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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599

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This wonderful book will be a classic. It combines specific new historical information discovered by Shapiro's original research--yes, new information can still be found on Shakespeare!--with an insightful reading of the great plays he wrote just before, during, and immediately after his annus mirabilis 1599.

For those who enjoy juicy, well-researched historical detail on the Bard's life and times (such as Frank Kermode's -The Age of Shakespeare-), Shapiro goes to the next level in this book. He depicts Shakespeare's life as he lived it during one momentous year, 1599, a decision that is not arbitrary. Shapiro's close focus on that year succeeds in illuminating much about Shakespeare's imagination that was previously obscure. And what a year it was--producing the break-through plays Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet.

Shapiro describes how the year began as Shakespeare and his co-investors surreptitiously and hurriedly worked to save their financial investment by dismantling a theatre building on a site where they had lost their lease, in order to rebuild it as The Globe on the south side of the Thames. Shapiro then explains better than I have read anywhere else the nature of Shakespeare's relationship with the Court of Queen Elizabeth, and how his performances before the Queen and his understanding of the royal taste affected his decisions when he wrote his plays.

Shapiro provides fresh insight into how Shakespeare's financial prospects and artistic choices that year were interwoven with the rising, and then the plummeting, fate of Robert Devereaux, the tragic Earl of Essex.

Forgotten events like the second Spanish Armada (which never materialised), and the English campaign to subjugate Ireland (which failed miserably) were of critical importance to the mood of England that year, and Shapiro shows how these events, almost or entirely forgotten today, exerted a powerful influence on Shakespeare's imagination.

Best of all, Shapiro connnects Shakespeare's development of the soliloquy with his reading of Montaigne's Essays, and he convincingly demonstrates how in 1599 Shakespeare invented what we think of as "Shakespearean" tragedy when he realised that Montaigne's literary innovation could be an instrument for depicting the inner consciousness of a character on the stage. Shapiro's reading of Hamlet is as illuminating as Harold Bloom's can be, without Bloom's metaphysical blather.

Shapiro also shows how the period marked the decline of the over-ripe chivalric ideals (embodied by Essex) of the English aristocratic class, and contrasts this with the rise of adventurous English merchant capitalists, signalled by the founding of The East India Company, a momentous event in the early development of what was to become the British Empire. Shapiro points out how this development transferred the initiative from knightly hot-heads like Essex and Raliegh to cool, sober, merchants who were about to produce centuries of successes. He shows that Shakespeare, a wealthy entrepreneur who sought to acquire a coat of arms, uneasily straddled both sensibilities.

What Shapiro achieves in this book is similar to what Charles Nicholls achieved for Christopher Marlowe's life in -The Reckoning-: he opens fresh new vistas on the playwright's life, making his hopes and dreams more understandable, and his imagination even more admirable.

Quite an accomplishment--quite a book.

Two rather obvious conclusions leap off the pages of just about every book ever written about William Shakespeare: That his plays reflect the turbulent times in which he lived, and that very little is known for certain about his life.

James Shapiro, a much respected Shakespeare scholar and professor at Columbia University, has applied his enormous fund of Shakespearean knowledge and his zeal for historical research to these home truths in a novel way. He narrows his focus down to a single year in Shakespeare's life and teases out of the four plays that occupied the Bard in that year a number of stimulating conclusions.

As a feat of sheer scholarly research, Shapiro's book is a mind-boggling performance -- his bibliography runs to 41 pages --- and his conclusions, while obviously personal and open to debate, will make readers go back to those four plays equipped with new tools for decoding them.

In 1599 Shakespeare finished "Henry the Fifth," wrote "Julius Caesar" and "As You Like It," and shaped his first version of "Hamlet" --- four truly great plays. He was also involved in the construction of the Globe Theater (of which he was part owner) and busy acting on its stage. Offstage noises in his life (though very much onstage for most Englishmen) were the ill-fated English expedition to subdue a rebellion in Ireland, the threat of invasion from a second Spanish Armada, a host of intrigues and plots at the court of Queen Elizabeth, England's attempt to shoulder its way into the lucrative East Indies trade, and even his own domestic affairs back home in Stratford.

