To commemorate the inaccuracy of celebrating Shakespeare’s death quatricentennial on April 23, we are offering a gift to readers. The Kindle publication, Contested Year: Errors, Omissions and Unsupported Statements in James Shapiro’s “The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606”, will be free to download from today until April 23, 2016. The book is available from Amazon, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.de.
In his review of James Shapiro’s 1606: Shakespeare’s Year of Lear (Simon & Schuster, 2015) published this month in the Cambridge Quarterly, David Ellis, PhD, disputes Shapiro’s thesis that historical background can substitute for biographical foreground.
Ellis begins his analysis — titled “Another Year in the Life of Shakespeare” — by relating Shapiro’s new book to his extravagantly popular work 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Harper Collins, 2005):
[Year of Lear] is the successor to Shapiro’s highly acclaimed 1599, published ten years ago and welcomed by Jonathan Bate as ‘one of the few genuinely original biographies of Shakespeare’. Concentrating on a single year was certainly an innovation, but there was nothing original about the methods Shapiro employed. In his Shakespeare’s Lives, Samuel Schoenbaum identified the Victorian biographer Charles Knight as the first person properly to ‘associate Shakespeare with the circumstances around him’ and thus triumph over ‘the limitations of his data’. What this method chiefly means, in Shapiro’s case, is making historical background stand in for a biographical foreground which is absent because the information directly related to Shakespeare’s life is still so desperately meagre. How could it not be when not a single letter he wrote survives; almost all the fifty or so references to him by contemporaries which E. K. Chambers collected together are, from a biographical point of view, worthless; and the last biographically significant archival discovery dates back to 1910? What Shapiro tried to do was relate the major historical events of 1599 to what little we know of Shakespeare’s life, but that proved so difficult that it seemed to me his subtitle, ‘A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare’, became misleading, suggesting as it did that we actually know what was happening to the playwright in the spring, summer, autumn, or winter of that year.
Later Ellis says:
The subtitle of Shapiro’s new book [Shakespeare in 1606] is more cautious [than 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare] and there appear throughout it confessions as to our complete ignorance of Shakespeare’s circumstances and feelings in situations where they would really matter. . . . yet, many of the old habits still persist, with liberal scatterings of ‘might’ or ‘would have’ and occasional recourse to the argument from silence. Thus we are old Shakespeare preferred (italics) ‘to remain in the shadows’, so that our ignorance of his life then becomes his own responsibility . . .
In his distaste for biographies featuring what might have or would have occurred, Ellis mirrors Germaine Greer’s concern as reported in her Oct. 6, 2015 Year of Lear review “Nowhere man: the challenges of tracking down Shakespeare” in The New Statesman: “For any writer of an extended narrative the temptation to abandon the conditional for the indicative is almost irresistible and Shapiro has not resisted it,” Greer said.
Ellis — emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury — expressed his concern about the limits of Shakespearean biography in his 2012 book The Truth About William Shakespeare: Fact, Fiction and Modern Biographies published by Edinburgh University Press. According to the Amazon book blurb:
How can biographies of Shakespeare continue to appear when so little is known about him? And when what is known has been in the public domain for so long? Why have the majority of the biographies published in the last decade been written by distinguished Shakespeareans who ought to know better? To solve this puzzle, David Ellis looks at the methods that Shakespeare’s biographers have used to hide their lack of knowledge.
When we asked Ann Newton, managing editor of Cambridge Quarterly about their choice of Ellis to review Shapiro, she declined to comment; so we rely on the description of the journal provided on their website:
The Cambridge Quarterly is a journal of literary criticism which also publishes articles on cinema, the visual arts, and music. It aims, without sacrifice of scholarly standards, to engage readers outside as well as inside the academic profession. It welcomes articles that encourage the re-reading of familiar authors, as well as those that champion new or neglected work. The journal remains committed to the re-appraisal of accepted views, and the principle that criticism and scholarship should reinforce the pleasure for which literature and other works of arts are created.
