A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro
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James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of
William Shakespeare: 1599 is a lively and electric book by one of the best
American Shakespeareans. It should be hard to argue that we need another
Shakespeare biography so soon after Stephen Greenblatt's fine 2004 book Will
in the World, but Shapiro more than makes the case. Rather than give a
cradle-to-grave account, he instead chooses to focus on a turning point in the
playwright's career: the year 1599, which marked important shake-ups in
Shakespeare's life and a fantastic leap forward in his writing. Shapiro engagingly recounts the politics of a kingdom presided over by an old and ailing queen and beset by belligerent foreign threats; he relates the issues of nationhood found in Henry V and Julius Caesar to England's ill-fated invasion of Ireland; and he describes how these macro-scale events, through the economics of patronage, would have affected what a rising dramatist would choose to write and how he would treat it: some subjects - like the killing of a monarch - were taboo at the time while others - including the existential angst of Hamlet - were ripe for the picking. Shapiro also delves into a fascinating subject that I've never found in other works on Shakespeare: how the make-up of Shakespeare's theatre company influenced his writing. For example, when he had a star clown the playwright penned bombastic roles like Falstaff and Dogberry, but when a later comedic player ascended to prominence, he produced more songs to feature that man's strong singing voice. Shapiro offers several such enlightening instances that serve to make Shakespeare's daily world all the more immediate to us as readers. Shapiro's excellent book reminds us that the best scholars don't study Shakespeare in order to close him up in a musty academic cabinet in some ivory tower but rather to unlock a door to the past and invite the curious to step right through. Review by Mark Bradshaw, November 3, 2005 Do yourself a favor and read Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, reviewed here: http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review1104-002.html
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