8:20am Thursday 18th March 2010
By Maggie Hartford
For 200 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 and the Earl of Oxford — have been proposed as their true author.
The conspiracy theorists argue that it would have been impossible for someone from so humble a background, and limited education, to have written such masterpieces.
Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, whose book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, became a bestseller and won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, seems likely to be a reliable guide through this controversy.
He will be at the Oxford Literary Festival next Thursday to discuss his forthcoming book Contested Will, to be published by Faber next month. In it, he unsurprisingly plumps for the status quo, but tries to unravel the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays.
Searching for the source of this controversy, he retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, false claimants, concealed identity and bald-faced deception.
He argues that we are fond of conspiracy theories about Shakespeare because we fail to grasp the power of writers’ imagination.
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