| Media |
Marlowe-Shakespeare
Society
The International
Websites
Much Ado About Something
official website of Michael Rubbo's
film about Christopher Marlowe. Buy
Much Ado About Something at
Amazon.com.
Much Ado on PBS Frontline
page dedicated to Mike Rubbo's film
on PBS Frontline's website
Peter Farey's Marlowe Page
an encyclopedia of information about
the Marlowe claim, assembled by
Peter Farey
The Marlowe Studies
Here you will find the books and
essays written by those who believe
Christopher Marlowe was
Shakespeare.
The Marlowe Society
dedicated to promoting research into
the life and work of Christopher
Marlowe
Complete works of
Christopher Marlowe
all of the plays and poems ascribed to
Christopher Marlowe in full text
The Shakespearean
Authorship Trust
explore different arguments for the
most prominent authorship candidates
Much Ado About Something
official website of Michael Rubbo's
film about Christopher Marlowe. Buy
Much Ado About Something at
Amazon.com.
Much Ado on PBS Frontline
page dedicated to Mike Rubbo's film
on PBS Frontline's website
Peter Farey's Marlowe Page
an encyclopedia of information about
the Marlowe claim, assembled by
Peter Farey
The Marlowe Studies
Here you will find the books and
essays written by those who believe
Christopher Marlowe was
Shakespeare.
The Marlowe Society
dedicated to promoting research into
the life and work of Christopher
Marlowe
Complete works of
Christopher Marlowe
all of the plays and poems ascribed to
Christopher Marlowe in full text
The Shakespearean
Authorship Trust
explore different arguments for the
most prominent authorship candidates
 | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  |
Contested Will by James Shapiro
The first book about the authorship question written by a leading Shakespeare academic.
Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal
"There yet remains one subject walled off from serious study by Shakespeare scholars: the
authorship question. More than one fellow Shakespearean was disheartened to learn that I was
committing my energies to it, as if somehow I was wasting my time and talent, or worse, at risk
of going over to the dark side."
The Age
May 21, 210
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare
By Bob White
Shakespeare was no ill-educated rustic but instead acquired at school a literary knowledge
‘‘roughly equivalent to a university degree today, with a better facility in Latin than that of a typical
classics major’’.
The New York Times
April 26, 2010
Shakespeare: The Question of Authorship
By Jeremy McCarter
Soon afterward, a spate of popular biographies conveyed to a wide audience the scant facts of
Shakespeare’s life—largely derived from surviving financial records and legal proceedings—
without making clear that it would be strange to see much else survive from the 16th century.
The Times Literary Supplement
April 21, 2010
Yes, Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare
By Charles Nicholl
So there begins to arise a disparity. On the one hand, this inferred biography of almost
superhuman cultivation and profundity; on the other, the then-known facts of his life, which were
few and uninspiring.
The Los Angeles Times
April 19, 2010
The Shakespeare authorship question isn't settled
By John Orloff
As the screenwriter of "Anonymous," the Roland Emmerich film about the Shakespeare authorship
question now in production, I read with great interest James Shapiro's April 11 Times Op-Ed
article, "Alas, poor Shakespeare." I was particularly fascinated by Shapiro's claim that U.S.
Supreme Court Justices William J. Brennan Jr., Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens ruled
"unanimously for Shakespeare and against the Earl of Oxford" in a 1987 moot court case. Shapiro
has, at best, oversimplified the facts.
Express Night Out
April 14, 2010
The Bard Identity: James Shapiro, 'Contested Will: Who Wrote
Shakespeare?
By Roxana Hadadi
But back then, unlike our "culture of memoir," people didn't project their emotions or feelings into
their writing, and applying that line of thinking just won't work, Shapiro said. The scholar has a
special description for those doubters.
Popmatters
April 13, 2010
Who Wrote Shakespeare and Why You Should Care
By James Williams
Indeed, Shapiro attributes much of the doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship to Romantic and
post-Romantic notions that art is self-revelatory, that it mirrors the artist’s soul or mind or
psychological state. This, he insists, is a dubious way of thinking about the creation of art and it is
certainly not one that circulated, at least in the same form, in Shakespeare’s period.
The Los Angeles Times
April 11, 2010
Alas, Poor Shakespeare
By James Shapiro
Film director Roland Emmerich, whose last effort was the apocalyptic "2012," has begun shooting
"Anonymous." It won't be another disaster movie -- except perhaps for English professors. . . .
