Summary: James Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. A Shakespeare scholar, his latest book is 'Contested Will'; a fascinating search for the controversial reasons why many people, including such respected figures including Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain and Orson Welles, question whether the Bard really wrote his celebrated plays. In the book, Shapiro retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity and bald-faced deception to irrevocably change the nature of the debate.
