from the BBC programme Front Row, March 26, 2010.[1]
James S. Shapiro (born 1955) is Professor of
English and
Comparative Literature at
Columbia University who specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period. Shapiro has served on the faculty at Columbia University since 1985, teaching
Shakespeare and other topics, and he has published widely on Shakespeare and
Elizabethan culture.
He also won the 2011 George Freedley Memorial Award, given by the Theatre Library Association, for his study of the
Shakespeare authorship question, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, which has been described as the "definitive treatment" debunking the
Oxfordian theory.[6] The same year Shapiro was inducted into the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Elizabeth Winkler in
Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies describes Shapiro's 2011 correspondence with Supreme Court justice
John Paul Stevens, a proponent of the Oxfordian theory, about the authorship question.[7] Shapiro's book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, published in hardback in 2015, was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for Biography[8][circular reference] as well as the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography.[9] Shapiro presented a three-part series on
BBC Four called The King & the Playwright: A Jacobean History about Shakespeare, King
James VI and I and the
Jacobean era.[10]
He is married, has a son, and lives in New York City.[11]
Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution Until Now, ed. James Shapiro, with a foreword by
Bill Clinton. New York: Library of America, 2014.
ISBN1598532952
"An Interview with James Shapiro", The Literateur interviews James Shapiro on the subject of Shakespeare conspiracy theories and authorship.
New Shakespeare film ruffles academic feathers, Jocelyn Noveck, Associated Press, October 27, 2011. ("I don't have a problem with Roland Emmerich drinking the Kool-Aid," says Columbia's Shapiro. "But when he serves it to kids in paper cups, I do.")