Sound Commentary - Your Wise Guide to Audiobooks and Audio Book Reviews

*James Shapiro. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Read by Wanda McCaddon. 2010. 9 CDs. 11 hrs. 30 mins. Tantor Media Audiobooks. 978-140-016-648-0.

Acclaimed scholar James Shapiro traces the Shakespeare controversy from its inception, some 200 years after Shakespeare's death through the authorship arguments proposed today on Google and Wikipedia. Shapiro sets out to entertain as well as instruct and does both remarkably well in this superbly organized, pitch perfect text, loaded with facts and historical anecdotes. Listeners on either side of the debate will have much to think about, while those with no position at all will enjoy the absurdity of some of the arguments and the sophistication of many of the others.

Shapiro makes his position clear. He believes that Shakespeare wrote his own work for the simple reason that his contemporaries had no doubt of it. But he is fair-minded enough not to let his opinion taint his survey. All of the great minds (along with those of lesser quality) took sides on whether an uneducated man from Stratford upon Avon could have emerged suddenly upon the London scene to become in short order the most celebrated writer in the English language. The cast of the naysayers is star-studded. And it's interesting, if not downright amusing, to learn that Mark Twain, for example, the most highly paid writer of his time with little to no formal education of his own, believed so strongly that Shakespeare could not have overcome his humble origins to write so beautifully of things he'd never actually seen or done as to completely convince Helen Keller of it, whose singular literary achievements belied the limitations of her own blindness and deafness.  What is it that makes this controversy still matter so much to so many?  Shapiro lets us in on that too.

Wanda McCaddon has a musical, highly expressive voice and keeps the pace moving briskly. In every way, this audiobook is a feast!

By Francine Levitov

Francine Levitov was a high school English teacher and had a second career in law as a New York public defense attorney before discovering audiobooks. Now in her third professional reincarnation, she is a former KLIATT audiobook reviewer and, along with Jean Palmer, a founding co-editor of SoundCommentary.com.