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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare:…
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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (edition 2006)

by James Shapiro (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,746339,806 (3.97)68
Quite good. ( )
  k6gst | Mar 5, 2020 |
Showing 1-25 of 33 (next | show all)
In 1599 Shakespeare was instrumental in building The Globe theater, and wrote several of his better-known plays: Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet. This was also a year of war, unrest, and uncertainty in England. This book sets Shakespear’s work against that backdrop, describing in detail the political situation in England and the cultural impact of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, which would soon be at an end. Shakespeare’s plays helped the audience understand present day events by telling the stories of long-dead figures; sometimes he also got away with criticism and satire.

The book is equal parts history and biography, a combination that worked for me. It was also interesting to read about those whose work influenced Shakespeare, although I admit I was easily lost when the author took deeper dives into Shakespeare’s writings and those of his contemporaries. But that’s probably just me. ( )
  lauralkeet | Jan 13, 2024 |
A beautiful read. In "1599", Shapiro tackles one year in the history of the citizens of London. It also happens to be the year William Shakespeare wrote "Henry V", "As You Like It", and "Julius Caesar", and began work on "Hamlet".

Despite the book's title, "1599" spreads its time equally between Elizabeth and her citizens, and the Bard himself. As Shapiro openly states, we know so little about what exactly led Shakespeare to write his plays, and about specific events in his life, that anything is by necessity conjecture - but he'd still rather stick to what is probable, not just possible. As such, he covers the complex political and social landscape brought about by Elizabeth and Essex, the Irish and the Spaniards, the changes in theatregoers and theatre laws, and other concerns that hit London and Stratford. He posits areas and concerns that may have affected Shakespeare as he wrote four such monumental works, while also seeking to explain the mindset of an Elizabethan during this shifting era.

What Shapiro has written is a book that first of all, educates about the living, breathing public mass of Londoners (people who, after all, were far more complex than any film stereotype); second, negates many of the needless conjectures determined to give every event in Shakespeare's plays some needlessly grandiose or tragic origin (all of which seek to undermine the fact that he was writing for a specific theatre and crowd, and working as a creative, not just working through some Freudian issues); and third, most importantly, sees Shakespeare as a human. We can never know what it was like to be such a genius during an era when history, linguistics, and politics rose up like never before. But we can ask questions about Shakespeare's personal stake in the theatre, about his reactions to other literary and political movements, about his reasons for taking age-old stories, myths, and plays, and reworking them into feats of ever-growing depth. A very enjoyable read, although I couldn't help wishing Shapiro could write a volume for every year of Shakespeare's professional life. ( )
  therebelprince | Oct 24, 2023 |
Among the many astounding things herein are, that it is possible to know so much about what Shakespeare was doing in 1599, the amount of Elizabethan history and then-current events reflected in the plays of 1599 that were never even hinted at when I was taught them, the many literary influences acting on Shakespeare and his ingenious response to them, and that the versions of "Hamlet" that I have read or seen performed may have been cobbled together from misremembered variant forms.
I found this book when Sophie Roell listed the best nonfiction of the past quarter century at the great website, fivebooks.com/. ( )
  markm2315 | Sep 8, 2023 |
A word you often hear used in reviews of academic works like “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” is accessibility. And that makes sense since these books dealing with subjects and issues that probably interest a very small demographic of the reading public need an audience for survival. This book is one of the least accessible books on Shakespeare I’ve ever read, and I’ve read many. I am a retired high school English teacher who taught Shakespeare for 40 years. I taught “Julius Caesar” and “Romeo and Juliet” for most of those years, and even I had a hard time making it through this book. In fact, at the epilogue, I quit. What those interested in Shakespeare need to know and accept is we know little to nothing about the man. In fact, in the excellent video “Shakespeare in the Classroom” (produced by the cast of the Academy Award winning film “Shakespeare in Love”), a list of five items is given as the only information we have on the bard: his baptismal date, his death date, the birth of his children, and a mention of Shakespeare in a real estate transaction. That’s it. So everything else that authors write about is speculation. That’s why in this book, you read phrases like, “Shakespeare might have…..” or “Shakespeare could have…..” Much of this book is given to the plays themselves and their impact on society at the time. Additionally, there is much given to the threat of war with Ireland, and Queen Elizabeth’s strained relationship with Essex, far removed from research on Shakespeare or his plays. I really struggled with this book, so I imagine readers who haven’t spent much time with Shakespeare since high school will most likely bail on it early on. True scholars of the bard are most likely the only audience for “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.” ( )
  FormerEnglishTeacher | Jun 19, 2023 |
Entertaining and educational! I thought I knew a lot about Shakespeare already but this book taught me so much more. I really enjoyed learning some of the history of Elizabethan England. ( )
  dianahaemer | Apr 27, 2021 |
Quite good. ( )
  k6gst | Mar 5, 2020 |
If you're a Shakespeare fan I would HIGHLY recommend this book. It is an entertaining and extremely informative book about a year in the life of the finest writer in the English language. The year Mr. Shapiro analyzes is 1599 in which Shakespeare wrote four plays, including HAMLET. It was a volatile year in England with rebellions and political intrigue going on, and Shakespeare drew on all of that to write his plays. Mr. Shapiro does a wonderful job of showing the linkage between what was happening around Shakespeare and the stories and characters that ended up in his plays. The amount of detail is excellent, and Mr. Shapiro has a knack for making you feel like you're living through those events yourself. This is an especially good read for aspiring writers, as it dispels the myth that writing came easy to Shakespeare, and shows how much WORK went into plays.

