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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599
1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England
Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and
...morePaperback, 394 pages
Published
June 1st 2006
by Harper Perennial
(first published January 1st 2005)
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Barbara
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Recommended to Barbara by:
Paula Fowler - Utah Symphony and Opera Education Director
Shelves:
non-fiction,
biographies
This is what I wanted in a biography about Shakespeare. It looked into the events of his time and discussed how those events contributed to his work. It also talked about why his writing appealed to both the rustic and the aristocracy of his time. It also discussed how he grew and progressed as a writer. As we know, Shakespeare was great at stealing stories from others and reworking them into a better story. The book also discusses this and why his versions are such improvements on the orig...more
1599 was the year that the famous Globe theatre was built and the year that Shakespeare created Hamlet, probably the first character in the history of the theatre to wrestle so intelligently and so eloquently with his own demons. For these reasons it seems, James Shapiro chose to focus on 1599 when he set out to write his "intimate history of Shakespeare" as the blurb on the back of the book puts it. But very little documentary evidence exists relating to Shakespeare's life, apart from...more
Twenty-some years ago – between the ages of fifteen and twenty – I devoured the bulk of Shakespeare’s dramatic works. Nowadays, I usually pick up a single contemporary retrospective on the Bard of Avon; the last two being Stephen Greenblatt’s A Will in the World and Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage . Having recently come across Shapiro’s latest nonfiction offering in paperback while scouring the remainder tables of the U Bookstore, I was more than happy to shell out six bucks for an...more
Part history, part textual examination and part biography; ‘1599’ does an excellent job of putting Shakespeare’s work – and the man himself – into context. It was a momentous year for The Bard, he wrote ‘Henry V’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘As You Like It’ and started on ‘Hamlet’. But it was also a tumultuous year for England, with an aged queen, over-ambitious lords and the threat of invasion (and indeed insurrection) hanging in the air. Shapiro takes on the task of showing how the events of the world a...more
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James Shapiro is one of my favorite Shakespeare scholars, primarily because he is able to transport the reader back to the Elizabethan age with a sentence. He does so at the beginning of 1599, when he asks his audience to imagine the moving of the Globe Theatre from one side of the Thames to the other, commenting on the odd band of brothers doing the moving, the actual trick of transplanting all that timber, and even remarking on what the weather must have been like that winter.
It's...more
It's...more
Wonderfully written survey of an important year in Shakespeare's life and Elizabethan culture. This book combines the best of literary criticism, history, and cultural studies. A worthy read for experts and general enthusiasts alike. Shapiro directs our attention to a period in Elizabethan history when tensions and anxieties were peaking. This is an important tale to remember: we often celebrate the end of the century as the Golden Age of English culture and literary achievement; but just around...more
What a year! By placing Shakespeare's life in the context of the forces--personal, literary, social, and political--James Shapiro gives a sense of how Shakespeare's imagination meets with the unfolding chaos of life and transmutes into Julius Caesar, Henry V, As You Like It, and Hamlet. Since I was also rereading As You Like It and Hamlet before seeing new productions of those plays, this book was particularly rewarding and enlightening. Shapiro's retelling of the story of Essex and Elizabeth's...more
Some bits of this book were really intersting - the religious history, Queen Elizabeth's role in the war on Ireland etc, but some bits were really difficult to get through, such as the detailed look at Shakespeare's writing. I put it to one side while I read something else, hoping that I would have a renewed interest in it when I picked it up again, but when I tried, I found it just as difficult to get through as before. I'd recommend it if you were writing an essay on the time or on Shakespeare...more
Wow, Nick Hornby was right! I can't imagine not being able to teach any four of these plays without the valuable knowledge gained from this insightful book. It was great to read how the plays themselves were incidental products of the volatile political and social era in which Shakespeare wrote. Read this along with Bryson's World as Stage biography, and it seems like the current trend it literary scholarship is to admit what the scholar doesn't know and will have no way to ever figure out. ...more
this was really interesting. i learned a lot, not so much about shakespeare, but more about what it was like to live in london and in england when he was alive: by exploring everything from customs to the political scene to what it was like to travel around england at the time, shapiro shows a unique way to look at shakespeare and his work that completed that year: henry the fifth, as you like it, julius ceasar, hamlet. it was an amazing year for shakespeare in terms of output, and shapiro does ...more
One of Shakespeare's greatest years. Went from writing Henry V to Julius Ceasar to As You Like It and finally, to Hamlet. The events of the year are unfolded in this study and I really appreciated the historical perspective of the politics and events of the 1598-99 year that would have affected Shakespeare's writing. It adds a new level of "timeliness" to the Bard's writings. It also sets a good argument for Shakespeare's attempt to re-image himself as a serious dramatist rather than s...more
Shapiro describes his M.O. best: this book is “about both what Shakespeare achieved and what Elizabethan’s experienced this year...it’s no more possible to talk about Shakespeare’s plays independently of his age than it is to grasp what his society went through without the benefit of Shakespeare’s insights. He and his fellow players truly were in Hamlet’s fine phrase, the ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the time’ (II,ii,524).”