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).
We are grateful to the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship for giving us permission to reprint William Boyle’s review of Year of Lear that appeared in the Winter 2016 edition of the SOF Newsletter. Boyle is the creator of the Shakespeare Online Authorship Resources (SOAR) catalog. Boyle’s editor at the SOF Newsletter, Alex McNeil, is a co-editor of Contested Year. For more information about the SOF Newsletter, read “Winter 2016 . . . “. To gain access to the latest edition of the SOF Newsletter, join the SOF online. Thanks, again, to the SOF for Boyle’s analysis, below. (CY)
Reviewed by William Boyle
Professor James Shapiro’s latest book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, is his third in the last ten years on the Shakespeare authorship debate. Some in the mainstream Shakespeare studies community might argue that only the second of those three books, Contested Will, is concerned with the authorship debate. But those of us in the Oxfordian community know better, since the true agenda of both of his “Year in the Life” books (1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare, and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606) is as much about the authorship of Shakespeare as Contested Will. In his latest book Shapiro posits that Shakespeare wrote three full-length plays (King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra ) back to back within one year (1606, and in that order, as his “Note on Dating the Plays” claims), all against the backdrop of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 and its aftermath.
While The Year of Lear is eminently readable and chock full of interesting information and anecdotes, it is also chock full of misleading information, misleading speculation, and outright error. The Oxfordian community has already responded to this in the just published ebook — Contested Year: Errors, Omissions and Unsupported Statements in James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 — edited by Alexander Waugh, Mark Anderson, and Alex McNeil (available from Amazon for Kindle). Contested Year includes commentary on each chapter in The Year of Lear from seventeen prominent Oxfordian scholars.
Contested Year gives many examples of the simple mistakes that Shapiro makes (for example, getting names, dates, ranks and titles wrong), but it also delves deeply into the real subtext of his book, which is to establish Shakespeare as a writer who was in touch with his times and who was as much a Jacobean (i.e., alive and working after 1604) as an Elizabethan figure. The cornerstone of the latter argument can be found in how Shapiro decides to deal with the play King Leir, which preceded Shakespeare’s King Lear and about which there is universal agreement that Shakespeare based his King Lear upon it. This original play clearly dates back to the early 1590s (if not earlier) and, as such, presents many problems for how Shapiro wishes to present his argument. So the story he presents is that, since this original King Leir was first published in 1605, Shakespeare “must have” purchased a copy at that time (Shapiro has him walking down the street one day and going into a bookshop!), and within six months he wrote his King Lear. And as he was writing it, one of the most famous events in English history occurred, the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605.
In fact, the second most important part of The Year of Lear is the Gunpowder Plot, an infamous event remembered to this day (Guy Fawkes Night, the Fifth of November). It is well documented that the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation (generally defined as “the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself”—a necessary, useful skill in a totalitarian state that hunts down Catholics) was front and center in this saga, as much on trial as the individuals who plotted to place gunpowder under the Parliament. Thomas Regnier addresses Shapiro’s chapter on equivocation and makes further observations on the flaws in Shapiro’s use of this historical fact, and how he overstates its supposed “newness” in 1606, when the doctrine had been around, and had been employed, for more than twenty years.
“Equivocation” is also the linchpin by which Shapiro (following in the footsteps of many before him) places the composition of Macbeth in 1606, immediately following King Lear. Shapiro relies on the famous Porter’s speech and its riffs on “equivocation,” and the notion that the Scottish King James was being flattered (and even alluded to) in a play about Scottish kings, notwithstanding its bloody alterations of succession. Finally, Shapiro assures his readers that Shakespeare was working on Antony and Cleopatra even as he finished Macbeth, which would place it also in 1606. He presents his A&C argument as Shakespeare belatedly finishing a sequel to Julius Caesar (which he dates to 1599). The sequel is “belated” because the Antony and Cleopatra love story could have been seen in the late 1590s as alluding to Queen Elizabeth and the fallen Earl of Essex, seemingly a dangerous move back then, but not so dangerous in 1606, in an “altered political landscape.” All of Shapiro’s dating evidence is tenuous, and is effectively rebutted in Contested Year.