I've read several books on the Bard, but this is my favorite so far, and I would highly recommend you read it. ( )
  FredLHolmes | Sep 9, 2019 |
The common problem when writing about Shakespeare is that biographical information is hard to come by, and it’s dangerous to read his plays and assume that he’s putting all of himself in there. James Shapiro gets around this challenge by writing about a pivotal year in Shakespeare’s—and England’s—life. In 1599, the succession to the throne of England was still uncertain, there were rebellions in Ireland and threats of armadas from Spain, and the East India Company was just getting started. Shakespeare, meanwhile, used events such as this to inform his writing four of his major plays: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet.

Shapiro explains not only the historical background of the plays but also the theatre-going environment, showing the reader what Elizabethan audiences would get out of certain plot choices or casting decisions or even certain lines. And he demonstrates just how challenging the plays were for the audiences, particularly As You Like It and Hamlet, which did new things with the pastoral romantic comedy and the revenge play, respectively.

I found this book most interesting when it talked more about the actual plays and the theatre, rather than straight history, as interesting and appropriate as it was. This is probably the first time I’ve been remotely tempted to read As You Like It, because I tend to favour Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, and it’s all because of this book. I also found it interesting to read about the different editions of Hamlet and how modern editions (at least at the time this book was published, in 2005) conflate two printings of Hamlet in what ends up being far less coherent than Shakespeare intended. I’ll have to check my own copy of Hamlet to see what the editors did with that one.

This book contains a small set of colour plates in the middle and black-and-white sketches throughout the text, and a bibliographical essay that may be helpful to readers wanting to know more about a specific chapter or topic. I’d recommend this for people who like to read about the theatre or a different slant on English history. ( )
1 vote rabbitprincess | Oct 11, 2018 |
I adore this book. It's a deep dive into a particular year in Tudor history -- the year in which Shakespeare wrote As You Like It and Hamlet. But it isn't just a book about Shakespeare; there's a lot of political and cultural history here, too. Well-written and fascinating, hard to put down. I'm really looking forward to checking out the follow-up, The Year of Lear. ( )
  GaylaBassham | May 27, 2018 |
Highly recommended--sheds new light on the year 1599 and the consequences of social history, especially politics, in Shakespeare's works. Helpful in the classroom as well. ( )
  AlisonLea | Jan 10, 2015 |
I read James Shapiro's 1599 three hundred and six years after its subject, the year it came out. It is the best written book on Shakespeare I have read in decades, and since Shakespeare is only known because he wrote so well, Shapiro's is the the most Shakespearean book on Shakespeare. From the first page account of the deconstruction (no, not the French mind-game, but a carpentry event) of The Theater
at night to prepare for the construction of the Globe miles south and across the river, this book reads like gripping narrative in parts.
When I saw James Shapiro at the Shakespeare Association of America, he told me he had spent three years revising it. So here is an ideal model for scholars, one unlikely to be followed under the pressures for publication. Research and write for years, then revise for three more. ( )
2 vote AlanWPowers | Sep 23, 2012 |
Knockout. Explains how WS got the complexity of viewpoint into his writing; link between him as poet, dramatist, actor, businessman. Surprising amount of hard evidence of his activities which by implication knocks on the head the "other writer" nonsense. Also gives insight into the plays and the stresses of Late Elizabethan England. Lot of names and details but the reader is taken by the hand. ( )
1 vote vguy | May 16, 2012 |
I found this book both fascinating and infuriating.