Dealing with all this gives Shapiro's book a divided focus. Those whose main concern is the four plays (doubtless a majority of his readers) may be impatient with the length and detail Shapiro devotes to the Irish venture and the Spanish threat in particular. There is no convenient critical pigeonhole into which to thrust this book. Call it literary criticism against a historical background. What's important is that Shapiro's perceptive research and fluent writing style make the mixture work nicely.

Of the four plays, "Henry the Fifth" is the one least esteemed by critics today. Shapiro investigates its sources and shows how it reflected England's uneasiness about the Earl of Essex and his expedition against Ireland. He concludes that it is neither pro- nor anti-war, but is rather a play about "going to war," a war that Shakespeare's audience felt was "both unavoidable and awful." "Julius Caesar" he sees as a clever blending of religious and political concerns then prevalent in English society.

He finds "Hamlet" remarkable for many reasons beyond its sheer greatness as literature. Here, Shapiro says, Shakespeare brought a new depth and style to the stage soliloquy, a form he finds based on the then-new art of the personal prose essay. For Shapiro, Hamlet is a man who "needs to talk, but there is nobody in whom he can confide" --- except his audience. Shapiro is also captivated by Shakespeare's verbal virtuosity in "Hamlet," where he uses about 600 words never before used in any of his plays and about 170 words or phrases that he "coined or used in new ways."

"As You Like It," the only comedy among the four plays, might seem harder to relate to the author's times, but Shapiro gamely tries, finding reflections of England's rural problems in the forest of Arden and the melancholy philosopher Jaques Shakespeare's first try at writing satire. Mainly though, he finds in this play a new and deeper form of comedy, built around Orlando's education in what love really is.

These literary judgments rest on a thick underpinning of historical information, assessment of Shakespeare's sources, the writings and activities of his contemporaries, and the tangled web of intrigue around the aging Queen Elizabeth. Shapiro weaves it all together expertly, and for good measure throws in a good deal of astute textual criticism, showing how words we think we know today really meant something quite different to Shakespeare ("jig," for instance). Most modern stagings and editions of "Hamlet" he dismisses as "incoherent" versions that Shakespeare "neither wrote nor imagined."

This is not a book for the casual reader, but those with a genuine interest in Shakespeare and his times will find it endlessly rewarding.


--- Reviewed by Robert Finn ((...))

I routinely read every book on Shakespeare that comes out. Most of them -- such as Will of the World -- speculate about this elusive figure without adding much to what we already know Shapiro's book is different It's a brilliant insight to add to the two main traditions of biographical studies of S -- his life as a working actor/manager and the intellectual roots of his plays plus the hints they give of his life and beliefs.

Shapiro embeds S the playwright in the politics of his age, particularly Elizabeth's reign coming to an end, the Earl of Essex as a potential rebel, the alarms about a possible new Spanish Armada, and the latent underground Catholic opposition to the new regime that had broken up the rhythms and traditions of conservative England. He makes S the observer much more a man of his era than most comparable books. He offers many insights into the time and S's place in it.

For me, there is only one test of a book on Shakespeare: does it send you back to reread the plays. This one did. His analysis of Julius Caesar is a significant new slant on the work. He gves me a richer sense of the always active mind of this complex man who was at the same time an intellectual, practical man of business, upward mobile money seeker -- and part of London's milieu.

I rate this as an outstanding new contribution to Shakespeare studies

"No," I tell my students, "Shakespeare did not write in Old English. Beowulf was written in Old English. Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Shakespeare's language was firmly in the Modern English linguistic period." I then confess the obvious, that the language has indeed changed in the four centuries since Shakespeare wrote, but, as Shapiro's book clearly demonstrates, much else in society has not. Such demonstrations, while not Shapiro's goal, are, to me, among the strong points of his book, so let's take a peek at those first, shall we?

Looking at the year 1599 in Elizabethan England, we are struck by more than a few parallels with contemporary world affairs. We see a national leader intent on invading another country, Ireland in the earlier case. We observe ill-starred Essex leading an invading army which utterly fails to subdue the Irish. We look on in astonishment as the English quake in fear of a reported Spanish invasion and as they block the streets of London with chains and illuminate the night with burning lamps to thwart enemy infiltration under cover of darkness. Potentially, of course, that may have been somewhat more pragmatic than creating a new government department and a rainbow-hued series of "threat levels." One can only recall the French axiom "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose," or "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Little in human nature, it seems, has changed in the past four hundred years.