But King Lear and the Gunpowder Plot lie at the center of The Year of Lear. In the longest chapter in Contested Year, Dr. Roger Stritmatter takes on these issues—the original composition dates of King Leir and King Lear, the doctrine of equivocation in history and in Shakespeare, and the Gunpowder Plot—and deftly demonstrates the serious flaws in Shapiro’s analysis. He also calls attention to a significant position Shapiro takes in his own telling of the Gunpowder Plot story:
Shapiro speaks of “selective official account[s],” of evidence being “suppressed or destroyed,” and of an artificial rebellion staged by the Cecil government “to advance the ends of the state, especially the suppression of England’s Catholics” (US/102; UK/119). Shapiro is actually supporting as plausible the idea, long familiar to independent historians like Francis Edwards, that Cecil’s Jacobean government staged a “conspiracy” to frame England’s Catholics, with historical implications that are still not yet fully understood. Shapiro’s daring is admirable, if not foolhardy. Apparently it does not occur to him that such speculations compromise his otherwise inflexible opposition to the “conspiracy theory” that the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is in doubt. If the Jacobean state could pull off a gambit like this, using the Gunpowder Plot to frame its political enemies, and making a false story of the event stick for more than four hundred years, it should hardly be controversial, given the appropriate circumstances and personalities, to suggest that a similar “conspiracy” could have existed with respect to Shakespeare. Alas, a reader will search Shapiro’s book in vain for any self-awareness of such contradictions. (Contested Year, page 46)
In his comments, Stritmatter refers to the “Cecil government,” but Shapiro does not use Cecil’s name at all anywhere in his book (“Cecil” is not even in the index). Instead, Robert Cecil is always referred to as “Salisbury” (i.e., the Earl of Salisbury, a title bestowed upon him by King James in 1605). Even in his telling of Father Southwell’s capture and torture in 1592, Shapiro refers to “the future Earl of Salisbury” rather than saying “Robert Cecil.” This struck me as odd, as of an author paying strict attention to his agenda, which in this case is a “post-Elizabethan, post-1604 Shakespeare” … so, no “Robert Cecils” allowed here. Even on the few occasions when reference is made to the Essex Rebellion (another key historical event that occurred almost five years before the Gunpowder Plot, and involved Robert Cecil and Shakespeare), no reference is made at all to Cecil’s role in that event, nor to his more important secret role of bringing James to the throne. This too is odd, as Shapiro relates in some detail the Ben Jonson masque of January 5, 1606, celebrating the marriage of Essex’s son Robert (now the 3rd Earl of Essex) and Frances Howard as a form of peace reconciliation; the performance was followed the next evening by a second part of the masque (Barriers) in which actual Essex Rebellion survivors did battle with those who had subdued them in 1601, in what amounted to a symbolic restaging of the rebellion in terms of a battle over Truth, Virginity, Marriage and Sacrifice. I was intrigued, and wondered what the real subtext might have been in both masques. But Shapiro, who can be very selective in his telling of a story, had no further comment.
Still, beyond the numerous factual errors, dating problems and selective telling of history that plague The Year of Lear, there exists the larger issue of whether an authorship debate agenda is in play, and what that may portend for the future of the Shakespeare authorship debate. As luck would have it, amidst all the reviews of The Year of Lear published last fall, there was an extremely interesting interview with Shapiro (published online in The Daily Beast, December 13, 2015) in which novelist Arthur Phillips talks with Shapiro about the issue of Shakespeare biographies, and how can one ever get to “know Shakespeare.” It is worth exploring here to get an idea of what Shapiro is up to in this book and in his two earlier ones. Phillips prefaces his first question by stating:
I see the importance, and the great pleasure, of your work like this: for people who want to know something about Shakespeare himself, about who we was and what he was thinking, there had been until now two unsatisfactory methods. One is limited and by now probably exhausted; the other was flawed from the start. The limited method was the biographical method. We only have a small amount of verifiable detail about his life, and so we look to it to explain the man who wrote the place. We hope that we could understand the word better if we look hard at the biographical details…. The other way we have … of knowing him was, I think, doomed from the beginning, a method that doesn’t work on Shakespeare and doesn’t really work on any writer of fiction or drama, and that is looking for the truth of the writer in his plays.
