Contested Will Who Wrote Shakespeare?

The case for Shakespeare is made cogently and convincingly. Shapiro cites contemporaries who identified him as the author of the plays, and show that the early printing history corroborates the attribution ... Shapiro weaves together various strands of recent scholarship to make a case which is about as watertight as it can be ... Shapiro illuminatingly assimilates the authorship controversy to radical theories about the non-existence of Homer as an individual author, and about the mythic nature of the Gospels ... Shapiro is a gifted storyteller. LRB