Robert S. Miola

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro Simon & Schuster, 339 pages, $26 The subtitle of James Shapiro’s lively new study is a real question that has long engaged serious artists and thinkers”Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, . . . . Continue Reading »

Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy Yale, 280 pages, $28.50 Before the flames consumed him in 1555, Bishop Latimer is said to have turned to his companion at the stake: “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle by . . . . Continue Reading »

After three years of tests”tree-ring dating (to determine the age of the wood frame), x-ray examination at Cambridge University, and infrared reflectography”Stanley Wells of the Shakespeare Institute unveiled earlier this year a new painting of Shakespeare, the Cobbe portrait (1610). Scholars and non-scholars alike eagerly gathered around computer screens and televisions to see for the first time what might well be the dark-eyed, youthful, intelligent, and finely featured face of William Shakespeare, age forty-six. When it comes to Shakespeare, new evidence is hard to find, and everyone is interested… . Continue Reading »

It started back in May 2001, at a graduation party in my daughter’s tiny New York apartment, just off Broadway, five flights up. Christine has won prizes in classics and Italian, a set of other honors, and she has no use for any of them. She has dropped two decades of aspiration and academic . . . . Continue Reading »

Joseph Pearce’s reply is as overheated and inaccurate as his book. I shall gladly leave it to your readers to determine whether there is anything of a “shrill personal attack” or ad hominem argument in my review, or whether those appellations better describe Pearce, who preens himself . . . . Continue Reading »

The Quest For Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome by Joseph Pearce Ignatius, 216 pages, $19.95 In The Quest for Shakespeare , Joseph Pearce claims that the “real Shakespeare” was a secret Catholic. Pointing in the preface to his own “robust muse” and “Bellocian . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1613, at the end of his career, Shakespeare joined John Fletcher to dramatize the reign of Henry VIII—the king who broke with Rome and started the Protestant revolution in England. The play ends with Thomas Cranmer’s rhapsodic paean to the once and future queen, Elizabeth, who would . . . . Continue Reading »