Contested Year is an anthology of critical reviews of James Shapiro's book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. It is also a side-by-side companion meant to be read and consulted as a supplement to The Year of Lear.

In October 2015, fanfares of acclaim greeted The Year of Lear's publication. Yet none of the reviewers seemed to notice its flaws. The roster of mistakes in The Year of Lear is enough to sink his entire thesis and cast doubt on his reputation as one of the world's foremost Shakespearean scholars.

Contested Year puts The Year of Lear's errors to right with seventeen leading independent Shakespeare scholars correcting, explaining and expounding upon each of The Year of Lear's multiple errors, false statements, omissions and unsupported conjectures, with concision, wit, erudition and keen attention to detail.

Contested Year rebuts fallacies and clarifies misunderstandings while highlighting Shapiro’s inaccuracies of dating, his sloppy confusion of sources, his muddle of historical events, his topographical gaffes, his mix-up of British titles, his errors over names, his genealogical howlers and his flagrant mistakes concerning language, court custom and the historical connections between key figures in his story. Contested Year fills the vacuum left by Shapiro's myopic and controversial insistence that 1606 was the year in which Shakespeare wrote King Lear by introducing a cornucopia of important evidence (omitted from his book) that undermines his thesis.

Contested Year is an essential companion to one of the most flawed and misleading works by an accredited academic professor of the last decade.