1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
by James Shapiro
HarperCollins Fall 2005
417 pp.
Translation: Anne Edelstein Literary Agency
Rights sold to:
UK / Faber and Faber, June 2005
How did Shakespeare go from being a talented writer of comedies and histories to become one of the greatest writers of tragedies who ever lived? In this one exhilarating year we follow what he reads and writes, what he saw and who he worked with as he rebuilds the Globe theatre and writes four of his most famous plays - Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and, most remarkably, Hamlet. James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599: sending off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathering an Armada threat from Spain, gambling on a fledgeling East India Company, and waiting to see who would succeed their ageing and childless Queen. This book brings the news, intrigue and flavour of the times together with wonderful detail about how Shakespeare worked as a showman, businessman and playwright, to create an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of a fascinating and inspiring moment in history.
Praise for 1599: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE:
"Mr. Shapiro has given us by his encyclopedic scholarship and lucid narrative a hitherto unknown Shakespeare. In place of the "bard" shown as fully portrayed when the surprising extent of his knowledge and the familiar anecdotes have been discussed, the Shakespeare alive in these pages is a man with responsibilities in the finances of his troupe, worried about competition from its rivals, including the Child players, involved in planning the Globe Theatre and watching over its construction, anxious like the rest of the country about the military situation in Ireland that might weaken Elizabeth’s rule--all this besides having to find a theme for the new play that’s needed, one that is topical without running the danger of suppression or boycott. Clearly, the supreme poet without a patron shines also as a successful independent contractor."
—Jacques Barzun, author of From Dawn to Decadence
"A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare sustains a biographical paradox quite brilliantly. By concentrating its focus on a single year of Shakespeare’s life, it gives a whole large picture of his life, times, and achievement. Wonderful."
—Andrew Motion, England’s Poet Laureate
"As a yarn, this is up there with the ’Da Vinci Code’ but in ’1599’ it’s all true!"
—Sir Ian McKellan
“Through the keyhole of a single year Shapiro opens up new vistas on the relationship between Shakespeare’s daily life and his creative imagination. This passionately written study, the product of deep scholarship and acute critical thought, offers fascinating illumination of some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays and of the experiences that produced them.”
—Professor Stanley Wells, author of Shakespeare for All Time and Chairman, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
“Shapiro’s scrupulous scholarship has given us a Shakespeare both for his time and our own. For the first time it is possible to see what in fact made Shakespeare Shakespeare and also to understand why he continues to matter to us.”
—David Scott Kastan, General Editor, The Arden Shakespeare
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk
1599: a year in the life of William Shakespeare, by James Shapiro
The year of grace
By David Lister
27 May 2005
In the last year of the 16th century, London had a population of 200,000. The two main playhouses held 3,000 each. Take a popular play and a run of just a fortnight and around 15 per cent of London’s adult population would have seen it. It’s a staggering statistic. Put another way, that 15 per cent would very likely have been watching a play by Shakespeare, again a statistic to which the present day cannot begin to aspire.
Theatre in Britain can never have been both so influential on and so reflective of the society it served. The Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro makes this case forcefully and with great narrative power by concentrating on one year in which there was a nasty war going on in Ireland, the threat of a renewed Spanish Armada, a queen growing old, and growing anxious enough to order satirical books be burned, a population worried about the succession, and a playwright approaching his peak.
From the deliciously vivid first pages, in which a group of armed theatricals make a dash through the snow in the dead of night to filch a theatre’s timber frame and transfer it to the site of the Globe, Shapiro weaves a tantalising narrative out of what could have been a fairly dry piece of scholarship.
During 1599 Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet. Inevitably, in a book that aims to show the seminal nature of a year, Shapiro sometimes tries too hard. Yes, a year that saw Shakespeare draft Hamlet must be counted key; but it is rather harsh to imply that what had come before was of lesser worth than the rest of the output of 1599.
Richard II can be counted every bit as mature and political as Henry V, just as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet are as poetic as As You Like It. Shakespeare’s career does not lend itself to a straightforward linear progression.
