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James Shapiro of Columbia University has published a scholarly yet readable book on a topic that deeply interested Sigmund Freud: who was
the actual author of the works of Shakespeare? Shapiro has little patience with the many highly speculative biographies of Shakespeare that have appeared over the past decade. Although they feed our voracious hunger to know more about this remarkable writer, Shapiro seems to agree with Mark Twain, who opined that biographies of Shakespeare are much like reconstructed dinosaur skeletons in museums—nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris. Shapiro believes that we do not need to know more about Shakespeare than those few indisputable facts that we possess. On the other hand, he maintains that it matters a great deal who Shakespeare was:
The greatest difference of all concerns how we read the plays. We can believe that Shakespeare himself thought that poets could give to “airy nothing” a “local habitation and a name.” Or we can conclude that this “airy nothing” turns out to be a disguised something that needs to be decoded, and that Shakespeare couldn't imagine “the form of things unknown” without having experienced it firsthand. It's a stark and consequential choice. [pp. 279-280]
Shapiro is confident that William Shakespeare of Stratford (1564-1616) was the author because of two categories of evidence: “The first is what printed texts reveal; the second, what writers who knew Shakespeare said about him” (p. 223). Thus, he contradicts the conclusion reached by Freud, that the author was actually Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). Shapiro's interpretation of the evidence leads him to deny that de Vere could have published under a pseudonym: “This was not a world in which a dramatist could secretly arrange with a publisher to bring out a play under an assumed name” (p. 225). This is an important claim to buttress Shapiro's assumption that, when the name Shakespeare appeared in print, it must have referred to the