"It's about who will succeed Elizabeth and the cause of that thriller, the Essex Rebellion." The film,
starring Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth and Rhys Ifans as the Earl of Oxford, will have
"kings, queens, and princes," he adds. "It's about illegitimate children, it's about incest. It's about
all of these elements which Shakespeare's plays have."
The Wall Street Journal
April 9, 2010
The Shakespeare Whodunit: Interview with James Shapiro
By Alexandra Alter
"Once you take away the argument that the life can be found in the works, those who don't believe
Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare don't have any argument left… There's no documentary evidence
linking their 50 or so candidates to the plays."
The Wall Street Journal
April 8, 2010
About an Author, Much Ado
By Saul Rosenberg
Mr. Shapiro argues that a man without a university education or library could write plays drenched
in extensive literary allusion by buying, borrowing or browsing books. He could fashion striking
falconry metaphors by (presumably) "frequently observ[ing] the rich at play." He could display an
intimate knowledge of Italy by having "a few choice conversations." . . . Mr. Shapiro may be
right. But to understand how a man can browse, observe and chat and then write "Hamlet," "Lear"
and "Othello" may require a different collaboration—between neuroscience and criticism. Until
then, we may know that Shakespeare wrote his plays, but we still won't know how.
Macleans
April 6, 2010
In the Shakespeare wars, James Shapiro fights for the Bard
By Brian Bethune
Putting Shakespeare himself aside for a moment, Oxford still leads the field, though Christopher
Marlowe—a former contender who faded—is catching up. Go to Westminster Abbey and look at
Marlowe’s grave. In 2002, his death date of 1593—and he needs to be alive long after that to be
Shakespeare—suddenly sprouted a question mark. . . . Next year comes Anonymous, directed by
Roland Emmerich, of all people, which will plug the Oxford cause. In the rock-paper-scissors
world of pop culture, movie beats book, and this film may well be a Emmerich disaster movie for
Shakespeare teachers.
The Guardian
April 4, 2010
Shakespeare's doubters reveal more about themselves than the Bard in
this absorbing study.
By Peter Conrad
But Shakespeare the author was stillborn: he fudged his own identity or conceded its irrelevance.
As James Shapiro points out, he had scant interest in publishing his plays, and left his name off the
title pages of his bestselling narrative poems. . . . After all, it does matter who wrote Shakespeare,
because the case Shapiro makes for him doubles as a defence of art. As he complains, the
argument about the poverty of Shakespeare's experience refuses to acknowledge what he learned
from books: all his plays are retold tales or commentaries on recorded history. . . . scepticism
about Shakespeare signals an agnostic disrespect for what Shapiro bravely, bracingly calls "the
mystery of literary creation". Some puzzles – like that of how this nondescript provincial came to
be the greatest and most elusively polymorphous of writers – are best left unsolved.
The Salon
March 28, 2010
A new book on the authorship debate asks why some people refuse to
accept "the Stratford man"
By Laura Miller
We now take it for granted that a poet penning love verse must be opening his heart on the page.
But that's not how the writers of Shakespeare's time conceived of their work. The belief that the
proper subject of literature is the contemplation and revelation of the self is a fairly recent one,
dating back to the birth of the Romantic movement, which was — not coincidentally — around
the same time that the authorship controversy arose. Before that, scholars were frustrated by the
lack of data about Shakespeare's life, but they did not look to the plays and the poems for evidence
of what he did, experienced and felt.
The Chronicle
March 28, 2010
A Shakespeare Scholar takes on a 'Taboo' Subject
Jennifer Howard
As Shapiro sees it, Stratfordians, Marlovians, Oxfordians, Baconians, and the rest share an
anachronistic insistence on what he calls "reading the life out of the works." In other words, they
try to find autobiographical details in the plays and poetry that will confirm the true identity of the
author. . . . Shapiro casts the history of the authorship debate as a cautionary tale of how modern
readers want to read the literature of a pre-autobiographical age the way we read more recent
writing. Some of the leading literary lights of the past 300 years have fallen victim to that
temptation.
Financial Times
April 3, 2010
Did Shakespeare write his plays alone?
By James Shapiro
The acknowledgment that Shakespeare collaborated so extensively has obvious consequences for
the last remaining orthodoxy in mainstream studies: that the plays and poems are autobiographical.
To believe this is to accept that the plays are not (or not merely) imaginative creations but also
recycled chunks of an author’s life. Significantly, this is an assumption shared by those who
believe someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays since, in the absence of documentary
evidence linking anyone else to the plays, they have little else to go on.