On the one hand, it's well-written on a sentence level, contains a wealth of detail about the context Shakespeare was writing in, and does an excellent job of connecting that context to the texts.

On the other, it seemed sloppy to me in several ways. For one thing, it is far more willing to speculate on the interior life of historical figures than I'm comfortable with, and since its citation takes the form of a bibliographical essay rather than specific endnotes, it's not always possible to figure out where its speculations are coming from. For another, I noticed occasional bits of carelessness in its discussion of the Shakespearean text (which I'm more familiar with than its historical context -- part of the reason I was interested in reading the book in the first place). For example, when discussing the metaphorical use of the word "brother" in Henry V, it talks about how Henry refers to "his aristocratic kinsmen" Bedford and Gloucester as brothers, without making note of the fact that they are quite literally his brothers.

All of this means I'm not quite willing to trust the book, even though it is as I said fascinating. ( )
3 vote tortoise | Sep 5, 2010 |
I usually avoid abridged books like the plague. One can never know what one has missed, and it is therefore unfair to the author to try to provide a review.

This was a very clear, understandable, narrative of a single year in Shakespeare's long career. The format works well. There are plenty of discussions of what is going on in England at this time, and how it directly affected Mr. Shakespeare's plays.

I ignored the entire last CD. It comprised excerpts from plays written in 1599. Strange. Wouldn't it had been better used for material that made it to the cutting floor?

But actually, this audio version was enough book for me. ( )
1 vote Sandydog1 | May 1, 2010 |
Shapiro’s expert scholarship and extraordinary attention to detail both come through in this book. If you thought you knew Shakespeare, you don’t. Every word, every stage direction holds meaning in this microcosmic look at The Bard. You don't usually think about the other contemporary actors of Shakespeare's. This was a thrill to read. ( )
1 vote NielsenGW | Jan 18, 2009 |
I enjoyed reading this admittedly popular history of one particularly significant year in Shakespeare's career. Shapiro does a good job of pulling together numerous historical sources which allows him to indicate not only what Shakespeare was likely doing, but what other playhouses were performing, what political intrigues were going on, and what foreigners were noticing and commenting on as they visited. Of course, as with any such history, there is much conjecture and much talk about visits that might have occurred, etc. For example, he reports that Edmund Spenser returned from Ireland to London in the first months of 1599. He then speculates about whether he would have seen one of Shakespeare's plays in performance since the Chamberlain's men were playing at court in those months. But such conjectures, true or not, are to be expected and are part of what makes the read fun. ( )
2 vote wrmjr66 | Sep 9, 2008 |
A terrific, readable but informative review of a pivotal year in Shakespeare's life. The year when the Globe Theatre was built, it saw the premieres of Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar and, possibly, Hamlet.

