In his extended commentary on Year of Lear’s “Chapter Two: Division of the Kingdoms”, Contested Year contributor Richard Malim addressed — among other topics — the following statement by author James Shapiro:
The contemporaneous feel of the beginning of Shakespeare’s play is reinforced by Kent’s first words: “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall”, (I, 1-2). Jacobean playgoers knew that the King of Scotland’s eldest son Henry was the current Duke of Albany and his younger one the Duke of Cornwall – and, in fact, James did prefer Henry over his sickly younger brother. To speak of Albany was to speak of Scotland (James himself had previously been Duke of Albany, as had his father). It was for Shakespeare an uncharacteristically topical start – the opening gossipy exchange marks the play as distinctively Jacobean in its political concerns (Year of Lear, p.48)
Richard Malim said:
This passage contains several egregious blunders. Prince Henry was not the Duke of Albany, he was the Duke of Rothesay and on the 24th March 1603 created Duke of Cornwall. His younger brother Prince Charles, was never Duke of Cornwall but was Duke of Albany; so Shapiro has the titles of both princes inverted, which completely ruins the point of his conclusion.
Quite how Shapiro imagines that the King and Queen and the theatre-going public would be required to identify the psychopathic eye-gouging Cornwall in King Lear with either Prince Henry (heir to the throne) or Prince Charles is baffling. Albany is in line for only part of the kingdom. These are the errors of a literary critic trying to write biography, by which the very basis of Shapiro’s thesis is irretrievably damaged.
Shapiro fails to reveal that the names of Cornwall and Albany were connected to the story of King Lear long before the Princes Henry and Charles were born, as Stow’s Summary of English Chronicles (1565) records: “Cordyla, the youngest daughter of Liere, succeedynge her father, was sore vexed by her two nephues, Morgan of Albanie, and Conedagus of Camber and Cornewall.”
Shapiro ought to tell us whether he was too arrogant to bother to check or so convinced by the inviolability of his construct he did not need to, or if he did check, considered he could safely ignore what he found. Any way the passage quoted reveals a gross dereliction from the standards of scholarship and the true position shows what nonsense the whole thesis is and what a disgrace his book is.
Richard Malim is Secretary of The De Vere Society. In 2005 he edited Great Oxford (Parapress), a collection of essays to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Oxford’s death. He is also the author of The Earl of Oxford and the Making of “Shakespeare”: The Literary Life of Edward de Vere in Context (McFarland, 2011).
an anthology of critical reviews of James Shapiro's The Year of Lear 
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