The Independent
March 26, 2010
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, By James Shapiro
By Boyd Tonkin
Shapiro cogently argues that both sceptics and old-style Bardolaters share similar post-Romantic
assumptions about individual genius and literature as a coded confession.
The Economist
March 25, 2010
Hero or hoax: The man and his pen
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro.
The authorship controversy turns on two things: snobbery and the assumption that, in a literal
way, you are what you write. . . . The idea that works of literature hold personal clues, or that—
more grandly—writing is an expression and exploration of the self, is a relatively recent
phenomenon.
The Sunday Times
March 21, 2010
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
The Sunday Times review
By John Carey
For two centuries after Shakespeare’s death, he points out, nobody doubted that Shakespeare
wrote Shakespeare. Doubts started because a powerful new idea took hold in the early 19th
century, which was that artworks are expressions of their creator’s inner self, and should be
interpreted as spiritual autobiography. This change was part of the tectonic shift that we call
Romanticism, and it affected Shakespeare because the few surviving documents relating to his life
in Stratford did not suggest he was a spiritual sort of person at all.
The Guardian
Saturday 20 March 2010
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
By Hilary Mantel
Shapiro is at his most combative when he engages with the autobiographical approach to
Shakespeare studies. Here, William must be saved from his friends as well as his foes. Are the
plays encoded episodes from his life? Do the sonnets reveal his soul? Self-revelation, Shapiro
persuades us, was not an early modern mode. What Shakespeare demonstrates is the authority of
the human imagination.
The Observer
Sunday 14 March 2010
Who really wrote Shakespeare?
By Robert McCrum
By the turn of the millennium, the anti-Stratfordian case was flying so high that Jim Jarmusch,
director of Mystery Train was reported to have said: "I think it was Christopher Marlowe" who
wrote Shakespeare's plays, a conclusion that no sensible person can sustain for a moment, as
Shapiro amply demonstrates.
The first book about the authorship question written by a leading Shakespeare academic.
Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal
"There yet remains one subject walled off from serious study by Shakespeare scholars: the
authorship question. More than one fellow Shakespearean was disheartened to learn that I was
committing my energies to it, as if somehow I was wasting my time and talent, or worse, at risk
of going over to the dark side."
The Age
May 21, 210
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare
By Bob White
Shakespeare was no ill-educated rustic but instead acquired at school a literary knowledge
‘‘roughly equivalent to a university degree today, with a better facility in Latin than that of a typical
classics major’’.
The New York Times
April 26, 2010
Shakespeare: The Question of Authorship
By Jeremy McCarter
Soon afterward, a spate of popular biographies conveyed to a wide audience the scant facts of
Shakespeare’s life—largely derived from surviving financial records and legal proceedings—
without making clear that it would be strange to see much else survive from the 16th century.
The Times Literary Supplement
April 21, 2010
Yes, Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare
By Charles Nicholl
So there begins to arise a disparity. On the one hand, this inferred biography of almost
superhuman cultivation and profundity; on the other, the then-known facts of his life, which were
few and uninspiring.
The Los Angeles Times
April 19, 2010
The Shakespeare authorship question isn't settled
By John Orloff
As the screenwriter of "Anonymous," the Roland Emmerich film about the Shakespeare authorship
question now in production, I read with great interest James Shapiro's April 11 Times Op-Ed
article, "Alas, poor Shakespeare." I was particularly fascinated by Shapiro's claim that U.S.
Supreme Court Justices William J. Brennan Jr., Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens ruled
"unanimously for Shakespeare and against the Earl of Oxford" in a 1987 moot court case. Shapiro
has, at best, oversimplified the facts.
Express Night Out
April 14, 2010
The Bard Identity: James Shapiro, 'Contested Will: Who Wrote
Shakespeare?
By Roxana Hadadi
But back then, unlike our "culture of memoir," people didn't project their emotions or feelings into
their writing, and applying that line of thinking just won't work, Shapiro said. The scholar has a
special description for those doubters.
Popmatters
April 13, 2010
Who Wrote Shakespeare and Why You Should Care
By James Williams
Indeed, Shapiro attributes much of the doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship to Romantic and
post-Romantic notions that art is self-revelatory, that it mirrors the artist’s soul or mind or
psychological state. This, he insists, is a dubious way of thinking about the creation of art and it is
certainly not one that circulated, at least in the same form, in Shakespeare’s period.