Phillips gushingly continues with a remarkable explanation, and a great summing up, of what Shapiro has been doing with his three recent books:
I think you’ve forged an entirely new way of seeing him. It seems like in 1599 and now in The Year of Lear that you broke through these two flawed methods and found something new, a much more plausible way of understanding the man. The Shapiro method goes like this: in a given year in London everybody would’ve known and reacted to certain facts, to the talk of the town. Everyone knew about the plague numbers or the recent executions or the news from Ireland or the inconceivably evil and fast terrorist attack that was thwarted and we know, from good old biographical research, that Shakespeare was in a given place of the given time and would’ve known all this too, and then you can look at his [plays] that you know [were] written in that [same] year and say, “this is the material that was going into his head, this is what he was living with that year … , and this in turn is the material that was coming out of his quill…” (emphasis added).
“And happily,” Shapiro responds, “He didn’t make up his own stories. He’s always rewriting someone else’s story.”
Happily? What we now have is an overview of all the ins and outs and problems of Shakespeare studies within the Shakespeare authorship debate over decades, if not centuries. It is centered, of course, on what is “known,” and how do we “know” what we “know”?
The second part of the problem of “knowing Shakespeare” (“looking for the truth of the writer in his plays,” as Phillips puts it) has been the ground zero of the authorship debate from the beginning. Disagreement over this point has driven the debate since the nineteenth century, especially since the emergence of the Oxfordian thesis in 1920 and its re-emergence in the mid-1980s.
So introducing the notion of the “Shapiro Method” as the solution to this problem, and praising books like The Year of Lear (and 1599) as examples of it, is remarkable. What Phillips seems to be saying here (with Shapiro agreeing with him), is that the solution to a long-standing problem is here, and it works! All one has to do is analyze the documented history of a given year, and then lay it alongside a detailed analysis of a play “known” (and there’s the rub) to have been written in that same year (e.g., Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra). The result will then be some new understanding of Shakespeare.
Exactly how this is any different from the eternal debate over the relationship between an author and his work remains, in my view, unclear. It seems to me that the “Shapiro Method” is not really new at all, and that it is flawed in the same way that Stratfordian scholarship has been flawed for centuries; by not having the right person identified as Shakespeare, any speculation about what Shakespeare was “thinking” or “why” he was writing will still come out wrong. One is reminded of the old cliché about computers: “Garbage in, garbage out.” Nonetheless to see it touted by Phillips as something new and important is telling, and the avalanche of glowing reviews for The Year of Lear confirms that.
In truth, I enjoyed parts of The Year of Lear. Shapiro is an excellent writer, and can marshal myriad facts into a compelling narrative. The stories of the Monteagle letter forewarning the Gunpowder Plot, of “equivocation” and Jesuits, of Father Southwell’s capture in 1592 and Father Garnett’s interrogation in 1606, etc.all are interesting and at times thought-provoking. I particularly liked some of his commentary on the plays, as when he writes of Lear (and the ways that Shakespeare changed it from Leir):
In Shakespeare’s hand “nothing” becomes a touchstone—and the idea of nothingness and negation is philosophically central to the play from start to finish.