Shapiro's book also helps pierce the mask of literary demigod behind which Shakespeare has been hidden by generations of admiring teachers and bewildered students. We see a man who produced plays through hard labor and laborious revision. We come to appreciate that Shakespeare was a businessman with an eye toward profitability, even when such was perhaps not completely legal or ethical. In this, he was certainly a man of his time, for the proto-capitalist British West Indies Company also got its start during this period.. With another eye toward profit, he and his fellow investors literally made off with the timbers from another theater to build the Globe that has become synonymous with his plays, although of course many other plays were enacted there as well. And speaking of enactments, Shapiro reminds us that Shakespeare was an actor as well as an investor and a playwright, and suggests some of the parts that the author very likely reserved for himself.

Reading Shapiro, one comes to appreciate the political realities of late 16th century England as well. In an era when writing that was perceived to be critical of the monarchy or to justify assassination or usurpation was banned and when books were burned, one simply did not publish Julius Caesar in Elizabeth's realm. Writing that portrayed the rise of republicanism at the expense of monarchical rule simply did not appear without retribution. Such insights as these make Shapiro's book a rewarding experience for those seeking to understand the social, economic, political, and intellectual milieu which formed both Shakespeare and his dramatic creations.

The book, however, is not an unmitigated joy to read. I found my interest in Shapiro's text waxing and waning, being the strongest when he delves into historical events such as the invasion of Ireland, Essex's failed leadership of the military and his devolution from trusted general to seditious and condemned prisoner, the panic among both government and citizenry over the reported Spanish invasion with its "Invisible Armada," and other facts, such as the common practice of plagiarism among authors of the day, including Shakespeare himself, the "inconvenient" fact that copyrights were owned by publishers, not by authors, and the annoyance that Shakespeare surely felt when he discovered some of his sonnets, which he circulated only privately among a few friends, featured in a book along with others of various quality but all attributed to him! My interest does tend to wane when Shapiro departs from his historical writing to immerse us with his qualitative descriptions of the plays whose compositions he ascribes to 1599: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet; his vocabulary and syntax become somewhat dense and obfuscated when he lapses into literary analysis; moreover, that aspect of the book does not appear to be delivering what the title has promised.

My other disappointment lies in the "bibliographical essay" that consumes forty-one pages of the book. Entries are arranged by chapter and discussion topic within each chapter and are hidden within a structure of sentences and paragraphs. A simple alphabetical bibliography would have been far more usable and beneficial for the reader interested in Shapiro's sources and related works.

As far as a recommendation is concerned, I would truly regret seeing this book become assigned reading for high school or university students whose interest in Shakespearean drama and in 16th century England in general is tenuous at best. While informative for them, the writing is not sufficiently captivating to ensnare their attention and appreciation, and is likely to be considered another bit of drudgery foisted upon them by an educational system out of touch with reality. Moreover, for the well-read Shakespearean scholar and Elizabethan historian, I doubt that the book contains any revelations that have not been encountered in other sources. However, for the general reader and for the student who enjoys filling in all of the massive gaps in understanding that persist despite high school diplomas and university degrees, Shapiro's book does give a most helpful, interesting, and usually readable overview of the society that formed Shakespeare and that determined the style and tenor of his long-lived literary creations. If one is at all curious about the "life and times" of William Shakespeare, then the book is certainly worth its purchase price and, more importantly, it is worth the time and effort expended in reading it.

Having read many of the Shakespeare biographies published over the last eight years, in my opinion, this may be the best. Shapiro does a virtuoso job of exploring the epic historical events of 1599,coupled with the daring personal events in Shakespeare's life(the risky new venture with the Globe)to bring the reader closer to the life of the Bard than any biography other than the brilliant Will in the World. He intensely explores the four groundbreaking plays written in this year ( Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As you Like It, and Hamlet ) and in the process brings you deeper into Shakespeare"s mind than you would think possible. At the same time his scholarship is so restrained that at no time do you feel that he is "fantasizing" the life.This may be as close as it is possible to get to the elusive playwright.