The Los Angeles Times
April 11, 2010
Alas, Poor Shakespeare
By James Shapiro
Film director Roland Emmerich, whose last effort was the apocalyptic "2012," has begun shooting
"Anonymous." It won't be another disaster movie -- except perhaps for English professors. . . .
"It's about who will succeed Elizabeth and the cause of that thriller, the Essex Rebellion." The film,
starring Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth and Rhys Ifans as the Earl of Oxford, will have
"kings, queens, and princes," he adds. "It's about illegitimate children, it's about incest. It's about
all of these elements which Shakespeare's plays have."
The Wall Street Journal
April 9, 2010
The Shakespeare Whodunit: Interview with James Shapiro
By Alexandra Alter
"Once you take away the argument that the life can be found in the works, those who don't believe
Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare don't have any argument left… There's no documentary evidence
linking their 50 or so candidates to the plays."
The Wall Street Journal
April 8, 2010
About an Author, Much Ado
By Saul Rosenberg
Mr. Shapiro argues that a man without a university education or library could write plays drenched
in extensive literary allusion by buying, borrowing or browsing books. He could fashion striking
falconry metaphors by (presumably) "frequently observ[ing] the rich at play." He could display an
intimate knowledge of Italy by having "a few choice conversations." . . . Mr. Shapiro may be
right. But to understand how a man can browse, observe and chat and then write "Hamlet," "Lear"
and "Othello" may require a different collaboration—between neuroscience and criticism. Until
then, we may know that Shakespeare wrote his plays, but we still won't know how.
Macleans
April 6, 2010
In the Shakespeare wars, James Shapiro fights for the Bard
By Brian Bethune
Putting Shakespeare himself aside for a moment, Oxford still leads the field, though Christopher
Marlowe—a former contender who faded—is catching up. Go to Westminster Abbey and look at
Marlowe’s grave. In 2002, his death date of 1593—and he needs to be alive long after that to be
Shakespeare—suddenly sprouted a question mark. . . . Next year comes Anonymous, directed by
Roland Emmerich, of all people, which will plug the Oxford cause. In the rock-paper-scissors
world of pop culture, movie beats book, and this film may well be a Emmerich disaster movie for
Shakespeare teachers.
The Guardian
April 4, 2010
Shakespeare's doubters reveal more about themselves than the Bard in
this absorbing study.
By Peter Conrad
But Shakespeare the author was stillborn: he fudged his own identity or conceded its irrelevance.
As James Shapiro points out, he had scant interest in publishing his plays, and left his name off the
title pages of his bestselling narrative poems. . . . After all, it does matter who wrote Shakespeare,
because the case Shapiro makes for him doubles as a defence of art. As he complains, the
argument about the poverty of Shakespeare's experience refuses to acknowledge what he learned
from books: all his plays are retold tales or commentaries on recorded history. . . . scepticism
about Shakespeare signals an agnostic disrespect for what Shapiro bravely, bracingly calls "the
mystery of literary creation". Some puzzles – like that of how this nondescript provincial came to
be the greatest and most elusively polymorphous of writers – are best left unsolved.
The Salon
March 28, 2010
A new book on the authorship debate asks why some people refuse to
accept "the Stratford man"
By Laura Miller
We now take it for granted that a poet penning love verse must be opening his heart on the page.
But that's not how the writers of Shakespeare's time conceived of their work. The belief that the
proper subject of literature is the contemplation and revelation of the self is a fairly recent one,
dating back to the birth of the Romantic movement, which was — not coincidentally — around
the same time that the authorship controversy arose. Before that, scholars were frustrated by the
lack of data about Shakespeare's life, but they did not look to the plays and the poems for evidence
of what he did, experienced and felt.
The Chronicle
March 28, 2010
A Shakespeare Scholar takes on a 'Taboo' Subject
Jennifer Howard
As Shapiro sees it, Stratfordians, Marlovians, Oxfordians, Baconians, and the rest share an
anachronistic insistence on what he calls "reading the life out of the works." In other words, they
try to find autobiographical details in the plays and poetry that will confirm the true identity of the
author. . . . Shapiro casts the history of the authorship debate as a cautionary tale of how modern
readers want to read the literature of a pre-autobiographical age the way we read more recent
writing. Some of the leading literary lights of the past 300 years have fallen victim to that
temptation.
Financial Times
April 3, 2010
Did Shakespeare write his plays alone?
