Shakespeare controversy inspires compelling narrative

A guest book review by THOMAS LISENBEE

Ask anyone to name the two greatest writers of all time and one of them is surely going to be William Shakespeare. Strange irony it is that this world-renowned Elizabethan playwright and poet has swirling about him a controversy at least as tumultuous and disputatious as “Who killed JFK?”

You might be surprised to learn Shakespearean scholars have debated for centuries how a minor Elizabethan actor named Will Shakespeare, a commoner in an age when only nobles or clerics of the church were well educated, could possibly have written such masterpieces.

It is not that we know nothing of the man. The problem is we know too much and the “conclusion” many scholars have made is either Shakespeare is the literary genius of all geniuses or someone else really wrote his stuff.

Now suppose you are a young graduate student named Joe Roper. You attend a small college in Massachusetts. You dream of being an important Shakespearean scholar but toil at cataloging a large, minor collection of Shakespeariana, filled with forgeries, trivia and nonsense.

You believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare and when you find a document that seems to be written in the master’s own hand confessing he was not the author of the works attributed to his name, you are shaken but thrilled to have found the elusive smoking gun and figure your literary career is made. In her excellent novel, “Chasing Shakespeares” (Atria Books), Sara Smith posits all this and more.

Factor in a girl friend that leaves academia and Joe to become a nun, a hot-shot Harvard scholar (and non-believer) named Posey who intends to chase down the real Shakespeare as well as Joe, a whirlwind detective trip to England, and Smith’s gift for weaving a good tale and you have a compelling whodunit page-turner tour de force.

Smith’s first thoughts about this controversy are probably much like yours or mine: “Why write on the Shakespeare authorship controversy anyway? Obviously they’re all nuts!” But like a small child left in a room with a piece of chocolate cake, the thought proved too delicious for her to ignore. “So,” she says, “the book ended up being about how imagination meets research, how one believes what one believes.” Indeed.

Join the chase. As a Broadway bard once proclaimed, “brush up your Shakespeare and they’ll all kowtow.”