James S. Shapiro

• 1. Introduction

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  James S. Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period. In 2023, one of his earliest books, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, won an unusual honor. The Baillie Gifford Prize named it Winner of Winners, an award chosen from among the prize's past winners. That distinction caps a long list of recognitions for a scholar who has spent decades studying Shakespeare's world. He has traced single years, single arguments, and single plays back to their roots. What made a book published so long before 2023 stand out among so many later winners? How did a professor of Elizabethan literature end up debunking a theory about who really wrote the plays? And how did he later end up writing about a modern culture war? The chapters ahead trace that path, from a Brooklyn classroom to a London fellowship to a shelf of prize-winning books.

• 2. Brooklyn To Columbia

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  Midwood High School in Brooklyn, New York, is where Shapiro's education began. He went on to earn a Bachelor's degree at Columbia University in 1977, a Master's degree there in 1978, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1982.

  Dartmouth College and Goucher College hired Shapiro to teach before Columbia brought him back to its own faculty in 1985, where he began teaching Shakespeare and related subjects. From 1988 to 1989, he lectured as a Fulbright scholar at Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University, and in 1998 he held the Samuel Wanamaker Fellowship at Shakespeare's Globe in London. That fellowship placed Shapiro inside the theater built to stage the plays he studied, just as a run of scholarly honors was about to follow.

• 3. Fellowships And Bylines

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  The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture have each given Shapiro awards for his publications and academic work. His writing has also appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Book Review, the Financial Times, and The Daily Telegraph.

  In 2006, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation named Shapiro a Fellow, the same year he held a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. That year of fellowships arrived alongside a book that would earn Shapiro his first major literary prizes.

• 4. Language In A Single Year

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  Robert Nye, writing in Literary Review, called Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare "powerful," crediting its precise, engrossing account of a shift in Shakespeare's language during that one year. The book won Shapiro both the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize and the 2006 Theatre Book Prize. Those two prizes marked the start of a run of book awards for Shapiro, starting with a challenge to a long-running argument about who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays.

• 5. Who Wrote Shakespeare

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  Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? has been called the "definitive treatment" for the way it debunks the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare's authorship. The book won Shapiro the 2011 George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association.

  That same year, 2011, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences inducted Shapiro as a member. A different single year in Shakespeare's life, 1606, would bring Shapiro's next set of prizes.

• 6. 1606 On Page And Screen

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  The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, published in hardback in 2015, won Shapiro both the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography. Shapiro also presented a three-part BBC Four series, The King & the Playwright: A Jacobean History, covering Shakespeare, King James VI and I, and the wider Jacobean era. That series carried Shapiro's Shakespeare scholarship from the page onto British broadcast screens, ahead of a shift in his writing toward contemporary politics.

• 7. Shakespeare And A Culture War

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  Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution Until Now, edited by Shapiro in 2014, carries a foreword by Bill Clinton and traces Shakespeare's presence in American life since the Revolution. In 2020, Shakespeare in a Divided America turned that same interest toward how Shakespeare's work has been used and read across American political divides. In 2024, Shapiro published The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War.

  The PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award went to The Playbook in 2025. Shapiro, who is married and has a son, lives in New York City.