One man, one year - what a difference it makes (with a bit of prosaic license). I picked up this book with considerable skepticism - how interesting can one year be in anyone's life. The answer - if you organize biographies like plays (with a bit of space-time rearrangement), very. It may be redundant to call Shakespeare a genius, but an unfamiliar genius from the popular lore he becomes. Not a brilliant writer as much as a brilliant re-interpreter of seemingly ordinary plays. Not just an artist, but a shrewd businessman with the political instincts of a survivor in treacherous times. One who gets away with political commentary that may have lead (and did) less canny artists to the chopping block. In this day and age when artists carp about having to choose between art and popular appeal, Shakespeare hardly saw this as conflict. And a word about the author - American scholarship at its best - lucid, enlightening and unpretentious, with an economy of prose that strikes the right balance without seeming either terse or prolix.

What is wonderful about this book, is that the thesis is very academic, as is the thinking behind it, but the book is marvelously accessible to the general reader!

Shapiro's thesis is that the public events of 1599 (The Irish Rebellion, the fall of Essex, the fear of a second Armada, and the nearing succession of Eliz. I - of which it was treasonous to speak) and the events in the personal/professional life of WS (the new theater, the loss of his popular comic actor, the unauthorized publication of his poems and the aquisition of his family coat of arms) joined to make WS not just a talented playwright, but the best of all times.

Shapiro uses WS text and to illustrate his points. He shows one of the unauthorized poems side by side with the version WS eventually published. The later one, with very little change in words has tremendous change in meaning, rendering the first, a sloppy and cynical sentiment, and the second a seasoned and honest tribute. Similarly he takes lines of the 1599 plays, to show us their relevance to the times. Among the simple things that we moderns would never note is in Julius Ceasar, Brutus, asks about the calendar. Moderns would relate this only to the soothsayer's prediction about the Ides of March, Elizbethans to their calindrical confusions with with the continent in not having the (Papal) Julian calendar.

The descriptions of the times are wonderful. He speculates on how book burning, the climate of fear of a Spanish attack, childhood memories of churches losing their stained glass windows and a trip home could have influenced WS. We see WS browsing in bookstores and riding to Stratford. Shapiro speculates on how much of the fall of Essex was known to WS and the general public.

This is an amazing book. I'd love to take a course from Prof. Shapiro! Thank you to the author!

I can't add much to the very positive reviews already posted, except to add that this is a marvelous book and I wish it had been written 30 years ago. The professor I had in college who taught Shakespeare left me with a bad taste in my mouth, such that my personal rediscovery of Shakespeare was long delayed. What distanced me from Shakespeare was the ahistorical approach. The lack of biographical detail (and even the big items are hotly contested) left only the "artistic genius" explanation of the character and personality of the author of the plays. Genuis there is, but nine-tenths of inspiration is perspiration and I never could grasp what made him sweat. Shapiro painstakingly explicates the hot issues of the times and positions the author and his work in that framework. It is reassuring that from the ever-changing matter of the every day world something like a lasting art can be fashioned.

As one who skates on the edge of the usual Shakespeare controversies, I read this book more interested in the history of 1599 and the setting of the action, London. I have wandered around the streets of London for hours, and enjoyed being able to picture Shakespeare and his cohorts wandering the same streets. The details about the evolution of Whitehall, Parliament, the Queen's travels, the building of the Globe, the difference between the neighborhoods north and south of the Thames--all were entertaining and welcomed. Having read the book, I am more able to picture Shakespeare as an individual writing in a specific time under specific circumstances. The German scholars stress the importance of understanding the "sitz im leben" (setting in life) in literary and theological discussions. This book is a Jewel!

It may be that by limiting his thesis to a single year and the events surrounding the full blossoming of Shakespeare's art Shapiro has accomplished something that many broader scoped biographers have missed. He has produced a tightly constucted .highly readable account that sheds considerable light on the times and the political and social challenges in England at the turn of the 17th century that provided the backdrop and some of the source material for the plays Shakespeare wrote that year.
Without resorting to wild speculation with little evidence Shapiro's book is as entertaining a read about the final years of the Elizabethan era as you are likely to find.