Shapiro gives us another full page on “nothingness” and Lear. On the very next page we have his description of Cordelia’s death scene in Lear’s arms (in Leir she doesn’t die). There we learn that when Lear says “My poor Fool is hanged,” it may also be some sort of commentary on the relationship between the comedic actor Robert Armin (playing the Fool) and the tragedian actor Burbage (playing Lear), an inside joke that only the actor Shakespeare “might” think to include. This is a strange observation to make here, but typical of the mixed bag of scholarship and bold speculation that permeates The Year of Lear.
In the end, though, I finally thought to myself, wouldn’t it be easier to just pack up and leave Stratford, and join those of us who’ve been understanding Shakespeare for a long time through bona fide historical context (which is what the whole authorship debate is about), and are loving it? In short, isn’t it easier to leave behind the strained association of Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot (which struck me as a sort of “imitation Oxfordian” effort on Shapiro’s part, reaching for an association of Shakespeare and political danger where there is none), and go for the real thing (e.g., Shakespeare and the Essex Rebellion, where the facts are there and the danger was real). When one looks at what Shapiro has done (focusing on the years 1599 and 1606), it is clear he’d prefer to skip 1601, the year of Richard II and a dangerous deposition scene, and 1604, the year of Hamlet.
Once you get out of Stratford, for just one example, your view of who and what Shakespeare’s fools really represent will change (invariably they’re all the author himself, from Touchstone to Feste to Lear’s Fool, etc.). And the actor Robert Armin? Shortly before this very time, he was about to “take my journey (to wait on the right honorable good Lord my Master whom I serve) to Hackney.” Once you’ve got the right Shakespeare as part of your history all the pieces fall right into place, and understanding Shakespeare becomes a reality.
The Contested Year editors are grateful for the information provided by Amazon reviewer, Thomas Reedy, in his Amazon post dated yesterday (Feb. 14, 2016) to wit: “Waugh’s use of an 1878 hoax newspaper fabricated from 17th century pamphlets, ‘The Weekley Newes, No. 19, for Munday 31st January, 1606’, to correct Professor Shapiro’s statement that no newspapers existed during the time of the Gunpowder Plot.”
The editors are in the process of correcting this oversight in the Contested Year file available on Amazon.
Contested Year co-editor, Alexander Waugh, provided the following commentary on the content of Reedy’s position paper posted in the review section of the Contested Year page on Amazon.
Alexander Waugh said:
[Thomas Reedy], you have five ‘ha’s in a row (‘Ha ha ha ha ha!’) to express your joy at finding a single slip in Contested Year so you can imagine how many “ha”s we have assembled to express our amusement at the mountain of blunders in Shapiro’s [Year of Lear] 1606.
Being a politer fellow than you I shall not line up a mile of “ha”s while pointing out the following errors in your “review”:
1. The earliest European newspaper dates from 1605 so Shapiro’s reference to 1606 as “an age in which there were as yet no newspapers….” remains incorrect, regardless of the authenticity of ‘Weekly Newes’
2. You are wrong about the prologue of ‘Ralph Roister Doister’ – it does not include a verbal use of roister but simply says “Our comedy or Interlude which we intend to play is named Royster Doyster in deede” so it looks as though it is you who has not read it rather than OED editors or myself.
3. The list of actors in [First Folio] does not entitle Shapiro to state without equivocation (as he does) that “Shakespeare knew the old venue [the Banqueting House] well and played there fourteen months earlier on November 1, 1604, when his last Elizabethan tragedy, Othello, had had its court debut.”As you perfectly well know not every single actor on that list played in every one of those plays. Shapiro has no evidence to support the statement I have just quoted.
4. You claim to be able to cite three pieces of evidence that show Shakespeare to have been an actor in his lifetime and yet produce only one of them, which does not show him to have been an actor in 1594\5 but a collector of revenues on behalf of the Chamberlain’s Men. Does everyone who attends to the invoicing of a theatre company qualify as an actor in your book? And what, pray, are your two other examples?
