & artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, & 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 & a failure to grasp what could not be imagined. If Contested Will does not end the authorship question once & for all, it will nonetheless irrevocably change the nature of the debate by confronting what's really contested: are the plays & poems of Shakespeare autobiographical, & if so, do they hold the key to the question of who wrote them?