1599 was a watershed year in Shakespeare’s career for it w...more
1599 was a watershed year in Shakespeare’s career for it w...more
don't read much non fiction, but this one caught my eye in the library (after a recommendation from F R Jameson). As some of you know I take a keen interest in local writers (eg I've recently read Anthony Cartwright's 'Heartland' set in Dudley, Mez Packer's 'Among Thieves' set in Coventry and Raphael Selbourne's 'Beauty' set in Wolverhampton). Well here is a local lad who did quite well for himself - Shakespeare. I live less than twenty miles from Stratford and am often hanging about the same ha...more
Spiros
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Recommends it for:
anyone wanting to get a nuts and bolts grasp on Shakespeare
Shelves:
bins,
londoncalling
1599 was a fraught year in the reign of Elizabeth: an uprising in Ireland had caused the Privy Council to levy troops throughout the country, and increase taxes (loans, they were called) from London merchants. Essex, sent to quash the rebellion, found himself, forced by Elizabeth's fretful orders, waging ill-considered attacks on the Irish, who wouldn't make themselves available to meet those attacks. As the relationship between the Queen and her onetime favorite deteriorated, Philip III of Spai...more
Good book, scholarly and readable. 1599 was the year that the Globe Theater was built, and that Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar and As You Like It, and began Hamlet. James Shapiro takes us through the year, showing us Shakespeare against his times. He implicitly contrasts Shakespeare with Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, who was the Obama-cum-Brangelina of his day. Essex starts the year a hero, marching off to war in Ireland; he ends it jailed in the Tower of London. John Donne wrote...more
Not an exact quote, but gives the sense of this book: "When people talk about Shakespeare's sources, they talk about books like Holinshed's Chronicles, but they ignore what was happening around him right then." The book delves into one year, 1599, the year of As You Like It, Henry V, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet, but also the year when the Chamberlain's Men made off with the materials from their old theater (which was on land for which they'd lost the lease) with plans to build the Glob...more
Shapiro is a scholar who has done a decent job of writing for a larger, non-specialist audience--something which seems to be a dying art. This is examplary popular scholarship.
He begins with the last days of 1598 and the audacious recreation (actually the reassembling) of the theater that the company to which Shakespeare belonged had been forced to take down. The reader understands quickly that Shapiro has a very full grasp of just about everything involving his subject and his times...more
He begins with the last days of 1598 and the audacious recreation (actually the reassembling) of the theater that the company to which Shakespeare belonged had been forced to take down. The reader understands quickly that Shapiro has a very full grasp of just about everything involving his subject and his times...more
http://nhw.livejournal.com/828838.html[return][return]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.[return][return]For those who are not London residents (maybe even for those ...more
"Shakespeare isn't real. You can't write a book on someone who isn't real."