5. ” . . .the cloying superciliousness tone . . .” I take to be another of your errors – you need the word ‘of’ between ‘superciliousness’ and ‘tone’; also
6. “. . . the kind of quality is on offer here”, I think you mean ‘the kind of quality THAT is on offer here’.
7. The price of our book was not arrived at by assessing the worth of its content but by a desire to have it as cheap as Amazon would allow, so that as many people as possible might buy it. All proceeds are distributed to three charities.
8. You have posted a quotation: :” . . . there is no documentary evidence that Shakespeare was ever in the same room . . . ” and claim that this is not only typical but that you are very familiar with it – so familiar, it would seem, that you invented it out of your own head as this quotation does not appear in the book you claim to be reviewing.
9. Why do your imagined readers need your assurance that you are ” . . . in no hurry . . . ” to correct and improve your review? Is it because your clumsy first draft betrays the great rush that you were evidently in when you started it? I urge you, for your next instalment, to take a little more time and try to get your facts right. We look forward to your next post.
Pip Pip!
Alexander Waugh
by Mark Anderson
Northampton, MA – What can a great author write after he’s dead? According to one leading Shakespeare scholar, the answer appears to be “Lots!”
In October 2015, Prof. James Shapiro published his widely reviewed and universally acclaimed micro-history book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (Simon & Schuster). As The Year of Lear’s title suggests, Shapiro claims Shakespeare wrote King Lear in 1606—and wrote and/or staged Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra sometime during that fateful year too.
The problem, say a collection of 17 independent scholars who have written Contested Year: Errors, Omissions and Unsupported Statements in James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear, is the historical evidence for Shapiro’s allegations suggests a very different story. Despite Shapiro’s many claims in The Year of Lear, not only is there no evidence that Shakespeare wrote King Lear in 1606, there’s no credible evidence the author of the plays was even alive in 1606.
The alternative and evidence-based point of view that Contested Year presents begins with the fact that The Year of Lear makes numerous factual errors, some of which prove devastating to Shapiro’s tenuous conclusions.
As Contested Year documents, for instance, Shapiro claims that King Lear represents a kind of sly commentary on the princes of the realm in 1606—King James’s two sons, Prince Henry and Prince Charles. The problem is Shapiro confuses his sources and can’t even get the titles of James’s sons right, negating his claims that Shakespeare was making sly commentary on Jacobean politics in any capacity.
Shapiro similarly muddles alleged allusions to current events circa 1606 in elsewhere in King Lear as well as throughout Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. As Contested Year documents, every time Shapiro claims the Shakespeare plays allude to politics or current events of 1606, he fumbles—sometimes badly. 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, Contested Year reveals, 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, weighing the whole docket of historical documents, there’s a stunning case 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.
by Mark Anderson
Northampton, MA — James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear was I think a bridge too far — riddled with suppositions and errors and unfounded claims and nonsense.
So Alexander Waugh, Alex McNeil and I took it upon ourselves to do something about it. It took some months to prepare, research, write, edit, fact-check, edit again, fact-check again, format for ebook, and so on. But, at long last, we’re ready to roll.
We’re calling this ebook Contested Year. The book features Jennifer Newton’s characteristically brilliant cover design, a foreword by Alexander Waugh, an afterword by me, John Shahan’s appendix pointing out the errors in Shapiro’s Contested Will, and an appendix generously contributed by Katherine Chiljan on “Twelve Too Early Allusions to King Lear.”
Contested Year features blow-by-blow refutations of Shapiro’s chapters by a roster of top scholars:
Contested Year will be released in ebook format at Amazon on Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2015. The cost will be 99-cents in the US, with all proceeds donated to the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, The De Vere Society and Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. (Prices in UK, EU and elsewhere will be in the same low-price range.)
James Shapiro’s fairy tales of a “Jacobean Shakespeare” will not stand unchallenged. When we examined his claims, they fell apart, as demonstrated in Contested Year.
an anthology of critical reviews of James Shapiro's The Year of Lear 
You must be logged in to post a comment.