Professor James Shapiro Examines the Question of Who Wrote Shakespeare

(Editor’s note: This story on English professor James Shapiro was originally published in the May 14, 2010, Vol. 35, No. 12 issue of The Record. We are republishing due to new interest in the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays stirred by the upcoming film Anonymous.)

James Shapiro (CC’77) fell in love with Shakespeare’s plays when, as an undergraduate, he took trips to London and Stratford-upon-Avon on summer breaks. “I would work from the end of the school year until early August,” recalls Shapiro. “Then I would fly over on a cheap flight, sleep in youth hostels and see a play a day—two on days there were matinees.”

Shapiro’s Shakespeare habit soon turned academic, and in 1985, he joined the Columbia faculty. Thirty years later, as the Larry Miller Professor of English, he teaches the Core Curriculum ’s Shakespeare class, which has been taught by a well-known roster of admired faculty over the years, including Mark Van Doren, Andrew Chiappe and Ted Tayler.

This storied academic history makes Shapiro’s latest book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, a somewhat unusual work, because he tackles a topic that most scholars avoid: the much-addressed theories that cast doubt on whether Shakespeare actually wrote the plays that bear his name. Shakespeare experts typically don’t consider this academically viable material, and Shapiro agrees, calling the debate “a matter of faith,” not fact. But rather than taking sides, Contested Will looks at the culture that engendered challenges to Shakespeare’s authenticity.

“I had thought about teaching why and when smart people, like Freud, Henry James and Mark Twain, to name a few, began to doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays—this didn’t happen until two centuries after his death—rather than what they thought, which is far less interesting,” said Shapiro.

That perspective for the book, like much of Shapiro’s previous work, was inspired by the classroom. His 2006 book, A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599, which explores the impact of sometimes mundane events on the evolution of the Bard’s craft during that year, grew out of a graduate course he taught 15 years ago and later adapted for undergraduates. But since the authorship issue isn’t taught, Shapiro had to envision a course that would explore why prominent thinkers began questioning Shakepeare’s work. “The course would have been in the tradition of the cultural history that defines so much of the important work that has come out of the English department,” he said.

Shapiro is quick to point out that such tradition is something of a Columbia specialty. He believes that Contested Will would not have been possible were it not for the deep knowledge of his fellow cultural historians in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. “I had to move from the 16th century to the 19th and 20th centuries for much of this book and deal with many American writers, too, and I was able to draw on the expertise of colleagues—especially Alan Stewart , Ross Posnock , David Kastan and Andrew Delbanco.”

Questioning whether Shakespeare really wrote Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet or Midsummer Night’s Dream is a gambit with a complex and intellectually dubious history. The earliest published account dates to 1857, with Delia Bacon’s The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, which posited that Shakespeare contemporary Francis Bacon (no relation to the author) had written the famous plays instead of the Bard. Out of this theory, known as Baconism, other authorship theories developed. The Oxfordians, founded by Thomas Looney in the 1920s, offered Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the true Shakespeare; Marlovians believe it was Christopher Marlowe, and Derbyites think it was William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby.

With Contested Will and its rave reviews in The New York Times Book Review and The Telegraph, among other publications, Shapiro has cemented his reputation as a Shakespeare scholar who approaches his subject with a fresh outlook. As an avid volunteer for various Shakespeare organizations and theaters, such as Classic Stage Company, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Theatre for a New Audience, Shapiro says he is as enlivened now by the theater as he was during his undergraduate summers in England. His next book, The Year of Lear: 1606, is set for release in 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

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