This Sunday’s New York Times Book Review features a review (online now) of James Shapiro’s new book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?:

Shapiro, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, uses the fight over Shakespeare’s identity to show how our views of the past are shaped by the contingencies of the evidence that reaches us, and how we’re swayed by the changing spiritual weather of our own time. Though dozens of alternate authors have been proposed over the years — four more while he worked on the book, he writes — he concentrates here on what he calls the two “best-­documented and most consequential” candidacies: those of the philosopher and courtier Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. The shifts in their reputations over the last 150 years have been sufficiently extreme to think of them as the reverse of Ben Jonson’s famous praise of Shakespeare: they were not for all time, but of an age.

On Sunday, May 2, as part of the Books & Bagels series, join Shapiro at the 92nd Street Y for a talk by one of our most renowned Shakespeare scholars. 

Related: On May 10, “Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Contest Winners will read from their work. Tickets can be purchased here, and are just $10.00 for those aged 35 and under.

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