By James Shapiro
The acknowledgment that Shakespeare collaborated so extensively has obvious consequences for
the last remaining orthodoxy in mainstream studies: that the plays and poems are autobiographical.
To believe this is to accept that the plays are not (or not merely) imaginative creations but also
recycled chunks of an author’s life. Significantly, this is an assumption shared by those who
believe someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays since, in the absence of documentary
evidence linking anyone else to the plays, they have little else to go on.
The Independent
March 26, 2010
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, By James Shapiro
By Boyd Tonkin
Shapiro cogently argues that both sceptics and old-style Bardolaters share similar post-Romantic
assumptions about individual genius and literature as a coded confession.
The Economist
March 25, 2010
Hero or hoax: The man and his pen
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro.
The authorship controversy turns on two things: snobbery and the assumption that, in a literal
way, you are what you write. . . . The idea that works of literature hold personal clues, or that—
more grandly—writing is an expression and exploration of the self, is a relatively recent
phenomenon.
The Sunday Times
March 21, 2010
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
The Sunday Times review
By John Carey
For two centuries after Shakespeare’s death, he points out, nobody doubted that Shakespeare
wrote Shakespeare. Doubts started because a powerful new idea took hold in the early 19th
century, which was that artworks are expressions of their creator’s inner self, and should be
interpreted as spiritual autobiography. This change was part of the tectonic shift that we call
Romanticism, and it affected Shakespeare because the few surviving documents relating to his life
in Stratford did not suggest he was a spiritual sort of person at all.
The Guardian
Saturday 20 March 2010
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
By Hilary Mantel
Shapiro is at his most combative when he engages with the autobiographical approach to
Shakespeare studies. Here, William must be saved from his friends as well as his foes. Are the
plays encoded episodes from his life? Do the sonnets reveal his soul? Self-revelation, Shapiro
persuades us, was not an early modern mode. What Shakespeare demonstrates is the authority of
the human imagination.
The Observer
Sunday 14 March 2010
Who really wrote Shakespeare?
By Robert McCrum
By the turn of the millennium, the anti-Stratfordian case was flying so high that Jim Jarmusch,
director of Mystery Train was reported to have said: "I think it was Christopher Marlowe" who
wrote Shakespeare's plays, a conclusion that no sensible person can sustain for a moment, as
Shapiro amply demonstrates.
Books
History Play
Rodney Bolt's brilliant
tongue-in-cheek post 1593 biography
of Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe's Ghost
Daryl Pinksen's website to promote
the 2008 book, Marlowe's Ghost: The
Blacklisting of the Man Who Was
Shakespeare.
The Marlowe-Shakespeare
Connection
2008 by Sam Blumenfeld. Buy it now
at Amazon.com
Shakespeare's Unorthodox
Biography
Explore the 2001 book by author
Diana Price on her website
www.shakespeare-authorship.com
Shakespeare and Marlowe
Website to promote the 2005 book,
Hamlet: By Christopher Marlowe and
William Shakespeare, by IMSS
member Alex Jack
Peter's Gematria Site
Website to promote Peter Bull's "The
Mason Code." Click here to read
Peter's essay, "Kit Marlowe wrote
Shakespeare's Sonnets?"
D.K. Marley's "Blood and
Ink"
Website to promote D.K. Marley's
2010 novel, "Blood and Ink." Watch
her promo on Youtube.
Books about the 'Death' of
Marlowe
Hosted on The Marlowe Society
website
History Play
Rodney Bolt's brilliant
tongue-in-cheek post 1593 biography
of Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe's Ghost
Daryl Pinksen's website to promote
the 2008 book, Marlowe's Ghost: The
Blacklisting of the Man Who Was
Shakespeare.
The Marlowe-Shakespeare
Connection
2008 by Sam Blumenfeld. Buy it now
at Amazon.com
Shakespeare's Unorthodox
Biography
Explore the 2001 book by author
Diana Price on her website
www.shakespeare-authorship.com
Shakespeare and Marlowe
Website to promote the 2005 book,
Hamlet: By Christopher Marlowe and
William Shakespeare, by IMSS
member Alex Jack
Peter's Gematria Site
Website to promote Peter Bull's "The
Mason Code." Click here to read
Peter's essay, "Kit Marlowe wrote
Shakespeare's Sonnets?"
D.K. Marley's "Blood and
Ink"
Website to promote D.K. Marley's
2010 novel, "Blood and Ink." Watch
her promo on Youtube.
Books about the 'Death' of
Marlowe
Hosted on The Marlowe Society
website