A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.)

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The book is really a wonderfully deft interweaving of historical and cultural context, physical and social description, the politics and economics of Shakespeare’s work as a professional actor and co-owner of the Globe theatre.” -- Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times

It is when one comes to the essays on Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet– embedded as the climaxes of 1599’s successive seasons – that one starts to have misgivings about Shapiro’s project, not least because these assured sections of the book are likely to become, in paraphrased form, undergraduate lectures at universities throughout the anglophone world. For one thing, Shapiro’s sense that his book is in direct competition with Greenblatt’s biography seems to have inclined him throughout towards treating 1599 not just as a conveniently well-documented 12-month sample of the playwright’s life but as a specially formative year, ‘perhaps the decisive one, in Shakespeare’s development as a writer’. Hence his book, like Greenblatt’s, seeks to explain, as Shapiro puts it in a direct quotation of Greenblatt’s subtitle, ‘how Shakespeare became Shakespeare’. This tends to skew Shapiro’s judgment of the relative significance and artistic achievement of different plays: every work the book discusses in detail is heralded as a major breakthrough, and those already written by the end of 1598 are pervasively undervalued. (The author of Venus and Adonis, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, King John, The Merchant of Venice and the Falstaff plays would surely occupy a pretty distinguished place in world literature even if he had been run over by a carrier’s wagon that New Year’s Eve.) Earlier this year, the Women’s Prize Trust announced it would be launching a nonfiction award to sit alongside its long-running fiction prize, after research found that female nonfiction writers are less likely to be reviewed or win prizes than their male counterparts. With the lightest touch and the most formidable scholarship, James Shapiro, once again, proves himself to be an irresistible storyteller. And what an exhilarating and disturbing tale he has to tell. Here is proof that Shakespeare's power remains undiminished in our divided and unhappy world."--Simon Russell Beale In Shakespeare studies, this declares a revolution. Ever since Coleridge, the prevailing view has been that the poet not only transcended his age but also wrote, in Coleridge's words 'exactly as if of another planet'. This point of view derives in part from Ben Jonson's 'He was not of an age but for all time', an idea echoed in Matthew Arnold's 'Others abide our question. Thou art free'. Shapiro will have none of this and, bringing us down to earth with a bump, his ambition is to understand, as Greenblatt put it, 'how Shakespeare became Shakespeare' by placing him in a world of plague, conspiracy and invasion.

Footnotes

Peterson, Tyler (March 2, 2016). "James Shapiro Wins 9th Annual Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography". is a truly enthralling and intimate account of a year in Shakespeare’s life. Shapiro explores both the internal complexities and external stimuli that influenced four of Shakespeare’s most significant works: Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and As You Like It. This book is essential reading for anyone who has an interest in Shakespeare.’

Impeccably researched, the book focuses on how key figures in American history have experienced Shakespeare... A thought-provoking, captivating lesson in how literature and history intermingle."-- Kirkus The limitations of Shapiro’s approach become obvious when one tries to imagine what would happen if a present-day director, convinced that Julius Caesar owed its significance and impact entirely to the historical circumstances of its composition, tried to stage the play so as to restrict the production’s meanings to those that might have been available in 1599. I am reminded of a well-intentioned RSC revival of All’s Well that Ends Well in the late 1980s, whose director, in a fit of Shapiro-like historicism, decided that the play must originally have reflected something of the change of mood between the last days of Elizabeth I and the new court of James I, and who accordingly hung a big portrait of Elizabeth behind his cast during the first half and an equally big one of James in the same position during the second. It didn’t help.First aired in April 2012 as a BBC4 3-hour documentary: “The King and the Playwright: A Jacobean History." Directed by Steven Clarke. Short-listed for the Grierson Award for the Best Historical Documentary, 2012. Now available as a DVD for North American viewers. In fact, 1599 might just as easily be described as what Huang called "a chronicle of failure". Henry V has never been as loved or admired as Henry IV. Although middle-aged Shapiro may think that the relationship of Rosalind and Orlando is more "complex" and "real" than the passion of Romeo and Juliet, what actor ever made his reputation by playing Orlando? Nowadays Rosalind may or may not be Shakespeare's "most beloved heroine", but in Elizabethan England Thomas Lodge's "Rosalind" was much more popular than Shakespeare's. Shapiro argues persuasively that Shakespeare welcomed, and may even have provoked, the departure of the great clown Will Kemp from his acting company, but who would rather see Touchstone than Falstaff?