Who wrote the music of Johann Sebastian Bach? Not the Man from Leipzig. It's self-evidently absurd to suppose that an overworked church organist with 20 children could possibly have had enough brainpower (or spare time) to will into existence such supreme utterances of Western art as the B Minor Mass, the St. Matthew Passion and the Brandenburg Concertos. Besides, if Bach wrote his own music, where are the letters in which he describes the creative agonies that he suffered while writing it? All he ever talked about was money. . .
OK, you get the idea. I am, as should be apparent, poking fun at those benighted souls who believe that someone other than William Shakespeare—the most prominent candidates being Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford—wrote "Hamlet," "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet." In a saner world, nobody would need to poke fun at them, for nobody would give them the time of day, there being no credible evidence whatsoever to support their claims. Alas, such is not even close to the case, for the ranks of Shakespeare deniers have included, incredibly enough, such noted figures as Mark Twain, Henry James and Sigmund Freud, not to mention a fair number of theater folk.
James Shapiro has thus done yeoman service by writing "Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?" In this no-nonsense study of the zanies whose theory-mongering has blighted the world of legitimate Shakespeare studies, Mr. Shapiro not only probes the peculiar mentalities of the most prominent deniers, but provides a brilliantly pithy, devastatingly final summing-up of the mountains of incontrovertible evidence proving that the not-so-mysterious "man from Stratford" did in fact write the greatest plays ever written. Read the last chapter of "Contested Will" and you'll never need to read anything else about what is known in polite circles as "the authorship question."
It doesn't surprise me that such lunacy has grown so popular in recent years. To deny that Shakespeare's plays could have been written by a man of relatively humble background is, after all, to deny the very possibility of genius itself—a sentiment increasingly attractive in a democratic culture where few harsh realities are so unpalatable as that of human inequality. The mere existence of a Shakespeare is a mortal blow to the pride of those who prefer to suppose that everybody is just as good as everybody else. But just as some people are prettier than others, so are some people smarter than others, and no matter who you are or how hard you try, I can absolutely guarantee that you're not as smart as Shakespeare.
If anything, Shakespeare's story reminds us of the existence of a different kind of democracy, the democracy of genius. Time and again, the world of art has been staggered by yet another "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" (to borrow a phrase from "The Great Gatsby") who, like Michelangelo or Turner or Verdi, strides onto the stage of history, devoid of pedigree and seemingly lacking in culture, and proceeds to start churning out masterpieces. For mere mortals, especially those hard-working artistic craftsmen who long in vain to be touched by fire, few things are so depressing as to be reminded by such creatures of the limits of mere diligence.
On the other hand, my little prefatory fantasia has a somewhat different point. For not only is Shakespeare the only major writer since ancient times whose authorial status has been seriously questioned by large numbers of people, but he's the only major artist of any kind who has attracted such attention. This fact, of which Mr. Shapiro somewhat surprisingly makes no mention in "Contested Will," is for me the most puzzling aspect of the authorship question. Any scholar who dared to suggest that Bach's work wasn't by Bach or Rembrandt's by Rembrandt would, I trust, be handled thereafter with the academic equivalent of padded tongs. Yet outside of the ambiguous evidence of their work, we know scarcely more about the inner lives of either man than we do about that of Shakespeare. Why, then, is he the only creative giant around whom an ever-growing edifice of pseudoscholarly fantasy has been erected?
The answer may be as simple as this: Most of us are far more at home with words than with sounds or images. Not being able to do much more than sketch a crude stick figure, I can't even begin to imagine what it would have felt like to paint "The Night Watch." But I, like you, express myself with words each day of my life, and though I know I'll never write a play like "Cymbeline" or "The Winter's Tale," I also know how it feels to sit down at the keyboard and set down my thoughts about the world.
This is undoubtedly the reason why the world is full of innocents who sincerely believe in their secret hearts that they could write a best-selling novel if only they tried hard enough. I further suspect that it also explains why so many laymen are interested enough in Shakespeare to have an opinion, however uninformed it may be, about the authorship question. The phrase "I'm entitled to my opinion," after all, is so ingrained in the American vocabulary that it even has its own Wikipedia page. And it's true: You are entitled to believe that the Earl of Oxford wrote "King Lear." So, too, am I equally entitled to assume that you're ... well, let's just say wrong, and let it go at that.
— Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday. He is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong."
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