Can you? Well, that question doesn't nail Shapiro's "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare" since Shakespeare isn't the center of the solar system in this book. Rather than trying to capture the complete life of Shakespeare, Shapiro analyzed the key historical events that occurred in one of Shakespeare's "golden age" years in his life--1559.
In that year, Shakespear...more
Can you? Well, that question doesn't nail Shapiro's "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare" since Shakespeare isn't the center of the solar system in this book. Rather than trying to capture the complete life of Shakespeare, Shapiro analyzed the key historical events that occurred in one of Shakespeare's "golden age" years in his life--1559.
In that year, Shakespear...more
Bob Draben
added it
Books about Shakespeare abound. They are a regular cottage industry of scholars of the bard. Shapiro has created an interesting book which will appeal to scholar and non-scholar alike. This book combines history, literary criticism and a biography which focuses on a single year, 1599.
Elizabeth I had just over three more years of her reign in 1599. Her government was bogged down in a war with the Irish who resented the English occupation of their lands, and there was a real scare in E...more
Elizabeth I had just over three more years of her reign in 1599. Her government was bogged down in a war with the Irish who resented the English occupation of their lands, and there was a real scare in E...more
Shapiro’s book takes 1599 as his text, the year William Shakespeare wrote Henry the Fifth, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, and the rough draft of Hamlet. It was the year, Shapiro says, that Shakespeare, at age thirty-five, “went from being an exceptionally talented writer to one of the greatest who ever lived.” This book is a word picture of Elizabethan London so vivid that you’ll smell the Thames at low tide as you read.
What a neat idea! Interdisciplinary approach to exploring the zeitgeist of late Tudor England while also providing a refreshing literary analysis of the plays Shakespeare wrote in 1599, including some insights about Hamlet that I hadn't really known about until I read the book. One of the most informative and yet enjoyable books I have read, it is dense but I finished it relatively quickly. I totally recommend this book to lovers of Shakespeare, lovers of Tudor history, lovers of literary analys...more
A very approachable read given I am considerably less than a Shakespeare expert. I suspect I would have liked this even more had I read all the plays under consideration. I think I should at least go read Julius Caesar now.
An ingenious way of handling the subject matter--the focus on a single year while still pulling in information from years prior and subsequent made this much more enjoyable than many "surveys of the lives of famous people." I can never keep those things strai...more
An ingenious way of handling the subject matter--the focus on a single year while still pulling in information from years prior and subsequent made this much more enjoyable than many "surveys of the lives of famous people." I can never keep those things strai...more
Pretty good overall, though he speculates a lot (though he has a disclaimer about that in the preface). And based on other books on Shakespeare I've read, I'm not sure how he can be so sure that the plays he talks about were written in 1599. There's a huge dispute on when most of them were written. The book does give a good background on what was going on in England at the time and how it's reflected in the plays.
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 ...more
An excellent, accessible and enjoyable book. The author makes a surprising number of persuasive connections between then-current events in Engand and the poetry and plays that are believed to have been written in 1599. I'm not sure whether this year was really the single most important in Shakespeare's career, but I'd happily read a whole series of titles that employ this conceit.
Exquisite sleuthing and scholarship, deftly written. Like the movie, SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, this chronicle of the year 1599, as it unfolds in Shakespeare's life, reveals reasons for Shakespeare's choices. WS's talent can never be explained, but to see how the forces of the time and place shaped the bard is to see the best of scholarship in wonderfully readable prose.
Completely awesome, and a very nice complement to the book I just read, Will in the World. Shapiro covers a little bit of the same territory, which helped to solidify that information in my brain. But he does a fascinating close up of four plays in particular and the circumstances surrounding their creation: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, As You Like It, and Henry V, Part 2. It makes me want to watch that BBC Elizabeth series again starring Helen Mirren, all about the entanglement between the Queen and ...more
By placing Shakespeare's artistic evolution in the context of this very specific point in history, the author offers a unique perspective on how the social and political events and upheavals of this pivotal year directly affected his work. An excellent choice for literature and history buffs alike, and essential reading for Shakespeare fans and scholars.
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