Contested Year says Shapiro got it wrong in Year of Lear
In October 2015, Columbia professor James Shapiro published his widely reviewed and universally acclaimed, micro-history The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (Simon & Schuster). As the title suggests, Shapiro claims that Shakespeare wrote King Lear in 1606, and that he wrote and/or staged Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra during that fateful year, too.
Seventeen independent scholars who have written Contested Year: Errors, Omissions and Unsupported Statements in James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear say Shapiro got it wrong. There’s no evidence that Shakespeare wrote King Lear — or anything else — in 1606.
As Contested Year documents, every time Shapiro claims the Shakespeare plays allude to politics or current events of 1606, he fumbles. And it’s not because the Shakespeare canon is bereft of any contemporary allusions. But time and again, when Shakespeare alludes to events and people and situations around him, it’s to the age of England’s previous monarch, Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603).
Shakespeare was persistently and steadfastly an Elizabethan playwright writing about Elizabethan characters, politics and situations, raising the question: Why did Shakespeare seemed to stop taking notice of printed books, plays, scientific discoveries, events, people and situations into the reign of King James I?
Was Shakespeare even alive in 1606? Contested Year presents compelling evidence that the author of the plays and poems had passed away by 1606. And yet, undeniably, William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon continued to engage in lawsuits and commercial transactions until his well-documented death in 1616—the quatercentenary of which scholars and Shakespeare fans the world over celebrate this year.
Contested Year co-editor Alexander Waugh — author of Shakespeare in Court and co-editor of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? Exposing an Industry in Denial — said:
“It is dismal that a tenured professor from a respectable university could make so many elementary gaffes and reveal such profound ignorance of his subject while critics from around the world sit about praising him and his literary style. He should be censured by his university for willfully misleading the public about William Shakespeare”
Co-editor Mark Anderson — author of “Shakespeare” by Another Name: The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, The Man Who Was Shakespeare (Gotham Books/Untreed Reads, 2005, 2011) — said:
“Despite Shapiro’s many claims in The Year of Lear, not only is there no evidence that Shakespeare wrote King Lear in 1606, but there’s no credible evidence the author of the plays was even alive in that year!”
Contested Year is available in ebook format at Amazon. Proceeds from the sale will be donated to the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, The De Vere Society and the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship.
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an anthology of critical reviews of James Shapiro's The Year of Lear 