The Winnepeg Free Press published Michael Dudley's review of James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, "Out, damned skeptics, author fills in blanks with Stratfordian doctrine" , on May 15, 2010. Dudley -- a senior research associate at the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnepeg -- is a long-time Shakespeare authorship skeptic who finds Shapiro's arguments for the traditional Stratfordian candidate to be "time-worn, weak and . . . fallacious". Dudley demolishes the key issue of Stratfordian attribution with one ultra-clear sentence: . . . Shapiro, nevertheless, devotes the final chapter to setting out his case for Stratfordian orthodoxy, which, like most conventional biographies of "the Bard," consists primarily of conflating all contemporary references to a writer named Shakespeare with the man from Stratford, and filling in the blanks with conjecture. And a scathing analysis: It is difficult to imagine a...
a Michigan group dedicated to the study of the works of William Shakespeare with particular interest in the authorship question