First Person: Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford and Morton Smith

I recently read a fascinating new book by a longtime and well-known Columbia University Shakespeare scholar named James Shapiro. The book is titled Contested Will and traces the history of the claim that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a glover’s son with a grammar-school education, who came to London from a little provincial town called Stratford and achieved modest fame as an actor. His three-page will makes no mention of any of his plays or their doubtless valuable manuscripts (and we have not a scrap of such manuscripts). He bequeathed to his wife Anne Hathaway […]