Biography
B.A., Columbia (1977); Ph.D., University of Chicago (1982). Professor Shapiro is author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991); Shakespeare and the Jews (1995), which was awarded the Bainton Prize; Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play (2000); 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize; Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), winner of the Lionel Trilling Award in 2011; 1606: The Year of Lear, which won the James Tait Black Prize; Shakespeare in a Divided America (2020), a New York Times 'top ten books of 2020'; and The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War (2024). He has co-edited the Columbia Anthology of British Poetry, served as the associate editor of the Columbia History of British Poetry, and edited a volume on Shakespeare in America for the Library of America. He has also co-authored and presented a 3-hour BBC documentary, The King and the Playwright (2012). He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Huntington Library, the American Academy in Berlin, and the American Academy in Rome. In 2011 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