The strength of this book is that it sets Shakespeare's literary output in its complex political context, showing through many illustrations how topical his work was, and his creative response to the controversies and preoccupations of his times. It sheds light not only on the four contrasting masterpieces Shakespeare produced that year, but on the whole social and historical context in which he lived and worked. Though the focus is on London, Stratford is not neglected and the writer addresses his efforts to regain the status his family lost through his father's financial miscalculations, primarily through Shakespeare's attempts, ultimately successful, to secure a coat of arms. ( )
1 vote sensiblecat | Sep 8, 2008 |
Who was Shakespeare? Who cares? This very focused biographical work disregards the question and as such is a very entertaining portrait - as best as can be deciphered - of the genius at the height of his powers. ( )
  scootm | Jul 18, 2008 |
This is a wonderful book, well written in a fast paced style which sacrifices nothing to historical accuracy and in which the author's love of Shakespeare leaps off the pages. It did two things for me. Firstly, it reminded me of how I have neglected Shakespeare for nearly twenty years now - an neglect I intend to remedy starting with his sonnets. Secondly, I'm Irish and a history buff; I'm very familiar with the Elizabethan wars in Ireland and every shoolchild here is reared on the Flight of the Earls. What this book does is join the dots and makes of Shakespeare a creature of the time, the policitcs, the wars and the personalties. I felt I understood the man so much more after reading this book and consequuently had a better grasp of his works. It makes it all so real - and that's a helluva job. ( )
2 vote liehtzu | Nov 24, 2007 |
looked interesting but hen i didn't really get hooked in. maybe i should give it another chance - but it seemed like more speculation pieced together from fragments of clues and asumptions
  iowamare | Oct 20, 2007 |
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare is a book I've been meaning to get around to for ages. James Shapiro is a Professor at Columbia University in New York, who has taken what relatively little we know of the life of Shakespeare, and woven it together with the detailed history of 1599 to create a vivid account of one year in his life. Quite apart from Shakespeare, it's a fascinating period in English history, as the Elizabethean Era drew to a close and a sense of uncertainty hanging everywhere, and Shapiro uses Shakespeare to illustrate that perfectly, just as his plays reflected it at the time.
As well as being a significant year in the history of England, 1599 Shapiro makes a strong argument for 1599 being the fulcrum point on which Shakespeare's reputation tunred; it was the year the Globe was built, the year he insisted on - and won - changes to long-standing traditions in English theatre (effectively allowing it to become a more serious medium), the year he wrote Julius Caesar, Henry V, As You Like It and Hamlet. Shapiro has the skill of taking history and giving it the force of a novel, but he doesn't cross the line into fictionalisation - when he's not sure of something, or is making an educated guess, he tells you.
The result is a book that sucks you into both the life of both Shakespeare and Elizabethean England for a year and works both as an excellent history, and as a novel-like story. ( )
1 vote MikeFarquhar | May 27, 2007 |
This took me three months of bedtimes to read but I'm very glad I did. Yay new historicism for (mostly) redeeming Shakespeare from mindless reverence. The holiday chapter makes me want to revise my PhD. I believe and hope that the distant-mirror pointedness of Shapiro's discussion of the Irish campaign seems dated in ten years though.
1 vote athenasowl | May 2, 2007 |
Excellently conceived. How events of 1599 impinged and reflected on one another - the year the Globe opened, a 'new beginning' for Shakespeare, the challenge of Ireland, etc, etc.

I say etc, etc because I only got half way through the book before myself giving up the challenge. A little too errudite after Anthony Holden's William Shakespeare and Terry Jones' Chaucer!

Must try again later. ( )
  eas | Apr 11, 2007 |
http://nhw.livejournal.com/828838.html

Shapiro has done a brilliant job of painting a picture of London in 1599, the year that Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and started on Hamlet, going through as many surviving books and documents from that year as possible, mooring his narrative quite firmly in what facts we have, frank about the extent to which he is speculating when he does.

For those who are not London residents (maybe even for those who are) the first interesting page is the very first, with a map of London in 1599. My own business in the city these days tends to be concentrated around Whitehall and Westminster, so there's a bit of cognitive dissonance at seeing them so far outside the old city limits. And while I knew that the Tower roughly marked one end of the City, I didn't realise that St Paul's marked pretty much the other end. Even by Pepys' day, sixty years later, a lot of the West End had been built over. Shakespeare's generation must have been the last for whom Lincoln's Inn Fields really were fields.

To my surprise, Ireland also looms heavily in the story. At school we were taught a bit about the Nine Years' War of 1594 to 1603, which led to the Flight of the Earls 400 years ago this coming September. (I bet English schoolchildren are not taught about it at all.) But to get it from the English perspective is very interesting. Here you had a seemingly unending overseas conflict pitting English soldiers against bitter and successful insurgents, to the point that the government as a whole was becoming deeply discredited by its failure to win and the waste of money and soldiers.

The book also brought home to me how little I know Shakespeare. I "did" Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet at school, and I guess I have picked up a certain knowledge of a few others by seeing them on stage and screen since (Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, er, that's it). Now I want to go out and buy the complete BBC Shakespeare DVD collection. ( )
2 vote nwhyte | Mar 26, 2007 |
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