James Shapiro believes, and so do I, that Shakespeare’s plays and poems were written, on the whole, by one William Shakespeare, “a young man of ill condition, a lout from Stratford,” as Henry James, in conversation with Percy Lubbock, quaintly called him. In Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), Professor Shapiro examined the evidence in favor of other Elizabethans for whom a claim of authorship of the plays and poems had been made, notably Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford. He conceded that “literature in support of alternative candidates—both print and digital—dwarfs that defending Shakespeare’s claim.” No matter: he ended with a strong chapter in favor of Shakespeare. Many readers have found that chapter decisive, and have thanked Shapiro for closing a not-endlessly-exciting debate.

I am one of the grateful. I demur only at one point, where Shapiro lists Henry James among the Baconians. He was never a paid-up member. Shapiro quotes a sentence from James’s letter of August 26, 1903 to Violet Hunt which goes as far as he was prepared to go. I take the point of the italicized almost.

I can only express my general sense by saying that I find it almost as impossible to conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.

Shapiro comments: “Bacon was an unlikely candidate, but Shakespeare unlikelier still.” But the qualification, “as we know