What this book drives home is that he was a man influenced by his time and by events. In our own age of directors determined to make Shakespeare relevant, we have rather forgotten to look at what was happening in the playwright’s own time and to see the effect on the plays. Shapiro puts that relationship back into dramatic focus.
By far the most fascinating and convincing relationship between a play and contemporary events concerns Henry V. The attempted crushing of the Irish rebellion of 1599 proved a deeply unpopular war. Shapiro cites the court sermon by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes urging support for the war. Its rhythms and repetition of the words "this day" are echoed in the St Crispins Day speech.
Most importantly, Shapiro reminds us that in Henry V the chorus actually refers to Elizabeth’s commander in the conflict, the Earl of Essex, "the general of our gracious Empress... from Ireland coming/ bringing rebellion broached on his sword." This is the only time in the entire canon that Shakespeare moved outside the time of a play to address the audience about a contemporary event.
Shakespeare was a playwright, argues Shapiro, who entered this year frustrated. He quotes poetic tributes by critics enjoying the sexually charged Romeo and Juliet and Venus and Adonis. Did Shakespeare consider his fame as a love poet faint praise, making him determined to prove himself the great tragedian? We don’t know. Any assertion by Shapiro to the contrary is mere speculation. As he acknowledges, Shakespeare left no diaries and no letters. We don’t even know what he looked like as the only portraits are posthumous. The physique, personality, motivation and feelings of our greatest genius are a mystery.
But the physique and feelings of other protagonists are documented. The 67-year-old Elizabeth’s sensitivity to ageing is captured in a cameo. An ambassador’s report tells how she "had a petticoat of white damask, girdled and open in the front, as was also her chemise, in such a manner that she often opened this dress". One could see "all her belly, and even to the navel."
Even Shakespeare would not have dared to parody that on the stage. But thanks to Shapiro’s exemplary work, we can see just how much the personalities and issues of his time did affect the plays, and how Elizabethan audiences would have smiled at allusions lost on their modern counterparts.
David Lister is arts editor of ’The Independent’
www.historytoday.com
Lucy Worsley reviews a new exploration of a well-documented year in the life of England’s greatest playwright.
1599: A year in the life of William Shakespeare
James Shapiro
Faber and Faber xxiv + 417pp £16.99
ISBN: 05712144806
What do the years 1688, 1603 and 1599 have in common? Observant bookshop browsers will know that they’ve all become recent titles on the ‘history’ shelf. 1603 (Christopher Lee) gives a snapshot of England in the year that Elizabeth I died, while 1688: A Global History (John E. Willis) is much grander in scope. James Shapiro’s ambitions for 1599 are also global, in a sense, for this was the year that the Globe Theatre was built in Southwark. It was also the year, Shapiro argues, that Shakespeare went from good to great as a playwright.
Recent historians have not let the relative paucity of primary material on Shakespeare’s life stop them from writing about it. Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography goes down the well-trodden road of doing the best he can with what’s available, but 1599 takes the ingenious alternative of exploring one particular year during which Shakespeare’s movements are unusually well documented. (...)
About the author:
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, James Shapiro received his B.A. from Columbia University (1977) before receiving his Ph.D from the University of Chicago (1982). After teaching at Dartmouth College and Goucher College, he joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1985, where he is now Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He has also served as a Fulbright Lecturer at Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv Universities (1988-1989) and as the Wanamaker Fellow at the Globe Theatre in London (1998).
He is the author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991), Shakespeare and the Jews (1996), and most recently Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (2000) which The New York Times Book Review selected as one of the "notable books" of 2000.
He has published widely on Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture, co-directed two National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes on Shakespeare, co-edited the
Columbia Anthology of British Poetry (1995), and served as the associate editor of the Columbia History of British Poetry (1994).
Among the awards he has received is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers and research fellowships from the Henry E.
Huntington Library and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. He has also been awarded the Hoffman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship on Marlowe and the Bainton Prize for best book on sixteenth-century literature.
He lectures widely in the United States and abroad and writes regularly for the New York Times and other publications.
He is currently at work on A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.
He is married, has a five-year-old son, and divides his time between New York City and Thetford, Vermont.