James Shapiro, a Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, visited the Southern Methodist University campus Thursday night for a Shakespearean lecture discussing his most recent published book, “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?”
About 150 professors, alumni and students gathered in McCord Auditorium to listen to Shapiro address the controversial debate of whether or not Shakespeare actually wrote his plays.
Jaclyn Castaldo, SMU sophomore majoring in advertising, never thought to think that Shakespeare did not write works like “Hamlet, and A Midsummer’s Night Dream.”
“I am excited to hear what he has to say,” Castaldo said. “I grew up reading Shakespeare in English class. I do not want to believe that anyone else wrote Shakespeare. I think it would take away the magic.”
Dan Moss, SMU assistant English professor ,introduced Shapiro.
“Professor Shapiro has produced some of the most engaging and critical and biographical studies of Shakespeare in the last 15 years.”
Shapiro is the author to four Shakespearean novels, “Rival Playwrights,” “Shakespeare and the Jews,” “Oberammergau,” “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare,” and most recently, “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?”
Shapiro grabbed the audience with his sense of humor and gratitude for everyone who came to support him.
“I appreciate the spectacular hospitality I have had at SMU. This is a glorious campus and it has a wonderful faculty,” Shapiro said. “I am so grateful.”
Shapiro goes on to say that it is not easy to keep track of all the candidates who helped write Shakespeare plays or poems.
Shapiro recalls a trip he took to his son’s fourth grade classroom in which he was reading Shakespearean sonnets to the class. One of the boys asked Shapiro a question.
“My brother told me Shakespeare did not write Romeo and Juliet,” he said. “Is this true?”
Shapiro thought to himself, how do these conspiracies get started? And, furthermore, how do these conspiracies trickle down to young children?
Before 1850, no one ever questioned whether Shakespeare’s work was written by someone else.
To this day, scholars are still debating the controversial subject.
In October filmmaker, Ronald Emmerich, is releasing the film “Anonymous,” which will depict that Earl of Oxford actually wrote the plays, and Shakespeare never wrote a single word.
As the lecture came to a close, Shapiro concluded that if people actually believed that Shakespeare did not write the plays, it would change everything. It will change how people read the sonnets, the plays and the poems. Finally, it will change how people envision the world Shakespeare lived in.
